1.
Aug
12, 2021
The
"Duomo" Metropolitana station is open. It
took 20 years to build. The results are
impressive. The station is 40 meters below
ground. The main entrance here (image) is
not really that near the actual Duomo
(Cathedral), a few hundred meters up the
sloped via Duomo to the north. The station
you see is on the large boulevard, Corso
Umberto, that runs from the Borsa
(stock market) to Piazza Garibaldi and the
main train station. The square is Piazza
Nicola Amore, with the "4 Gemelli"
(Quadruplets), 4 identical buildings built
during the Risanamento,
the urban renewal of Naples in 1900.
Engineers say this was the most difficult
station of all.
2. August 15, Ferragosto
Ferragosto
was a tribute to the Iron Emperor. It comes from
Iron + Emperor Augustus. Iron is
a chemical element with the symbol Fe
(from Latin: ferrum) and atomic number
26. It is a metal that belongs to the first
transition series and group 8 of the periodic
table. It is, by mass, the most common element
on Earth, forming much of Earth's outer and
inner core. Iron melts at 1,500 °C (2,730 °F).
If you heated Augustus to 1,500 °C, he got
really steamed, then hot under the collar, but
generally he was a very solid emperor, cool
as a cucumber, which, if you heat to 1,500
°C — well, you got no more cucumber.
Anyway, Ferragosto —the Iron Emperor.
Now, none of that is true (except a few
names and degrees C.) but it's better than the
real story, so pedestrian I'll tell you in my
bare feet: It's Latin for "August vacation." The
Latin was Feriae Augusti, instituted by
Augustus (Roman emperor from 63 BC to 14 AD) in
18 BC. He fused a lot of other festivals in that
month* into
one. They were all "end-of-havest" holidays.
Time to rest from all that hard work. The
Catholic Church later decided to get some of the
action by declaring the 15th of August the day
to celebrate the Assumption of Mary into
Heaven; thus it may also be called the Assunta.
*What? Did you just
say you guess the month is called August because
"all this" happened in August?
First, all what? Second, Romans
used a calendar based on Ab urbe
condita [from the foundation of the City —spoiler, that means Rome].
It is abbreviated AUC and is the number
of years since 753 BC, the traditional founding
of Rome by Romulus and Remus. It's an expression
used in antiquity and by classical
historians to refer to a given year in Ancient
Rome. In reference to the traditional
year of the foundation of Rome, the year 1 BC
would be written AUC 753, whereas 1 AD would be
AUC 754. The foundation of the
Roman Empire in 27 BC would be AUC 727. Our
current common era year 2021 is AUC 2774.
Oh, there is a Neapolitan proverb that says: Aùsto
cap’ ‘e vierno [August is the beginning of
winter]. Really? That proverb is nonsense, or at
least makes no sense to Sicilians this year.
3. August 18, Speaking of which...
Mount Etna
Keeps Growing.
Taller Than
Ever
Mt. Etna's
southeastern crater has grown after six months
of activity, Europe's tallest active volcano is
taller than ever. The youngest and most active
crater has risen to a new record of 3,357 meters
(11,000 feet) above sea level, said INGV, the
National Institute for Geophysics and
Vulcanology, based in Catania. "The
southeast crater is now much higher than its
'older brother', the northeast crater, for 40
years the undisputed peak... ...Some 50
episodes of ash and lava belching from the
mouth of the crater since mid-February have
led to a 'conspicuous change' in the volcano's
outline." The dimensions are calculated
through satellite images. The northeastern
crater of Etna reached a record height of 3,350
meters in 1981, but a rim collapse reduced that
to 3,326 meters, recorded in 2018.
Enthusiasts of the classics remember Virgil's
reference to Mt. Etna in the Aneid:
" 'T is said that here / Enceladus, half
blasted by the bolts / Of heaven, was thrust
beneath the mountainous mass;/
And mighty Etna, piled above, sends forth /
His fiery breathings from the broken flues; /And
every time he turns his weary sides,/
All Sicily groans and trembles, and the sky
Is wreathed in smoke."
Enceladus was the giant of Greek mythology, the
offspring of Gaia (Earth), and Uranus (Sky)
(Insert your anus joke here.)
Enceladus was the traditional opponent of Athena
during the Gigantomachy, the war between the
Giants and the gods, and was said to be buried
under Mount Etna.
Perhaps you
ask, like many, Well is this the whole
Enceladus? I wouldn't count on it.

This photo added Nov. 2021
(See also: UNESCO's inclusion of Etna on one of
their many "Why this is important!" lists. That link is here.)
(D.H. Lawrence's spectacular
description of Etna.)
4. August 23
Alessandra Buonanno,
Physicist.
I
have a passionate lay interest in cosmology —
the Big Bang, black holes, stuff like that. I
like to read about Einstein, Fermi, Hawking,
Bohr, guys like that. Guys. Hmmmm. Who is a
person who understands all that stuff and is
better looking than all of them put together?
Her name is Alessandra Buonanno (image). Born in
Cassino, not far from Naples, one of the worst
places to be in WWII in Italy, no matter what
side you were on.
Buonanno completed her PhD in theoretical
physics at the University of Pisa in 1996. After
a brief period spent at the theory division of
CERN (European Co-op for Nuclear Research), she
held a postdoctoral position at the Institut
des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in
France. She became a permanent researcher (Chargée
de 1ere classe, CR1) in 2001 at the Institut
d'Astrophysique de Paris and then at the
Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris
with the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique before joining the University
of Maryland as a physics prof in 2005. She moved
to the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational
Physics in 2014. She got a Tolman Prize
fellowship at Cal Tech. She is among the
"go-to" experts in the world on gravitational
waves (disturbances in the curvature of
spacetime).
She is called the "Black hole whisperer." Come
on! That's a sexist comment hung on her by male
scientists, who feel there
must be something magical about beautiful women
with brains. How much brains? You judge. She is
now director of the Max Planck Institute for
Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany. She
just got the Dirac medal from the International
Center for Theoretical Physics. She holds a
research professorship at the University of
Maryland (on their softball team she has a curve
ball you can't touch!) She's an honorary
professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin
and the University of Potsdam. She is a leading
member of LIGO (Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory), which observed
gravitational waves from a binary black-hole
merger in 2015, showing that quantum
correlations between photon shot noise and
radiation-pressure noise can circumvent
constraints imposed by the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle. I'm uncertain about that
one, but I know from my own modest research that
a "binary black-hole merger" is two black holes
trying to devour each other.
You can forget King Kong vs. Godzilla.
5. Aug 24
"...and all
I ask is a tall ship
that doesn't look like this."
Sailing Yacht A (uh,
that's the name of the boat!)
in Naples,
Sorrentine peninsula in
background
Maybe
the world's largest sailing yacht, although it's
really a "sail-assisted motor yacht". Maybe the
ugliest thing afloat. It is held by Valla Yachts
Ltd. (motto: "Totally tasteless luxury." Their
ads say SY-A is a "natural head turner." OK, I
turned my head so as not to throw up on myself.
SY A was finished in 2017 by German yard
Nobiskrug. It is 143 meters long and 25 m at the beam.
SY-A was built for well-known Russian
yacht owner Andrey Melnichenko and displays his
also well-known knack of working his way through
non-Cyrillic letters. Alessandra's time may be
up. Get Barbara out of the cage. Some numbers
and letters: IMO 1012141, MMSI 310763000, Callsign ZCEU9.
It is currently sailing under the flag of
Bermuda. Give them a call. Operators who are not
chained to an oar are standing by. My guess is
that it
carries 8-10 guests, all fairly
well of heel, and a lot more crew, maybe 20.
6. Aug.25
A Benefactor's
Work is Never Done
Gino Strada (1948 –
13 August 2021)
died two weeks
ago. That left a big gap among doctors, nurses,
and health care providers, whose goal is to help
those who are in pain. The consolation is that
his life was exemplary. A doctor told me the
other day she wanted join EMERGENCY, the medical
humanitarian organization founded in 1994 by
Strada, his wife, and colleagues and that by now
has treated millions of patients around the
world.
After medical school Strada went into emergency
surgery. His concern was war victims. In 1988,
he began surgery with the International
Committee of the Red Cross in conflict zones,
including Pakistan, Ethiopia, Peru, Afghanistan,
Thailand, Djibouti, Somalia, Bosnia. He launched
projects in Iraq, Cambodia, Eritrea and
Afghanistan, now much in the news. EMERGENCY was
effective. By 2013 EMERGENCY was running four
hospitals and 34 clinics in Afghanistan.
Strada's life was a handbook on doing the right
thing: "Do you think that health care is a human
right? Do you think all human beings deserve to
be treated with dignity? Yes and yes. He devoted
his life to those principles. He would be the
first to say he left a lot undone. But what he
did get done matters to the millions he helped.
"If any human being is,
at this very moment, suffering, or ill, or
hungry, that is something that should
concern all of us because to
ignore the suffering of a person is always an
act of violence, one of the most cowardly."
"War is a persistent form of terrorism
against civilian populations in which people are
maimed by bullets, shrapnel, antipersonnel
mines and so-called toy mines. Treating the
wounded is neither generous nor merciful; it is
only just. It has to be done.”
Gino Strada
7. Aug. 31
Ocean Sapphire
This
one is so strange I like it. It was here
yesterday and is gone now, back to its home
star-system. Ocean Sapphire says it's a
motor yacht. Stats are 41m / 134'6 long, beam
8.4m / 27'7, built by Rodriquez Yachts in 2010.
Their home office on Earth is "near the Solent"
(hah! a likely story!) on the UK south coast.
The Solent is a strait between the Isle of Wight
and Great Britain. The Isle of Wight thus is in
the English Channel. The nearest large
city is Southampton. Sleeps 12 guests in 5
rooms, including a master suite. Carries a crew
of 7. It boasts "timeless styling, beautiful
furnishings and sumptuous seating...aluminium
superstructure and hull. Cruising speed, 12
knots; maximum speed 16 knots. Range 2,400nm
(nautical miles) from 26,000 liter fuel tanks.
Ahoy, landlubbers: a knot is a unit of speed,
equal to one nm per hour. Something moving at
one knot is going 1.151 land miles per hour. A
mile per hour is a unit of speed used in the
U.S. It equals 1.61 km per hour but that's dicey
because our Earth is not a perfect sphere but an
oblate spheroid with slightly flattened poles.
Ask a crew member. Thus, if you are walking at 2
knots per hour, you are going
about 2.4 mph. Go faster. These aliens can't
even spell "aluminum" right.
8. Sept. 7
The Opus
Continuum Exibit "Eros"
has Ended
first
mentioned mentioned here
complete
program and ample photos

They started
on July 4 and went, as advertised, through
Sept. 5, the other day. It was an exhibit on
erotic art at one of the most
enchanting venues in all of Italy, the
Vanvittelian Lodge at Lake Fusaro. It was at
best, as we all know, "the worst of
times" — there was and still is a
global pandemic in progress; people are
afraid, no one knows exactly what comes
next.

This exhibit was a perfect example of art
in the service of Good, art telling us
that we will get through this: come in,
have a good time, take lots of pictures,
watch others take pictures, write on the
walls, go out and look at the lake, and,
my favorite, look at the naked models
(hah! I spit in the face of hypocrisy!) It
was great. It was just what we needed.
Call the Nobel committee. We need a Peace
Prize down here.
9. Sept. 10
It's Just
a Game! Relax.

This is part of a harmless little internet
game I am playing with a handful of real
chumps. They know who are they and now know
if they have won or lost. Well, there is no
winning because if you win, having chosen
correctly, then you lose, big-time. If, on
the other hand, you guessed incorrectly,
well...
Look, it's hard to explain. If you are not
playing the game, then you may put your
heads down on your desk and weep until the
bell rings.
10.
(Dec 17) Today is Friday the 17th!
Unlike many cultures that view Friday the 13th as
unlucky, in Italy, today is the day of bad luck.
The Friday part may be traceable to the fact
that Christ was crucified on a Friday. In
ancient Rome they executed prisoners on Friday
and Romans paid their taxes on a Friday. The
number 17 (and not 13) is unlucky apparently
because if you write 17 with Roman numerals as
XVII, you can view those numbers as the letters
VIXI; in Latin that means "I have lived" and is
in the past tense and perfect aspect (it
describes a completed action); thus, "I have
lived and am done living. My life is over." So,
put Friday and 17 together and you have a very
unlucky day. In the smorfia,
the Neapolitan tradition of interpreting dreams
as numbers to bet on in the lottery, the number
17 is associated with disgrazia —that is, an
accident or disaster. So if you dream of such,
bet on 17 as one of your numbers. Interestingly,
the number 13 is considered lucky in
Italy (as in a number of cultures in the world).
In Naples and the Campania region, in general,
you might say "tredici" (13) if you think your
luck has changed for the worse and you want to
call it back. Having said all that, I'm not sure
if the word for "fear of Friday the 17th" is friggaheptakaidekaphobia
or friggadekaheptaphobia.
Frigga was the Norse goddess "Friday" is named
for. I'll stop now. It would be just my
Frigga-luck if my computer started to act
x^ci**%tz....
11.
19 Sept 2021
The Miracle
of San
Gennaro
The faithful gathered outside
the Naples cathedral

The Miracle of San Gennaro refers
to the reputed liquefaction of a vial
of the saint's clotted blood. It is
held to occur at other times during the
year, but Sept. 19 is the one that counts
most in the minds of the faithful. At
10 a.m. this morning the archbishop of
Naples, monsignor Domenico
Battaglia announced that the miracle had in
fact taken place.
There is a complete discussion
of this here.
(photo taken 19 Sept
2021)
12. Sept. 23
Opus Continuum, Hard at Work —
or
Art
is a Many Fingered Thing
The artists' collective
Opus Continuum is at work preparing for summer
2022. Climate change tells us (I just spoke to
her) that summers are getting longer, so that
may be sooner than they think. They 'd better
get crackin' instead of preening for the camera.
The canvas behind them is a collective effort —the bay of Naples seen from
Bacoli. It's pretty empty but by next
summer will be full of what artists call
"stuff". It will be
the center-piece of an exhibit at the
Vanvitellian Lodge at Lake Fusaro in Bacoli. (see #8, above)
They're also drawing up lesson plans for courses
in painting, design, and photography at the same
location. Selene teases a
"proposal" for Capri. I have no idea what that
means, but I like it.
13. Sept. 25
Cruising Down
the River on a Sunday Afternoo..
Giant Violin
with apologies to the
original © 1946 song: music, Dayne;
lyrics, Beadell & Tollerton
"Noah's
Violin", a giant floating violin by Venetian
sculptor Livio De Marchi, journeyed through
Venice's Grand Canal on Saturday. The
trademark gondolas of Venice's Grand Canal
played second fiddle this weekend to a very
unusual vessel: A giant violin carrying a live
string quartet. This large-scale replica is made
from about a dozen different kinds of wood, with
nuts, bolts and space for a motor inside. De
Marchi said the violin is a "sign of Venice
restarting." He named it after Noah's ark
because he sees it as bringing a message of hope
— artistically and culturally — after a storm.
The violin made its journey down the canal on
Saturday, as musicians on board performed works
by Vivaldi (De Marchi also cited the Venetian
violinist and composer as a source of
inspiration for the craft's design. After its
roughly hour-long ride, the violin was blessed
by a reverend, who said he hoped it would send a
message of hope to the world. Businesses in
Italy and a museum in China have already
expressed interest.
14. Sept. 26
A Tagger's
Work is Never Done!
A "tagger" is
one who likes to decorate public property
with his or her own comments, usually with
spray paint or a magic marker. Those
comments then become "street art". I call
your attention to these links on my site
about the same problem: graffiti
and street art.
Given the "Führerbunker Bauhaus"
look of some of the concrete slab &
drab architecture that now counts as
"public property," maybe a few bits of
tagging is not such a bad idea, you say.
In some cases, as in this image, the "tag"
is a very slight change, an addition of a
single letter to a known phrase. That
phrase
is very current around the world as a
commitment to... well, you know it. It
took the slightest change to make it
different. It's also easy to imitate fast
and has appeared in various places in
Italy.
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