1. Neapolitan
tenor, Enrico Caruso, was born on Feb 25,
1873. Naples hosted a small celebration at San Carlo
theater a days ago for the occasion. There was some
singing, a few debates, and they listened to scratchy
recordings, restored as much as possible (the original
versions were on wax cylinders - Caruso was an early
techno junkie and liked to record his voice.) The
hosts of the event assured us all that a permanent
Caruso museum would open on July 20 at San Carlo and
that a new on-line ticket office / booking office
/ Museum and Historical Archive of San Carlo was
now available... "a place of memory and innovation
to relive the great historical events surrounding
the oldest opera house in Europe." That
site is here.
Caruso was a good caricature
sketch artist. This is one he did of himself!
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2. From Cash
Back to Trash
Back
Italians
love anglicisms. It makes them cosmopolitan to know
they are getting "cash back" if they wait longer than
such-and-such a period in this or that line to make a
payment. Now we have Trash Back, at least I offer that
phrase to the city. I am heartened to see that the
mayor of the town of Bacoli, a very scenic town in the
Flegrean Fields has started the ball rolling. He saw
from reviewing surveillance videos that trash had been
discarded on via Spiaggia Romana in Bacoli. The
offender's car was right there, so they had him
dead-to-rights. It's always a local. Tourists pick up
after themselves. They come from distant galaxies and
live by the Cosmic Code that says you leave a place
cleaner than when you found it. I used to joke about
this. I'd say, What are they going to do if you don't
pay the yearly trash collection fee? Bring it all back
to you? (What happens in large cities is that you pay
a fine, and then another one and another. Then they
take your children. But out in Bacoli --just a few
letters away from Bucolic, the mayor had the guy's
trash bagged and dropped off at his front door with a
note: Here. Stick this where the moon don't shine --
in a trash bin. There was a short lecture on "Zero
tolerance" and a fine. I sigh for my youthful
visionariosity.
-----------------------------------------------------
3. 
ALL of the Museums and Archeological
Sites in Puglia
(there are dozens of them)
No kidding! The best organized such
site on the internet.
https://musei.puglia.beniculturali.it/en/museums/
Oh, this thing? Search and
ye shall find.
----------------------------------------------------- March 13
4.
ALL
of the Museums and Archeological Sites in Italy
The
goal of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage
is to have up and on-line 500 Italian museums all
linked via an easy-to-use hierarchy from region
down to province down to museum (an
archeological site, castle or fortress, or a
building of major artistic value). Each one of the
500 targets will then have an explanation with an
Italian-English toggle, some images, ideally some
photos, but at least a graphic contour map of the
site. I previewed this a week ago at item #3
(above). The page for Puglia is excellent. None of
the others comes close and many say "temporarily
closed due to covid". It is clear the pages have
not been looked at in many months. A few of them
have explanatory text, so maybe something is
stirring. I don't know why Puglia went right to
work and stayed at it. Yes, they have a lot to
show (maybe more castles and fortresses per cubic
Italian than anywhere else!) But it's as if most
of them are getting ready to start thinking about
it. I looked at the pages for Florence, Rome, and
my own Campania region, and it's all very sparse.
I expect it will all be filled in sooner or later.
It's a worthwhile project, but it is painstaking
and slow. Be patient, but try it every so often.
Anyway, their homepage looks looks
like this right now: Scroll down a
bit. You'll see a statue and "Discover Italy"
written next to it. Below that is "Museums list by
region". That is the top of the chain. All 500 of
the sites are below that.
5.-----------------------------------------------------
In Search of the Golden Bough
The
woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But
I have promises to keep,/
And miles to go
before I sleep, / And miles to go before I
sleep.
These
lovely lines by Robert Frost are what this
tenacious group, Opus Continuum is all about.
Certainly tenacious, if you think what the world
has been through in the past couple of years. If
you feel that a bunch of artists wandering
around the woods looking for truth or pondering
"promises" they made and now have to keep, are
irrelevant, then you may feel that art, music,
and literature, themselves, are irrelevant. I
think you're missing something, but that's your
business. Good-bye and I wish you well. A
reminder for you from Socrates —"The
unexamined life is not worth living."
“IMMAGINARIA” has reached its
third edition. The year's effort by the Opus
Continuum artists collective will be a joint
venture with the Archeological Park of the Campi
Flegrei. Selene Salvi of the collective points
out that the group's exhibits "always center
on our local myths and legends, but
not simply for the sake of nostalgia or to
evoke antiquity, but rather to serve as
a lens through which we can focus on our own
lives and times." They've chosen the Greek
myth of the "The Golden Bough", an episodic tale
in Virgil's Aeneid that narrates the
adventures of the Trojan hero, Aeneas, after the
Trojan War. It's a metaphor of the search for
one's self. They could have chosen something
else, but, after all, Virgil lived and wrote
here, was "nurtured in sweet Parthenope"
and they're in the Flegrean Fields! You are
invited. Can I guarantee that you will
find your own personal Golden Bough, the key to
your own personal "underworld"? No, but the search
is what counts!
The
exhibit will run from 25 March to 21 May in the
Baia Castle, in this restless landscape, one rich
with myth and legend. From its vantage points you
can admire the beauty of a land that has inspired
artists down through the ages.
The UBC-code
displayed above links to the 69-page fully
illustrated brochure of In Search of the
Golden Bough.
UPDATE FROM MAY 21: THE EXHIBIT HAS BEEN EXTENDED
UNTIL JUNE 11. ORGANIZERS ARE HAPPY WITH THE
RESULTS --A LOT OF VISITORS IN SPITE OF THE
WEATHER, WHICH BEEN LESS THAN COOPERATIVE.
6.-----------------------------------------------------
Portrait
attributed to Francesco Metzi (from 1515-1518) is
the only certain
contemporary
depiction of Leonardo. I like it better than
Leonardo's famous
self-portrait
where he looks grizzled and unhappy.
Hey,
Mom, Can
We Talk?
They're still discovering
astonishing things about the breadth of Leonardo
da Vinci's (1452-1519) genius. He is widely
held to be the greatest "universal genius" in history.
He had unquenchable curiosity and a feverishly
inventive imagination. This latest one, by CalTech
scholars in 2023 found his calculations for the
gravitational constant were 97% accurate! What's more,
he did all this without a means of accurate
timekeeping or the benefit of calculus, which Newton
later invented for his laws of motion and universal
gravitation in the 1660s. Leonardo was playing with
the idea that gravity and the rate at which time
passes were related. That is what Einstein's General
Theory of Relativity was about, published in
1915. Leonardo had the great advantage of living
before everything had to be either science or
the humanities. It was all connected. He wrote copious
notes on the world and what was in it. Astronomy,
Biology, Carrots ...etc...Zoology. Mona Lisa
is in there somewhere. (His thousands of pages of
notes were in cursive mirror-writing, like the
emergency vehicle in back of you that writes
"Ambulance" backwards so you can read it in your
rear-view mirror. The scope and depth of his interests
were without precedent and his mind superhuman, yet
the man himself is mysterious and remote. So, barring
the revelation that Leonardo was from the future and
rolled out buck-naked from a shimmering
electromagnetic sphere like The Terminator,
we'll have to focus on his "mysterious and remote"
personal life if we want to know more,
Maybe his mother can tell
us. What? We're not even sure who she was? Indeed,
Carlo Vecce, a literature professor at the "Orientale"
University of Naples has revealed his theory in a new
novel, “Il Sorriso di Caterina”) [“Caterina’s
Smile”]. He bases his theory on a 600-year-old
document in State Archives in Florence that granted
freedom to a girl named Caterina, who, says Vecchia,
was kidnapped from her home on the Black Sea in
Circassia (now southern Russia) before being shipped
to Venice as a slave! Vecce says she was freed from
slavery by da Vinci’s father, who was himself a
well-known slave trader. Ah, the hackneyed cliché of a
slave trader with a heart of gold; yet, it gladdens
the heart. The traditional story of Leonardo's mother
was that she was a humble peasant girl named Caterina.
That's it. Leo's father was a wealthy notary named Ser
Piero. He and she made a little whoopee and a little
Leo out of wedlock. Daddy made sure Leo got a good
education. There is no record of Caterina. The lines
between truth, fiction, past, present, and future get
ever fainter, so I note that Katherine ("Caterina")
Janeway, captain of the starship "Enterprise" on TV's
Star Trek-Voyager visits the ship's holodeck
regularly where she chats with a hologram of Leonardo
da Vinci. I rest my case.
7.-----------------------------------------------------
Happy Vernal Equinox!
I remember in my college band, way back
in the caves, when members of the reed section
(clarinets, saxes and those other things) showed up
one morning all bent out of shape; they were
sputtering fortissimo vituperation because
they had just seen a billboard ad for Texaco featuring
Benny Goodman, the King of Swing (image). (He had
released a record produced by Texaco called "Swing
into Spring.") On the recording, Benny sounded great,
as you might expect, but the billboard ad had a
drawing of a Texaco gas-station guy who really looked
like Benny, playing the clarinet, and our reed players
were fuming! Why? Look carefully at the image. What's
wrong with it? (hint: nothing to do with the bird.) A
free bottle of Corona beer for the right answer!
Earliest time-stamp counts. (Offer void where
prohibited by law or if I'm too tired to leave the
house.)
8.-----------------------------------------------------
Good Game!
- The Tumult
and the Pouting*
When the
Great Scorer comes / To mark against your name,
He'll write not 'won' or 'lost' /
But how loud you screamed into a microphone**
Finally,
a sensible sports writer, Pasquale Tina of la
Repubblica. He summed up yesterday's
England-Italy game fairly and nicely, saying the
English brought a good team. So did we. The stadium
was almost full, just a few empty seats. (The stadium,
for those of you who don't follow such niceties, is
now called the Diego Maradona Stadium. It used to be
the San Paolo Stadium. Same place.) It was a good
game. One black mark was when some Italian fans booed
and jeered the playing of "God Save the King".
Boorish behavior, which embarrassed the journalist,
who noted that Italian social networks were a-buzz
with the dismal rendition of the Italian hymn, Fratelli
d'Italia by two Italian pop-stars. (Message:
Get a decent brass band or don't play it.)
Bad news for the home team: final score -
England 2 — Italy 1. Final note from
the journalist: Good game. The fans won, the stadium
won, we lost. (Subtext: that's why they call it
"competitive sports". Someone wins. Someone
loses. As much as Italian journalists love the
word "Hooligans" to describe English fans, this
reporter didn't use it because he saw fairly that they weren't.
Were they happy they won? Yes. Was he unhappy Italy
lost? Yes. There was no violence. They should have
more matches like that.
*apologies
to Rudyard Kipling - "The Tumult and the Shouting"
( from Recessional)
**apologies to
Grantland Rice - "...'But how you played the game'.
9.-----------------------------------------------------
In Search of
the Golden Bough-part
2
As noted (item
5, above), In Search of the Golden Bough, an
exhibit put on by the Opus Continuum artists
collective opened the other day. About 50 persons
were in attendance. The photo (right) shows some of
the group enjoying the works of paintings and
photography, done by members of the
collective, on the premises of the renowned
Baia Castle, the fortress (image, below, left) that
guarded the western approaches to the gulf of
Naples.
The exhibit will run from
25 March to 21 May in the Baia Castle, in this
restless landscape, one rich with myth and legend.
From its vantage points you can admire the beauty of
a land that has inspired artists down through the
ages.
Ths UBC-code
links to the 69-page fully illustrated brochure of In
Search of the Golden Bough.
10.
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April 1. Today is not April Fool's
Day!
....
(wait,wait) APRIL FOOL!
Get it? Excuse me while I
stop guffawing. I slapped my thigh so hard I think
I broke my leg. Actually there is not the April
Fool's Day tradition anywhere in Italy that there
is in other countries. I have
an item here on that tradition. The
English have a good time with it. The BBC used to
put up a good hoax on April 1 (see link, above)
most years, but I'm not sure if they still do. I
looked this morning, and they may have done so,
but I couldn't find one suspicious enough. Some
stodgy Brits (apparently everyone in the UK except
people who work for the BBC and John Cleese
complained that it was unbecoming for a news
organization to be so frivolous. As that may be, I
am indented to Marius Kociejowski for pointing me
(and you) to another
site that also enjoys fooling people.
11.
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Anchors...
or at least Anchovies
"Made in
Italy"
... Aweigh!
The
Italian naval academy flagship Amerigo
Vespucci is a "tall
ship", a large,
traditionally-rigged sailing
vessel. They are used in many
navies in the world to teach
young cadets and sailors "the
ropes" --that is, the basics
skills of seamanship. Italy has
two such vessels: Amerigo
Vespucci (image)
and Palinuro.
The Vespucci is a
full-rigged three-masted
steel-hulled vessel, built in
the Castellammare shipyards near
Naples in 1931. She is 82.4 m
(270.34 ft) long, with an
overall length of 101 m (331 ft)
including the bowsprit and a
beam of 15.5 m (51 ft).
She has 26 sails totaling 1,360
m2 (14,600 ft2).
On July 1 she will set off on a
two-year global tour "to boldly
go...[sorry]...sell 'Made in
Italy' products to as many
natives as they can. She will
visit all continents. When they
say global they mean global.
Speaking of "she", I wonder how
Prime Minister Gloria Meloni
feels about the term "Made in
Italy". She's been on a tear
lately about not using English
terms. Offenders can be fined, I
wonder if they'll have to pay up
before they set sail.
13.
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Pasquetta
It's like
this all the way to Vevuvius
Easter Monday is
the second day of Easter and a
public holiday in some
countries. In Western
Christianity it marks the second
day of the eight-day period that
begins on Easter Sunday and ends
with the following Sunday.
Christians celebrate the
Monday as
the beginning of Eastertide. In
Italy, Monday is an official
public holiday and is called
“Pasquetta”. It is customary to
prepare a family picnic.
Specifically, the walk recalls
the walk of the disciples to
Emmaus, when Jesus followed them
without being recognized.
"And, behold, two of them went that same day
to a village called Emmaus…and they talked
together of these things which had
happened…Jesus himself drew near and went
with them…" (Luke 24:13-15)
photo credit: Selene Salvi
Pasquetta is hectic. Everyone
puts on a knapsack packed with
food and sets out to go
somewhere —anywhere. But not
alone.The travel in groups,
carefree and out for a picnic in
celebration of an event they no
longer know anything about, an
event that was evidence that
Jesus was the Messaiah. Emmaus
was about "threescore furlongs"
from Jerusalem. That's about 7½
miles (12 km). Neapolitan
teenagers are not going to walk
that for anything, much less to
celebrate The Risen Messiah, but
they will walk along my street,
a broad avenue and look for a
place to stop and unpack their
backpacks. The city has issued
bulletins that it's ok to eat in
this park but not in that one
and not here but over there.
People are confused, but that's
ok. It's Naples. Some will have
to move and some will not. It
used to be very noisy because of
portable music players. That has
changed to zombie-like, eerie
silence. Everyone is texting. I
miss the noise. Please, text not
that ye be not texted. Don't
forget to "like" Jesus. And
don't talk. You'll wake the
dead. Wait, isn't that what this
is all about?
I
have synthesized the text from these
earlier items:
pasquetta.php
-original item
miscellany73.php#12
-update
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added- April 11, 2023
There is Always Something Going on in Herculaneum
After
months of
restoring a
section of the
Roman City of
Herculaneum,
the charred
remains of a
number of
beams and
doors that
were somehow
not totally
destroyed in
the great
eruption of
Vesuvius in 79
A.D. have been
readied for
public display
starting in
June. The
object was to
open to the
public in June
an arcade
along the decumanus
massimo
--that is, the
main east-west
street, in
which a number
of shops were
located. The
beams and
doors Image)
that will be
displayed were
part of that
shop. There
are another
330 similar
objects in
Herculaneum.
The remains
are carbonized
wood, standing
there like
sculpted
charcoal.
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Amalfi
Maritime
Museum
The Amalfi
maritime
museum is now
open to the
public again.
It was closed
in January for
a brief winter
break and for
minor repairs.
It is the
symbol of the
medieval city,
containing
displays on
the maritime
duchy of
Amalfi.
The facility
documents and
illustrates
the history of
this ancient
Maritime
Republic with
displays on
the evolution
of nautical
navigational
instruments as
well as
various
artifacts and
relics that go
back
to the
founding of
this
City-State in
839, including
a facsimile of
the Tabula
de Amalpha,
the first code
of
Mediterranean
maritime law.
It is well
worth the
visit. There
is an entrance
fee of 3
euros, waived,
however, for
students and
school-teachers
from the area.
16.
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UNESCO's
Creative
Cities Network
Papers
make it sound
as if this is
an award given
to a city for
being
"creative" in
a particular
field. There
are seven
fields: Crafts
and Folk Art,
Media Arts,
Film, Design,
Gastronomy,
Literature,
and Music.
Fine,
there should
be a list of
winners since
2004, when
UNESCO
launched this
network.
That's not how
it works. All
a city has to
do is send in
a form and
promise to be
creative in at
least one of
those fields.
There are
currently 295
cities on the
global list.
Naples is NOT
one of them,
but that may
change. The
president of
the Campania
region, the
mayor of the
city and a
sub-heavenly
host of
flunkies just
had a sit-down
and opined how
nice it would
be to get on
that last. It
would raise
the city
internationally
to a new
level...etc.etc.
Naples is already
a world
brand. It's
packed with
tourists this
minute, right
now as I
write. So I
don't know
what this
means. "Joining
the network is
a long-term
commitment to
participate
and present a
realistic plan
of specific
projects,
initiatives or
policies to be
carried out in
the next four
years to
implement the
objectives of
the Network
and enhance
your city's
creative
potential for
sustainable
urban
development,
to exchange
know-how and
cooperate at
an
international
level!" If
you lie about
that, if your
city has a
river, it
turns to
blood; then
come the
frogs, lice,
locusts, and
boils
If you want to
see if your
city is on the
list, see
https://en.unesco.org/creative-cities/home
After many months of painstaking restoration, the San Carlo theater has been handed back to the city as "good to go." They did a good job.