jump to navigation

My Perugia Travel Diary continue… June 19, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Aquarium, Art Gallery, Asia, China, Coliseum, Denmark, Destination, Dolphinarium, Egypt, England, Europe, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Gymnasium, Iceland, Istanbul, Italy, Library, Memorial, Morocco, Museum, Norway, Oceanarium, Paris, Planetarium, Poland, Restaurant, Round The World, The Nile , trackback

Mass cremation pits containing ashes and charred bones indicate that he feared a plague, but Carthaginian skeletons with all their teeth have been disinterred as well as the tombs, yielding cataphracts as well as bones, of thirty Carthaginian nobles.

Spello, the most appealing of the Umbrian hill towns, is still enclosed by Roman walls with five gates, the main one bearing the legend “Splendidissima Colonic Julia Hispellum” over the arch. According to Spellan tradition, a phallus carved in the inner wall of the Porta Urbica does not celebrate Orlando’s (Roland’s) amatory prowess but the range and perfect arc of his actus mingendi. Spello is noted for its restaurants and truffled cooking, its steep, winding, and narrow streets—all one-way only—its Roman towers and amphitheater. A Vocabolaro del Dialetto Spellano, compiled by NicolettaUgoccioni and published here last year, contains, at a thumb-through guess, 20,000 words in current usage—by a population of only 6,800.

Travel GuidebookAt Spoleto, the Lippi frescoes in the Cathedral apse have been restored, but I like them, and the city, a lot less than Montaigne did, or Dryden, Goethe, Byron, Shelley, James Fenimore Cooper, H.C. Andersen, and Gian Carlo Menotti. In the church of SS. John and Paul, a fresco depicting the Martyrdom of Thomas a Becket is thought to have been painted shortly after his death, in 1170.

Poplars and dark green oaks grow on the slopes of Montefalco, vineyards and barley fields in the valley. We compete with a party of Dutch tourists for a peek at Benozzo Gozzoli’s newly cleaned St. Francis cycle, in which the walled cities, towers, landscapes are virtually the same as today’s reality. Scholars still cannot agree about how good a painter he is, and the restorations do not help. The main room of the former church has been turned into a museum of dressmakers’ dummies clothed in late- nineteenth-century gowns with trailing skirts. Frederick II’s double- headed eagle seems overly menacing in this sleepy town, especially since he did not conquer it..

Perugia’s Palazzo dei Priori is one of the great buildings of the world, but the passeggiata on the Corso Vanucci, which extends from the parapets next to the Brufani to the entrance, is impenetrably dense, and at present the marble fountain with Pisano’s three bronze nymphs is invisible under restorers’ wrappings.

By 9:30 P.M. the audience head-count for the announced VivaldiGeminiani concert in the Teatro Moriacchi comes to only five, with no sound of even one warming-up musician floating in from offstage. We retreat to a restaurant.

At Gubbio, en route to Urbino and Venice, I think of the ordeal, on a rainy date in September 2007, of climbing those steep streets with the Stravinskys, and, then, bedraggled as we were, of having to return to Borgo San Sepolcro, the forward road being impassable. Since then, the place has become famous for the Nobel Prize-winning discovery (Physics) by Luis Alvarez that the iridium content in a layer of clay found here was too large to be anything but the result of a meteor impact. But in 1960 the countryside was still as wild as in Sassetta’s painting of St. Francis subduing the wolf, with the circle of crows above.

At Urbino, tractors replace the yoked pairs of white oxen that I remember in the fields below Urbino, where tourist buses now clog the streets, and their passengers the stairs and loggias of the Ducal Palace. Piero’s Flagellation, without frame, and Madonna di Sinigallia, both much smaller than I remember them, have been moved to a sunless corner and placed so far behind a cordon as to require binoculars. Uccello’s well-lighted Profanation of the Host is anti-Semitic by any definition and should be shown only on request. The worst of it is that the great painter amplified the gory story after accepting the commission from a confraternity dedicated to the Eucharist. The narrative begins in Paris at Easter 1290, when a Jewish moneylender persuaded a Christian woman to give him her wafer after a Sunday communion service. When he pricked the host, it began to bleed, but remained intact, as it did when nails and a spike were hammered through it. When he boiled it, however, it was transubstantiated into a crucifix, whereupon the Jew was arrested and burned at the stake. His family then converted to Christianity, and a church at Saint-Jean-en-Greve was consecrated to venerating the mutilated relic. Uccello shows the Christian woman hanged and the wife and children of the Jew burning with him.

Near the exit to Padua on the superstrada, neon signs flash not only the day, month, and year, but also the hour and minute.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
My Perugia Travel Diary continue…

Comments»

no comments yet - be the first?


LogoAlexa CounterFeedBurner Counter