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editor
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 Posted: Fri Dec 17, 2004 4:29 pm Post subject: Italia |
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WELCOME!
Italia:
Western Living
Magazine Subscription
Recycled July 11/06 at The Tyee as Burgess Down the Stretch in Italy
November, 2004
| Quote: | Strictly speaking the Palio is a horse race, a three-lap, bareback careen around the town square held on July 2 and August 16 of each year, a galloping free-for-all that can leave riders broken and horses destroyed. In practice, the Palio is considerably more - eight centuries of ritualized combat, an all-consuming goal, an organizaing principle that has gerrymandered Siena the way high school football carves up Texas. Each race lasts under a minute and a half. But in old town Siena, the Palio defines you every day of the year...
It is in the lottery that the true genius of Palio is revealed ...The lottery determines who will have a legitminate chance of victory. Steinbrenners with fat wallets are powerless.
Although 10 horses run, ultimately two will be remembered - one winner and one loser. The loser is the horse that finishes second. The rationale for this can be surmised. Since Palio horses are assigned by lot, finishing dead last probably indicates nothing more shameful than drawing a bad ticket. But to finish second suggests a good horse and a bad ride. (-- p. 68) |
Though the betting is all unofficial, millions of lire change hands at the event each year, according to the story below:
Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
Palio: Italy's Mad Dash
By Diane M. Bolz
August, 2002
There's this, too:
Where There's a Will
Hardcover
By John Mortimer
| Quote: | Every Italian city had not only its own history but also its own masterpiece in the cathedral, its own food, its own wine and often its own language. The Neapolitan dialect is incomprehensible to the pure-speaking Florentine. You wouldn't expect to eat spaghetti with clams in Bologna or wild boar pate in Naples. If you want a town where the present and the past are still vividly alive, go to Siena. It's divided into parishes, which compete in the extraordinary horse-race round the scallop-shell-shaped piazza twice a year. The Palio, which celebrates a victory over rival Florence, takes only a few minutes but the preparations and the processions are unforgettable. The horses spend the previous night in local churches, to which they are led by men singing, and if they manure the marble floors it's a sign of luck. The long procession before the race, with parishioners in medieval costume throwing twirling flags into the air as high as the houses, unwinds slowly. Knights in armour, with their visors down, ride by to celebrate the parishes that no longer exist. Finally the Palio itself, a huge silver dish, is driven round on a cart drawn by white oxen. The secret ambition of all the parishes is not to win (winning entails a great deal of expense) but to have their enemy come second - a true humiliation.
The Palio has more importance than even the beauty of the event in Europe's most perfect city centre. Loyalty to your parish is so great that women giving birth in a hospital outside their home area take a little tray of earth from their home parish to put under the bed. And the parishes organize events, football matches, parties and dinners for young and old, rich and poor, all the year round. The system works so well that there is little juvenile crime in Siena. It should certainly be tried in Birmingham, preferably with a colourful horse-race round the Bull Ring. (From Chapter 25, Eating Out, pgs. 140-141) |
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| Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2005 4:48 pm Post subject: |
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Ars Magna
The Rules of Algebra
Paperback
By Girolamo Cardano
| Quote: | GIROLAMO CARDANO
Italian mathematician and astrologer (1501-1576)
Cardano turned to gambling to make ends meet, where he had advantage with his superior knowledge of probability. His addiction to gambling led him to formulate a mathematical theory of chance.
Cardano was renowned throughout Europe as an astrologer, even visiting England to cast the horoscope of the young king, Edward VI. A steadfast believer in the accuracy of his so-called science, Cardano constructed a horoscope predicting the hour of his own death. When the day dawned, it found him in good health and safe from harm. Rather than have his prediction falsified, Cardano killed himself. (Credited to I. Asimov, Biographical Encyclopedia at Death of Famous Scientists) |
Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
Hardcover
By Isaac Asimov
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 9:24 am Post subject: |
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From the PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to the Opera:
La Traviata
DVD
By Giuseppe Verdi
Featuring Rumanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu as Violetta
| Quote: | What fun navigating the Giuseppe Verdi website, clicking on all the wonderful video and music clips, the latter of which include lyrics as well as credits. Listen to selections from the tragic opera based on the Alexandre Dumas fils story of a French courtesan, Lady of the Camellias.
In addition to lavish sets, costumes and extraordinary music, Act II provides one of the greatest gambling scenes ever in the arts: |
| Quote: | | At her soirée that evening, Flora learns from the Marquis that Violetta and Alfredo have parted, then clears the floor for hired entertainers - a band of fortune-telling Gypsies and some matadors who sing of Piquillo and his coy sweetheart ("E Piquillo un bel gagliardo"). Soon Alfredo strides in, making bitter comments about love and gambling recklessly at cards. Violetta has arrived with Baron Douphol, who challenges Alfredo to a game and loses a small fortune to him. Everyone goes in to supper, but Violetta has asked Alfredo to see her. Fearful of the Baron's anger, she wants Alfredo to leave, but he misunderstands her apprehension and demands that she admit she loves Douphol. Crushed, she pretends she does. Now Alfredo calls in the others, denounces his former love and hurls his winnings at her feet ("Questa donna conoscete?"). Germont enters in time to see this and denounces his son's behavior. The guests rebuke Alfredo and Douphol challenges him to a duel. (From The Metropolitan Opera online, attributed to Opera News. |
Also ravishing:
La Traviata
DVD
Artistic Director Franco Zeffirelli
Other dramatizations we admire:
Camille
DVD
Featuring screen legend Greta Garbo
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2005 4:17 pm Post subject: |
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The Gamester
Hardcover
By Rafael Sabatini
| Quote: | The cards for which Mr. Law waited were not dealt him until a few months later. But dealt him they were at last[/b], and the deal supplied a climax to the exasperation of Monsieur de Noailles and his friends.
Ever since the days of Richelieu and Colbert, the monopoly of maritime commerce and colonial exploitation had been granted for a term of years to such companies among others as the Compagnie de Chine, the Comagnie du Senegal, the Compagnie du Canada.
In the autumn of this year 1717 Crozat, who had controlled a company for the exploitation of Louisiana and the Valley of the Mississippi, finding it unprofitable, surrendered the concession.
At once Mr. Law perceived the chance to begin to realize his dream. This comprised no less than the ultimate gathering into one establishment under his hand the banking, the administration of the public revenues and the direction of all monopolies, so that the State should become one vast commercial undertaking over which he would preside. t had all been foreshadowed in that system of his which the Council of Finance had rejected. (From Chapter V, Extreme-Unction, p. 56) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Tue Apr 05, 2005 9:16 am Post subject: |
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Without Blood
Hardcover
By Alessandro Baricco
Translation by Ann Goldstein
| Quote: | | So she began to walk through the Galeria Florencia, and eventually she saw, some twenty yards ahead, a small kiosk that stuck out from the left-hand wall, creasing for a moment the clean profile of the space. It was one of those kiosks where lottery tickets are sold. She continued walking, but when she was a few steps from the kiosk she stopped. She saw that the man who sold the tickets was seated, reading a newspaper. He held it resting on something in front of him, and he was reading it. All the sides of the kiosk were of glass, except the one that was against the wall of the Galeria. Within, the ticket man could be seen, and a mass of colored strips hanging down. There was a small window, in front, and that was the opening through which the ticket seller talked to people. (-- p. 43) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Wed Apr 06, 2005 1:59 pm Post subject: |
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The Ballad of the Low Lifes
A plan, three con-men &
a woman
Hardcover
By Enrico Remmert
| Quote: | ...he starts explaining that he hates horses, they're stupid creatures, really stupid, that nobody could make an intelligent animal run races -- "Have you ever seen a cat race? Of course not, they're obviously intelligent animals." He's enjoying himself and goes on. "But you can bet, that's the good part. At least there's proper racing today -- I can't stand trotting."
Cristina gives you an odd, long-suffering look, you give her the expected smile back, then offer to stand in the queue.
You haven't been to the races for years. Your father used to take you all the time when you were a child, he was mad about betting, expecially the complicated stuff: he never placed bets to win or place unless it was over two or three consecutive races; he always placed combination bets: forecasts, tri-casts, trebles, and in all this he followed a specific doctrine concerning Man and Destiny. You remember a phrase of his: "Betting isn't a game, it's a duel between Man and Destiny." Now it sounds grandiose. You want to add: Of course, Shakespeare, King Lear, Act Four, Scene One, but when you analyse it you realize there's a whole lifetime in this phrase. You remember your father's habit of shouting "Well done!" to the winner at the end of every race, even when, especially when, he had bet on another horse....(-- pgs. 62-64) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Fri May 13, 2005 10:58 am Post subject: |
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America's Empire
Global Leader or Rogue Power?
Hardcover
By Jim Garrison
| Quote: | In the fall of 176, after almost seven years of war, Marcus returned to Rome and was given a triumphal celebration as savior of the empire. At his side rode Commodus, a boy of fifteen, whom he designated as his colleague on the throne. The plague had burned itself out by then and the city was returning to normalcy. As Durant describes it, "The capital had suffered little from the wars, which had been financed with remarkable economy and little extra taxation; while the battle raged on the frontiers trade flourished within, and money gingled everywhere. It was the height of Rome's tide and of its Emperor's popularity; all the world acclaimed him as at once a soldier, a sage, and a saint. (footnote omitted)
But Marcus knew that the barbarians were only temporarily weakened, and that despite a hundred defeats they were in fact growing stronger. He believed that further invasions would cease only if Rome extended its boundaries to the mountains of Bohemia, so in 178 he set off with Commodus and his legions for the Third Marcomannic War. Again he crossed the Danube and wiped out any resistance and was about to proclaim Bohemia and Danubian Galicia new provinces when death struck. He called Commodus to his side and bade him finish the task and realize the dream of Augustus to extend the borders ofRome to the Elbe. He then refused all further food and drink for the next six days. On the seventh, he rose from his bed and presented Commodus as the new emperor. He then returned to bed, covered his head with a sheet, and died.
Commodus did not follow his father's admonition. Rather, he quickly made peace with the barbarians and returned to Rome, where he preoccupied himself with participating in gladiatorial contests and debauchery. He drank and gambled, kept a harem of three hundred women and three hundred boys, paraded himself as a transvestite at public games and enjoyed the spectacle of unspeakable cruelties perpetrated by gladiators on the defenceless. He consigned the governance of the empire to a series of incompetent and rapacious friends, until finally, in the year 192, he was poisoned by one of them and then strangled while he lay in the bath. He was thirty-one. (-- pgs. 144-145) |
Need more on the scourge called Commodus?
Gladiator
DVD
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 3:40 pm Post subject: |
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The Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
In Search of the Roots of Genius Mozart
By Edward Rothstein
February, 2006
| Quote: | | During these years, Mozart also, in collaboration with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte - himself a master of masquerade, born a Jew, educated as a priest, a restless lover and an avid trickster - wrote his greatest operas. In their collaborations - Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte - the accepted order of things is undermined by trickery, by seduction, by savvy manipulation; in each opera too, there are scenes of masquerade and confusion. And in varied ways, the listener is lured into differing reactions to a revolution in sensibility: we cheer it in Figaro, we fear it in Don Giovanni, we worry over its power in Cosi. It is as if the very nature of humanity were being tested in these operatic laboratories, exposing it ot the diverse forces of the Englightenment. (-- p. 95) |
According to the excellent Italian authors in translation:
| Quote: | | This was to become a recurring theme in his life, buying the books he loved, then selling them to pay his debts. At the age of twenty-one, Da Ponte was made a teacher at another seminary, and at twenty-four he was ordained as a priest. Almost immediately he set off for Venice. At the time, Venice had seven opera houses, and music was everywhere. It was also one of the most dissolute cities of Europe, and gambling was a second passion. The motto of the Venetians was, "A little Mass in the morning, a little gamble in the afternoon, and a little lady in the evening." The carnival season lasted six months, during which all the people wore masks, even the priests. |
More on the wondrous adventures of da Ponte:
Where There's a Will
Hardcover
By Sir Jack Falstaff Mortimer, Q.C.
| Quote: | If you feel stuck in any kind of a rut you might contemplate the chameleon life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Jew who became a Catholic priest, the librettist of the three greatest operas ever written, the friend of Casanova, Mozzart (as he always spelled the composer's name) and two successive Austrian emperors, who married an English wife and ended up living in New York, owning an opera house and teaching Americans about Italian poetry.
In that great period of history which included the Age of Reason and the French Revolution, the world of Rousseau and Napoleon, Byron, Wellington, Shelley and Goethe, Mozart and Beethoven, Da Ponte appears in flashes of light, enjoying extraordinarily different lives in various disguises. Even his name wasn't his. The child of a Jewish family which had converted to Catholicism because, in the province of Venice, Jews were not allowed to marry, the future librettist was given the name of the bishop who baptized him.
We get a glimpse of Da Ponte in the priests' seminary at Cenada, where, in six months, he learned most of Dante's Inferno by heart, as well as the best sonnets and songs of Petrarch and 'the most beautiful works of Tasso.' He was fluent in Latin and became a brilliant teacher. Now we see him taking holy orders, followed by a succession of unpriestly love affairs. An anonymous denunciation accused him of an 'evil life.' Someone had seen a woman put her hand in his breeches. He fled from Venice to avoid his trial by the Inquisition and was sentenced, in his absence, to seven years in a prison cell without light.
After a tender love affair with the wife of an innkeeper, and having renamed himself for a short while with the eccentric pseudonym of 'Lesbonico Pegasio,' he appears again in Vienna as 'poet' to the Burg theatre, and the favourite of Emperor Joseph II. So we find him writing libretti for three operas, one by Mozart, one by Salieri and one by Martini, feeling as he writes that 'I am reading the Inferno for Mozart, Tasso for Salieri and Petrarch for Martini.' He is working twelve hours at a stretch, assisted by a bottle of Tokay on his right, his inkwell in front of him and a box of Seville snuff on his left, with a beautiful young girl, the housekeeper's daughter, to bring him a biscuit, a cup of coffee or merely her smiling face.
... We can't resist a look at Da Ponte in a country house party just before the first night of Don Giovani. The house was on the outskirts of Prague and the October weather was still warm and beautiful. 'People lingered happily in the open air, with the feeling that days like this were a blessing,' one of the guests wrote. It was at this party that Mozart was lured into an upstairs woom and the door was locked until he finished the yet unwritten overture. Da Ponte appears at this party with an aged librarian from the Castle of Dux. This was a man who may have been a model for the sensual Don, and who also had a rascally servant. 'Signor Casanova seems to be a worthy old man,' one of the guests is reported to have said to Da Pone, who replied, 'There you are making a terrible mistake. He's an adventurer who has spent his days playing cards, brewing elixirs and telling fortunes.'
... He travelled to England and then turned up unexpectedly in Boston, after a terrible crossing of the Atlantic without a mattress or regular meals, to teach and sell Italian books. And then he was in New York, opening his new opera house.
... Finally the opera house burnt down, but Da Ponte lived on until his ninetieth year, respected, grey-haired, still handsome and smiling through all life's changes. When he died, he had an elaborately theatrical funeral at the Roman Catholic Cathedral on 11th Street. His grave was, like Mozart's, unmarked, the cemetery has been built over and no trace of this extraordinary consumer of life exists except on the stage. (From Changing Your Life - and 'The Man in Sneakers,' pgs. 7-10) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 11:04 am Post subject: |
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Ginger and Fred
Directed by Federico Fellini
DVD
Fellini's tribute to the doppelganger, midgets, TV talk shows and his two beloved stars, Giullietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni, who acted throughout his movies with the same precision, grace and timing as the film's elegant tap-dancing namesakes.
| Quote: | In this scene, Ginger and Fred are among Fellini's usual carnival crowd this time aboard a special bus bound for the TV studio, where their 30-year dance reunion will be filmed before a studio audience. A group of midgets notices that one of the guests has arrived separately in police custody wearing handcuffs.
Midget (to one of the attending policemen): Who is the handcuffed gentleman? We made a bet.
(Policeman ignores him)
Second midget following in succession off the bus: He won't say.
Third midget: Who cares? |
The troupe of professional midgets, by the way, danced and played musical instruments beautifully in some of the most resplendent costumes ever seen even in Fellini movies.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2007 12:28 pm Post subject: |
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New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
The Critics
Nights at the Opera
The life of the man who put
words to Mozart
By Joan Acocella
Jan. 8/07
| Quote: | When Lorenzo was nineteen, Bishop Da Ponte died and his subsidy of Lorenzo's tuition ended. Lorenzo was told that he could transfer to the seminary at nearby Portogruaro, but that, if he did, he would have to become a priest, a calling he writes, "wholly contrary to my temperament, my character, my principles, and my studies." He submitted. At the new seminary, he rose quickly to the position of instructor, then professor, then vice-rector. In 1773, at the age of twenty-four, he was ordained, and six months later he escaped to Venice.
The Venetian Republic was in rapid decline at the time - twenty-four years later, it surrendered to Napoleon without a fight - but, meanwhile, the Venetians were having a party. Those who could afford to went every night to one of the city's seven opera houses. When the show was over - usually around 2 a.m. - they repaired to the gambling houses.
...This, then, was a good place for a young man who, after ten years in a cassock, was looking for some excitement, and in Venice, Da Ponte says, he devoted himself exsclusively to "cards and love." The first love was Angiola Tiepolo, an impoverished noblewoman - tiny, pretty, and violent-tempered - whose husband had just left her, apparently for good reason. Da Ponte moved in with Angiola and her equally dissolute brother. Both were gambling addicts, and Da Ponte soon became one, too. (--pg. 70) |
Memoirs
Hardcover
By Lorenzo Da Ponte
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 12:37 pm Post subject: |
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Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
On the trail of Caravaggio
The works of the criminally gifted 16th century painter are attracting passionate, even cultish, admirers. A noted novelist makes her own pilgrimage through Italy in search of the master turned murderer
By Francine Prose
March, 2007
| Quote: | | After his unsatisfactory sojourn with Monsignor Insalata (Monsignor Pandolfo Pucci, who forced the young artist to make knockoffs of devotional paintings and fed him so poorly, C. would refer to him by the nickname), Caravaggio briefly supported himself by making pictures to sell on the street. He soon found employment painting flowers and fruit in the bustling studio of Giuseppe Cesari, later known as the Cavaliere d'Arpino. While working for Cesari, Caravaggio became involved in the rough-and-tumble street life of the now-stylish Campo Marzio, which - with its elegant restaurants and handsome government buildings patrolled by carabinieri who always seem a few years too young for the machine guns they're holding - shows little sign of the seedy brothels, taverns and alleys through which Caravaggio swaggered, caroused and encountered the prostitutes, gamblers, ordinary laborers and beggars that he would cast (so shockingly, to his contemporaries) as saints and witnesses in his most spiritual paintings. Nor, for that matter, do the boutiques and gourmet groceries of the Via della Scrofa suggest that this is the place where in May 1606 Caravaggio became embroiled in the ultimately disastrous dispute that allegedly began over a wager on a tennis match. Today, the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina - where, on the night of May 28, the feud that had begun near the tennis courts erupted into a street fight during which Caravaggio stabbed and killed a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni - is most often filled with children and their nannies taking the sun and enjoying the gelato (some of the best in Rome) at Ciampini. (-- pgs. 86-87) |
Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles
Paperback
By Francine Prose
Definitely not prime-time but visually compelling:
Caravaggio
DVD
Directed by gay luminary Derek Jarman
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2728#2728
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| Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 3:13 pm Post subject: |
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CBC Radio Two
Saturday Afternoon at the Opera
Featuring Puccini's Girl of the Golden West
and artists of the fabulous Radio Filharmonisch Orkest
| Quote: | Show: SATURDAY AFTERNOON AT THE OPERA
Date: 2007/11/03
Time: 13:30:00
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST (This performance is not commercially available) Duration: 02:02:23
Concert: LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST
Persons/Roles: DAVID BELASCO - AUTHOR
GIACOMO PUCCINI - COMPOSER
CARLO ZANGARINI - LYRICIST
EDO DE WAART - CONDUCTOR
NORBERT ERNST - TENOR
PETER GIJSBERTSEN - TENOR
STEPHEN KECHULIUS - BARITONE
NETHERLANDS RADIO MEN'S CHORUS - CHORUS
NETHERLANDS RADIO PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA - ORCHESTRA
HUGH SMITH - TENOR
EVA-MARIA WESTBROEK - SOPRANO |
| Quote: | Act I
Sheriff Rance quiets a brawl that has broken out in Minnie's Polka saloon. Ashby announces that he is chasing the bandit Ramerrez and his gang. When Rance is told that Minnie is only toying with him, another fight follows. A plan is formed to capture Ramerrez, after reading a letter from Ramerrez's old girlfriend. Minnie rebuffs Rance's attentions. The stranger Dick Johnson enters who knows Minnie. When the miners demand to know his plans, she intervenes. Rance becomes angry when he sees Minnie and Johnson dancing. Ashby returns with the gang member Castro, and after they threaten to kill him, he promises to betray Ramerrez, who is actually Johnson. The miners follow Castro on a wild goose chase. Johnson stays behind to protect Minnie. They confess their love for each other.
Act II
Minnie tells Johnson about her life, and they kiss. Overwhelmed with guilt over his secret identity, Johnson tries to leave, but is stopped by snow. He swears his love to Minnie. Before the sheriff and his men enter, Minnie hides Johnson. She is shocked to learn that Johnson is Ramerrez. After the men leave, she confronts Ramerrez. He confesses, asks for forgiveness, and reforms. After leaving he is shot, but Minnie takes him back to care for him in secret. Sheriff Rance is about to give up searching for Ramerrez, when he discovers a drop of blood. Minnie desperately makes Rance an offer. If she beats him at poker, he must let Ramerrez go free. If he wins, she will be his. Minnie wins by cheating, and Rance honors the deal.
Act III
Rance is furious that Minnie loves Ramerrez. Ashby captures Ramerrez and turns him over to the sheriff. The men want to hang Ramerrez as a thief and a murderer. He denies killing anyone, but admits to stealing. He accepts the sentence, and only asks that Minnie be told that he escaped. Minnie gallops in before the hanging, and while Rance tries to proceed, she convinces the miners that they owe Minnie too much to kill the man she loves. Minnie and Ramerrez leave to start a new life together. (From Wikipedia) |
Not such a surprising plot development, perhaps. According to the composer's biography posted at Musician Biographies:
| Quote: | | ... Puccini was famously handsome and charming, but he also possessed a melancholic side that he drew on to give depth to his characters. He was wholly uninterested in religion or politics, and enjoyed racing sports cars on his property and gambling at cards. |
New program host Bill Richardson is breathing intelligent new life into this PokerPulse favorite, which has occasionally suffered from the weight of so many stars - quite literally. We have especially enjoyed recent selections from this summer's Salzburg Festival.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3098#3098 |
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| Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 12:17 pm Post subject: |
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Paradise of Cities
Venice and Its Nineteenth-century Visitors
Hardcover
By John Julius Norwich
| Quote: | | ... in the early eighteenth century - whether by accident or design remains uncertain - the Most Serene Republic set itself upon a completely different course. It assumed the mantle of pleasure capital of Europe - and in doing so, during the final decades of its existence, set in train a dramatic revival of financial prosperity. This, fortunately, was the age of the Grand Tour. From all over northern and western Europe - but above all from England - young noblemen descended on Italy with the obstensible purpose of completing their education. Rome, inevitably, was their principal objective, with all the opportunities it offered for the study of the great monuments of antiquity; but there were few indeed who did not return by way of Venice, where Carnival lasted longer, the gambling was for higher stakes and the courtesans were more obliging and highly skilled than anywhere else on the continent. For those visitors of more intellectual tastes, there were books, pictures and sculptures to be bought and churches and palaces to be admired, to say nothing of the music and opera for which Venice was famous throughout the civilized world. The city was the most comfortable in Italy, and by far the most beautiful; and by a further lucky coincidence it boasted a number of hugely talented men who in the past fifty years had brought the art of townscape painting to a point of excellence never achieved before or since. It was fortunatel too that the greatest of these vedutisti, Antonio Canal - generally known as Canaletto - should have selected as his agent an Englishman, a certain Joseph Smith, who had come to Venice in 1700 at the age of eighteen and was to remain there till his death seventy years later. In 1742 Smith was appointed British Consul, in which capacity he was careful to make the acquaintance of all the richer Englishmen passing through the city - and to ensure that they all received an invitation to the Master's studio. Thus it was that when - somewhat wiser and a good deal poorer - the young milords eventually returned to their homeland, a mild dose of the clap must have seemed a small price to pay for a brace of Canalettos and the memories of the happiest and most exciting weeks of their lives. (After the Fall, pgs. 2-3) |
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Last edited by editor on Fri Sep 11, 2009 1:43 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 3:03 pm Post subject: |
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Moments of Reprieve
Paperback
By Primo Levi
| Quote: | Eddy waited for me to get up, then asked to whom I was writing. I answered in my bad German that I was not writing to anyone. I happened to find a pencil and was writing on a whim, out of nostalgia, in a dream. Yes, I knew very well that writing was forbidden, but I also knew that getting a letter out of the Camp was impossible; I assured him I never would have dared to break Camp rules. I knew Eddy certainly would not believe me but I had to say something, if only to arouse his pity. If he were to denounce me to the Political Section, I knew it was the gallows for me, but before the gallows an interrogation - and what an interrogation! - to find out who my accomplice was, and perhaps also to obtain from me the address of the recipient in Italy. Eddy looked at me with a strange expression, then told me not to budge, he'd be back in an hour.
It was a long hour. Eddy came back to the cellar with three sheets of paper in hand, mine among them, and I immediately read on his face that the worst would not happen. He must have been quite clever, this Eddy, or maybe his tempestuous past had taught him the basics of the sad profession of interrogator. He had looked among my companions for two men (not just one) who knew both German and Italian, and had gotten them separately to translate my message into German, warning them that if the two translations did not turn out to be identical, he would denounce not only me but also them to the Political Section.
He made a speech to me that I find difficult to repeat. He told me that, luckily for me, the two translations were the same and the text was not compromising. That I was crazy - there was not other explanation. Only a madman would think of gambling in such a way with his life, that of the Italian accomplice whom I certainly had, my relatives in Italy, and also his career as Kapo. He told me that I deserved that slap, that in fact I should thank him because it had been a good deed, the kind that earns you Paradise, and that he, Strassenrauber, a street-thief by profession, certainly needed to perform good deeds. That, finally, he would not have recourse to denunciation but even he could not exactly say why. Maybe just because I was crazy. But then Italians are all notoriously crazy, good only for singing and getting into trouble. (From The Juggler, pgs. 31-33) |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 12:40 pm Post subject: |
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From Gambling on God:
Galileo's Daughter
A Historical Memoir of
Science, Faith and Love
Hardcover
By Dava Sobel
| Quote: | Galileo, now fifty-nine, also stood boldly alone in his worldview, as Suor Maria Celeste (*his equally brilliant daughter whom he cloistered in a nunnery because despite his 'genius' he lacked the foresight to imagine what hell his decision not to marry his mistress would cause his subsequent children - esp the girls!) knew from reading the books he wrote and the letters he shared with her from colleagues and critics all over Italy, as well as from across the continent beyond the Alps. Although her father had started his career as a professor of mathematics, teaching frist at Pisa and then at Padua, every philosopher in Europe tied Galileo's name to the msot startling series of astronomical discoveries ever claimed by a single individual.
In 1969, when Suor Maria Celeste was still a child in Padua, Galileo had set a telescope in the garden behind his house and turned it skyward. Never-before-seen stars leaped out of the darkness to enhance familiar constellations; the nebulous Milky Way resolved into a swath of densely packed star; mountains and valleys pockmarked the storied perfection of the Moon; and a retinue of four attendant bodies traveled regularly around Jupiter like a planetary system in miniature.
"I render infinte thanks to God," Galileo intoned after those nights of wonder, "for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries."
The newfound worlds transformed Galileo's life. He won appointment as chief mathematician and philosopher to the grand duke in 1610, and moved to Florence to assume his position at the court of Cosimo de' Medici. He took along with him his two daughters, then ten and nine years old, but he left Vincenzio, who was only four when greatness descended on the family, to live awhile longer in Padua with Marina (his mistress).
Galileo found himself lionized as another Columbus for his conquests. Even as he attained the height of his glory, however, he attracted enmity and suspicion. For instead of opening a distant land dominated by heathens, Galileo trespassed on holy ground. Hardly had his first spate of findings stunned the populace of Durope before a new wave followed: He saw dark spots creeping continuously across the face of the Sun, and "the mother of loves," as he called the planet Venus, cycling through phases from full to crescent, just as the moon did. ...
... In 1616, a pope and a cardinal inquisitor reprimanded Galileo, warning him to curtail his forays into the supernal realms. The motions of the heavenly bodies, they said, having been touched upon in the Psalms, the Book of Joshua, and elsewhere in the Bible, were matters best left to the Holy Fathers of the Church.
Galileo obeyed their orders, silencing himself on the subject. For seven cautious years he turned his efforts to less periolous pursuits, such as harnessing his Jovian satellites in the service of navigation, to help sailors discover their longitude at sea. He studied poetry and wrote literary ciriticism. Modifying his telescope, he developed a compound microscope. "I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration," he reported, "among which the flea is quite horrible, the gnat and the moth very beautiful; and with great satisfaction I have seen how flies and other little animals can walk attached to mirrors, upside down." (From She Who Was So Precious to You, pgs. 6-7) |
* Reason 4, 3444, 119, 567, 689 why many of us have a hard time admiring the 'genius' men of science - PU!
Link to this entry
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Last edited by editor on Wed Dec 17, 2008 12:51 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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