Tuscany: A Land of Die Hard Optimists?

21 June 2016 Dr. Franco Gallippi

Italy: From Top to BottomBloor Hot Docs Lecture 4

LA TOSCANA

Roberto Benigni La vita è bella (1998)

The Kid (Chaplin, 1921)

CLIP 2: (A) Roberto Benigni Goes Wild: 1999 Oscars – YouTube video (Running time min 03:33); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cTR6fk8frs;

(B) Benigni al Letterman Show – La vita è bella – YouTube (Running time min 04:00) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVUlhi8pe0c

Roberto Benigni – La vita è bella (1998); Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

Compare these two films and pay attention to the children: the little boy in La vita è bella and the little girl dressed in a red coat in Schindler’s List. What connection can be made?

Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

Giovanni Boccaccio (Certaldo 1313-1375)

The Decameron was written between 1349 and 1351Compare the frame of the Decameron to the frame of Benigni’s La vita è

bella: in a context of danger and death, stories about life are told.

The situation is this: During the Black Death of 1348, which disrupts Florentine society and demoralizes the survivors (the disease is depicted in grisly detail), seven well-to-do young women and three young gentlemen agree to escape to the countryside for the duration. Taking along the requisite servants, they live platonically in two different villas and a third garden spot, spending their days in organized pleasurable activities. The late afternoon, after a siesta, is reserved for storytelling. Each of them tells a story a day on a preannounced theme given by the master of ceremonies (whom they call “Queen” or “King”) of the day… The stories go on for then days, but it is on the fifteenth day, not the eleventh (as careless article writers state), that the group returns to Florence, because they have reserved two Fridays and Saturdays for religious and hygienic purposes; when they return to Florence, all is well (the frame story ends fairly abruptly).

(The Decameron Selected Tales. Edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum. Dover, 2000)

Roberto Benigni La vita è bella (1998)

Benigni’s character, Guido, marches like a puppet to show his son, who watcheshim from his hiding place, that it is all a game.

Roberto Benigni – Pinocchio (2002)

CLIP 3: Le Avventure di Pinocchio (prima parte) (Luigi Comencini 1972) YouTube Video: min 20:50 – 26:40; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95wnqWPlV4w

Illustration by Enrico Mazzanti

LE AVVENTURE DI PINOCCHIO

Complete text in a bilingualedition with the original illustrations.Translated with introduction and notesBy Nicolas J. Perrella (Prof. Emeritus of Italian at the University of California,Berkeley).

From “An Essay on Pinocchio” in The Adventures of Pinocchio. Translated by Nicolas Perella. U of California Press, 1986.

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child: when I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (I Corinthians 13.11).

“Oh, I’m sick and tired of always being a puppet!” cried Pinocchio, rapping himself on the head. “It’s about time that I too became a man” (Chapter 25).

“Astoundingly, psychology turns to the child in order to understand the adult, blaming adults for not enough of the child or for too many remnants of the child still left in adulthood” (James Hillman, “Abandoning the Child”).

Carlo Collodi (Carlo Lorenzini) – Firenze 1826 – 1890

Carlo Lorenzini was born in Florence on November 24, 1826. Between 1856 and 1859 he began to use the pen name Collodi, after his mother’s place of birth, a village just outside the town of Pescia in Tuscany. Le Avventure di Pinocchio started to appear under the title Storia d’un burattino with the first issue of the Giornale per i bambini. Although the weekly Giornale was published in Rome, the enterprise was in the hands of fellow Tuscans who had migrated after the capital of the newly united country was transferred from Florence to Rome. (The Adventures of Pinocchio. Translated by Nicolas Perella. U of California Press, 1986).

COLLODI

LE AVVENTURE DI PINOCCHIO (Luigi Comencini, 1972)

Nino Manfredi (1921-2004)

Gina Lollobrigida

LE AVVENTURE DI PINOCCHIO (Luigi Comencini, 1972)

PINOCCHIO PARK – PARCO PINOCCHIO – COLLODI

PINOCCHIO PARK – PARCO PINOCCHIO – COLLODI

The “Parco Pinocchio” was opened in 1956, the result of country-wide artistic collaboration. Artists from across Italy participated in the creation of sculptures and mosaics that appeal to child and adult alike. Scenes from Carlo’s fable are represented within the small confines of the park. https://travelsacrossitaly.com/tag/pinocchios-home-town/

CLIP 4: GIACOMO PUCCINIOPERA – Giacomo Puccini (from Lucca in Tuscany) medley: (A) Tosca DVD (show 1:37:40 to 1:40:35; Placido Domingo singing “E lucevan le stele”); (B) Madam

Butterfly DVD (show 1:02:50 – 1:07:20; Mirella Freni singing “Un bel di vedremo”); (C) Turandot DVD (show 1:21:55 – 1:24:30; Serjei Larin sings

“Nessun dorma!” – this clip is in Act III, then select “Nessun dorma! Calaf”).

Giacomo Puccini, (December 22, 1858, Lucca, Tuscany, Italy - November 29, 1924, Brussels, Belgium), one of the greatest exponents of operatic realism, who virtually brought the history of Italian opera to an end. His mature operas: 

La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), and Turandot (1926), left incomplete.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Giacomo-Puccini

GIACOMO PUCCINI

Walking from Lucca to Pisa – Giacomo Puccini

In 1876, at the age of 18, he walks from Lucca to Pisa to watch an opera for the first time, Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida.

Walking from Lucca to Pisa Giacomo Puccini

In 1876, at the age of 18, he walks from Lucca to Pisa to watch an opera for the first time, Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida.

Walk 20.5 km, 4 h 8 minLucca, Province of Lucca, to Pisa, Province of Pisa, Tuscany, Italy

IL MELODRAMMA – THE MELODRAMA

The birth of the melodrama dates back to the Italian musical tradition of the end of the sixteenth century beginning of the seventeenth. In the transition from l’opera sacra to opera profana, the figure of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) is very important. At the time, the first entirely sung dramas/plays were being performed. The term libretto eventually came to mean the literary text used in the opera in musica. The height of the melodrama’s success arrives in the nineteenth century, a time in which the works of Victor Hugo, A. Dumas, and W. Shakespeare, are being adapted for opera.  Il MELODRAMMA: its main characteristic is that of singing a whole play/drama from beginning to end with no alternating parts acted in prose. Of course, the singing varies. The arias, for instance, are moments of particular pathos and convey important moral values. TWO OTHER CHARACTERISTICS: the topics chosen are almost never fantastic or from fairy-tales – they are related to realistic situations – realism; what is mostly represented is the clash of passions and human emotions.

IL MELODRAMMA – THE MELODRAMA

The nineteenth century melodrama establishes a strong relationship with its audience – the emotions and events “lived” by the characters become their own. It can be said that the relationship between public and Italian melodrama in the nineteenth century is comparable to the relationship between the public and the novel in France and England. The tension and the exaltation of the romantic human emotion breaks through the rationality of the eighteenth century: if l’opera buffa was pure entertainment, the romantic melodrama becomes emotional participation. German romanticism turns to untamed and obscure nature, to the mysterious and the occult, as a reaction to classicism, while Italian melodrama turns to passion and love. Think of the musical and intellectual contrast between Wagner and Verdi.

First half nineteenth century: Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) – L’elisir d’amore (1832), Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), Don Pasquale (1843) – and Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835) – La sonnambula (1831), Norma, of the same year, I puritani (1835). High romanticism in both and a strong lyrical emphasis that has entered Italian popular culture.

IL MELODRAMMA – GIUSEPPE VERDI – PIETRO MASCAGNI

Verdi and the unification of Italy: with the birth of the Kingdom of Italy (1861), the melodrama materializes in the genius of Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901). He first dedicates his efforts to historical and romantic topics: Nabucco (1842), I lombardi alla prima crociata (1843), La battaglia di Legnano (1849), which became, as in the case of the splendid chorus in Nabucco, symbol of the Risorgimento battles for freedom (at the time the kingdom of Lombardy-Veneto belonged to Austria), and had a hard time with censorship. Later, after the failures of the 1848 uprisings and the defeat of 1849, Verdi abandons historical and political subjects to dedicate himself to a deeper examination of the psyche of his characters. This phase generates the famous popular trilogy: Rigoletto (1851), which had problems with censors, Il Trovatore (1853), and La Traviata (1853).

The “verista” melodrama: Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945), great success in 1890 with Cavalleria rusticana, a one act opera based on the short story by Giovanni Verga. The verista melodrama is born, which emphasises the aria rather than the recitative – it also places the accent on the lyrical expressive element. The subjects are taken from contemporary reality and are narrated as current events. Strong influence from realism, particularly French literature (Zola).

IL MELODRAMMA – GIACOMO PUCCINI

GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858-1924): The majority of Puccini’s operas illustrate a theme defined in Il tabarro: “Chi ha vissuto per amore, per amore si morì” (He who has lived for love, had died for love). This theme is played out in the fate of his heroines – women who are devoted body and soul to their lovers, are tormented by feelings of guilt, and are punished by the infliction of pain until the end they are destroyed. In his treatment of this theme, Puccini combines compassion and pity for his heroines with a strong streak of sadism: hence the strong emotional appeal but also the restricted scope of the Puccinian type of opera. Born into a family of musicians in 1858 in Lucca. Although his father passes away when he is a child, Giacomo is able to complete his musical education.

IL MELODRAMMA – GIACOMO PUCCINI

He wrote 12 operas. His first success is with Manon Lescaut (1893), in which the first of his portraits of delicate and unhappy petit-bourgeois heroines takes shape. Think of Mimi in La Bohème (1896), which tells the story of a group of young starving artists on the background of the bohème in the Paris of 1830; Tosca (1900), with the famous aria E lucean le stelle, and Madama Butterfly (1904).For some time Puccini’s opera was more successful with the public rather than with the critics. Today he is recognized as being one of the main protagonists of the crepuscolare phase of Italian opera.

His opera can be described as going from an initial romantic and bourgeois phase, to a phase of renewal that brings him from the Scapigliatura to twentieth century modernism: La Fanciulla del West (1910), il Trittico (1918, made up of the one act Il tabarro, Suor Angelica e the comical act Gianni Schicchi), and the incomplete Turandot (1926).Puccini died in Brussels in 1924. Turandot was first performed at Teatro alla Scala, conducted by the great Arturo Toscanini.

CLIP 5: How an Amateur Built the World's Biggest Dome: YouTube video (Running time: 03:35) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IOPlGPQPuM;

FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI’S DOME

King, Ross. Brunelleschi’s Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral in Florence. London: Vintage, 2008.

QUOTATION FROM: King, Ross. Brunelleschi’s Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral in

Florence. London: Vintage, 2008.

“Filippo on the other hand, offered a simpler and more daring solution: he proposed to do away with the centring altogether. This was an astounding proposal. Even the smallest arches were built over wooden centring. How then would it be possible to span the enormous diameter called for in the 1367 model without any support, particularly when the bricks at the top of the vault would be inclined at 60-degree angles to the horizontal? So astonishing was the plan that many of Filippo’s contemporaries considered him a lunatic. And it has likewise confounded more recent commentators who are reluctant to believe that such a feat could actually have been possible” (42).

FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI’S DOME

FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI’S DOME

FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI’S DOME

FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI’S DOME

FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI’S DOMETHE BRICK WORK

FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI’S DOME

ITALIA IN MINIATURA – RIMINI

ITALIA IN MINIATURA – RIMINI

PISA – Torre pendente Piazza dei miracoli

SIENA – Piazza del campo

ITALIA IN MINIATURA – RIMINI

CLIP 6: (A) Florence 1966 (Show from beginning to min 03:15) – Very good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRdxLWyoGRc; (B) When the World

Answered - Trailer HD (Running time 02:14) – 50 years after the flood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-uy85y6n80

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICVOL 132, No.1, July 1967

1. FLORENCE RISES FROM THE FLOOD2. LAKE POWELL, WATERWAY TO DESERT WONDERS3. HOPES AND FEARS IN BOOMING THAILAND4. ENGLAND'S SCILLIES, THE FLOWERING ISLES5. IN QUEST OF THE WORLD'S LARGEST FROG

Florence Flood: 4 November, 1966

On Friday, November 4, 1966, after a month of heavy rain, the Arno River overflowed its banks, flooding the city of Florence and causing incalculable damage to life, property, and cultural patrimony.

Now known as “l’Alluvione,” the Florence Flood revolutionized the field of art restoration as no other single event.

From: Joseph Judge. “Florence Rises From the Flood.” National Geographic. Vol. 132, No. 1, July 1967

“On November 3 and 4, 1966, the Arno watershed received a third of its annual average rainfall in two days. Nineteen inches of rain fell in 48 hours…”“A few minutes’ walk downstream, Dr. Maria Luisa Righini Bonelli, the attractive scholar who directs the Institute and Museum of the History of Science, was sleeping in its ground-floor apartment.‘My husband was in Brazil,’ she told me, ‘so I worked late and stayed in the apartment here. I heard a rushing sound, and when I opened my eyes, water already had reached my bed. When I opened this window…’ she held her hand level with the sill, ‘the river was here.’Appalled, she began to carry upstairs what she could of the museum’s irreplaceable collections – original instruments used by founders of modern chemistry, medicine, and physics. But the waters mounted until they swirled waist deep on the ground floor; sick at heart, she had to abandon one of Edison’s first phonographs; Brambilla’s surgical instruments of ivory, gold, and ebony; Pietro Leopoldo di Lorena’s laboratory bench of chemicals.Carrying what she could, she made 28 precarious trips along a third-story ledge between the museum and the Uffizi. Thus she managed to save some 35 smaller treasures – including several of Galileo’s telescopes – and her own life (18-19).

“Even though the saving of paintings and sculpture and books held the world’s concern, may most indelible impressions are of the courage of the popolo minuto – Florence’s “little people”.The flood did it’s worst where human beings could least afford it. Years ago the small craftsman – the makers of mosaics, the woodcarvers, the jewellers – settled near the river, where water power would turn their small machines. Florence is probably the last European city where an economy rests so heavily and happily upon handcraftsmen and small manufacturers, many of them using the tools and techniques handed down through generations. The image of Florence after the flood was that of small shop owners sweeping out the remains of their life’s work. But they are, after all, Florentines. Their determination to carry on was voiced by Marcella Battagli who, with her parents, runs a small leather-goods whop near the Arno.‘We now have to start again from the beginning,’ she said, ‘but we will continue. My parents’ lives and more than 25 years of my own life cannot be destroyed in one night.’ […] History meanwhile added an ironic footnote. Two ‘lost’ notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, discovered in the National Library of Madrid, were made public shortly after the disaster. They included a long-forgotten drawing from the great Florentine’s elaborate scheme to control flooding of the Arno with a complex of canals, dams, and reservoirs. The 450-year-old plan might have saved Leonardo’s city much grief. But it was never carried out, and Florence in its valley has lived its history of disasters. What measure may yet be taken to protect it remain the long thoughts of tomorrow” (42).

From: Joseph Judge. “Florence Rises From the Flood.” National Geographic. Vol. 132, No. 1, July 1967

Florence Flood: 4 November, 1966

Florence Flood: 4 November, 1966

Cloister Santa Croce

Florence Flood: 4 November, 1966

Santa Croce

Florence Flood: 4 November, 1966

Florence Flood: 4 November, 1966

50 years later

November 3, 2016 will be the 50th anniversary of 1966 flood of the Arno River in Florence, which killed 101 people and damaged or destroyed thousands of art masterpieces and many more rare documents and books. It is considered the worst flood in the city’s history since 1557. Many of the historic works have been restored. New methods in conservation were devised and restoration laboratories established. Some of the methods were already known and came into use immediately after the flood. One of those was the strappo technique used to save frescoes immediately after the flood, a race against time.

Frescoes demanded complicated treatment. Normally water, once it evaporates, will leave a layer of residual salt on the surface of the wall that absorbed it. In some instances, the resultant efflorescence obscured painted images. In other cases, the impermeability of the fresco plaster caused the salt to become trapped beneath the surface, causing bubbles to form and erupt, and the paint to fall. The adhesion of the plaster to the wall was often also seriously compromised. A fresco can only be detached when fully dry. To dry a fresco, workers cut narrow tunnels beneath it, in which heaters were placed to draw out moisture from below (instead of outwards, which would have further damaged the paint). Within a few days, the fresco was ready to be detached.http://tuscantraveler.com/category/florence/

Florence Flood: 4 November, 1966

Florence Flood: 4 November, 1966

The length of the river Arno is 248 km. River that runs through Florence starts in the Apennines of Arezzo,passes through Empoli and flows into Ligurian Sea near Pisa. Several times in its history Florence has suffered from flooding of the river Arno. The most devastating catastrophe were recorded in 1333, 1557, 1844 and 1966.http://www.travel-to-tuscany.org/florence-river.html

FINE