The castle of Campagnatico in Maremma

It retains its ancient medieval structure, with the walls which, even if fragmented and at times incorporated into residential buildings, as often happens in reuse operations, still appear today in all of its original complexion. There are still two current gates, one that shows its beautiful arch open towards the town and the other that can be guessed and which is remembered in the historical signs before accessing Piazza Dante. Our poet, in this particular case, gives his name to a square, as often happens for streets and roads and open spaces in our beautiful Italy, of which we recall the verses of canto XI of Purgatory in which our poet immortalizes a character illustrious member of the Aldobrandeschi count family, a family that held its power over Campagnatico until the struggles brought by the Republic of Siena in the XIII century in order to subdue the castle. … continue reading  The Castle of Campagnatico in Maremma

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Visit to Archaeological Musem of Vulci (Viterbo)

Vulci, the Badia Castle, the courtyard

A small museum, with large photos and videos as well as important archaeological finds, not to be missed also for the castle which houses it in some of its rooms. A few kilometers from the ancient city of Vulci, on the steep bank overlooking the Fiora, a bridge, which is very little to define as suggestive, a pity that it cannot be crossed due to renovations, and a medieval castle both called della Badia, which deserve a digression.

Vulci, the Ponte della Badia, now under restoration

The Ponte della Badia is prior to the castle of the same name and, although with different shapes, dates back to Etruscan times. The bases of the pillars made of red tuff date back to the work of the Etruscans and, like other particularly daring bridges in structures with three arches that rise up to thirty meters in height, it is also known as del Diavolo or dell’Arcobaleno and it has certainly been of strategic importance, already in the Etruscan-Roman age, for the north-eastern connections towards the interior of Etruria. … continue reading     Visit to the Archaeological Museum of Vulci

Liberty in Florence and Tuscany

All the articles dedicated to Liberty featured in the magazine

Viareggio, detail of the decoration of the villino Flora

Toscana in “Liberty”: Introduzione

Toscana in “Liberty”: Firenze capitale del nuovo stile 

Toscana in “Liberty”: i villini di Michelazzi e le realizzazioni di Coppedè a Firenze

Il Liberty lungo le coste toscane: Viareggio

Toscana in Liberty: i Chini

A Montevarchi: Villa Masini

Galleria di immagini: i “villini” di Michelazzi e le realizzazioni di Coppedè a Firenze

Galleria immagini: Viareggio in “Liberty”

Image gallery: the Etruscan vases of Vulci

Some of the Etruscan vases found in the archaeological excavations of Vulci

Oinochoe (cm-30-620 a.C.)

Go to the images of the Etruscan vases discovered in Vulci

May along the coasts of Maremma

The coastal Gariga at Principina a Mare

Go to the photo gallery: The coastal garrigue at Principina a Mare

The Pantheon of the Etruscans

Etruscan deities

Livy defined the people of Veii as by far the most religious eo magis dedita religionibus, quod excelleret arte colendi eas (Ab Urbe condita, V, 1). Among the Italic peoples, the Etruscans were certainly the first to construct an anthropomorphic image of the gods, probably influenced by contacts with the Greek world.

Their Pantheon was present in the sky, in the sea, in the earth and underground as shown in the liver of Piacenza, where the divinities are inscribed within sixteen boxes; the Etruscans divided the sky into sixteen regions in which groups of divinities lived. … continue reading    The Pantheon of the Etruscans

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Wine and grape harvest in medieval Tuscany

by Alessandro Ferrini

And because you least admire the word

look at the heat of the sun that becomes wine,

arrived at the omor that gives the vine there (Purg. XXV, 76-78)

In the famous tercet, Dante describes wine as a synthesis of the heat of the sun and of the sap produced by the vine, comparing this process to the one that transforms a living being into a human creature thanks to the divine intervention that infuses the soul into it.

Libation with red wine (Tacuina Sanitatis, 14th century)

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keep reading Wine and grape harvest in medieval Tuscany

History of the Tuscan landscape

Good governance (detail) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti – Siena –

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The genesis of the classical landscape (first part)

The genesis of the classical landscape (second part)

The genesis of the classical landscape (third part)

The genesis of the classical landscape (fourth part)

The genesis of the classical landscape (fifth part)

The Tuscan landscape: the farmhouses

The agricultural landscape in medieval Tuscany

The farmhouse in the hills: Chianti and the Upper Valdarno

Photo gallery: farmhouses in the Tuscan hills

Some types of huts in rural Tuscany: cylindrical-conical hut

Some types of huts in rural Tuscany: quadrangular hut and Maremma hut

Giants of Tuscany

The battle of Alalìa between Etruscans, Greeks and Carthaginians (c. 540 BC)

Greek colonization of the Mediterranean

Alalìa (now Aleria) was an ancient colony on the Tyrrhenian coast of Corsica founded by the Greek Phocian colonists in the 6th century BC. fleeing from Asia Minor, driven out of Arpago by order of Cyrus, as Herodotus recounts:

Appointed by Cyrus as commander of the army, when he arrived in Ionia, he began to conquer the cities using embankments: every time, in fact, he forced the enemies inside their walls, had enormous quantities of earth piled up against the ramparts and then attacked them .

… The first city of Ionia that he took possession of was Phocaea. These Phocaeans were the first Greeks to make long voyages: it was they who discovered the Adriatic, Tyrrhenia, Iberia and the region of Tartessos: they did not sail with large cargo ships but with penteconters.

… continue reading The battle of Alalìa between Etruscans, Greeks and Carthaginians (c. 540 BC)

Robert Louis Stevenson “The devil in the bottle” Edida, with the text opposite and illustrations by Elena Salucco

Italian-English facing text

Edida.net

From the introductory note

“The Devil in the Bottle” is part of the “Island Night Entertainment” collection.

It was composed between December 1889 and January 1890 while the author was in Honolulu; published in 1891 in the Herald of New York and later, in the Black and White of London, it was finally translated into the Samoan language for a local magazine.

The style of classic simplicity used by the author, which he himself considered “akin to Hawaiian folk tales in ingenuity and quality of imagination”, lent itself well to this purpose. The inspiring motif of the story, that of an unholy pact with the infernal powers to obtain success in life but the inevitable loss of the soul after death, finds its origin in the fabled narratives of the Germanic romantic area, just think of the Spiritus familiaris of the Grimm or the much more famous Goethe’s Doctor Faust. It should also be remembered that the story, set in the Hawaiian Islands, fits fully into the exotic vein, typical of the cosmopolitan character of a large sector of English literature, whose authors, starting from Defoe to Conrad, Kipling and Lawrence , love to place the events narrated in their works in distant countries.
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