Ligabue Magazine 25
Second semester 1994
Year XIII
On the contents page of every Ligabue Magazine is our motto: ‘The magazine for people who travel the world’. Nowadays hundreds of millions of individuals travel from one place to another throughout the five continents, heedless of the discomfort created by overcrowded stations and airports, by delays and missed connections. In short, such inconveniences are cheerfully put up with or even ignored by those who, out of duty or pleasure, ‘travel the world’. But how did our distant ancestors fare when it came to travelling?
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* Digital versions from no. 1 to 57 are obtained from a scan of the Magazine. They may therefore have imperfections in the display of texts and images.
This is one of the relatively unresolved and intriguing questions for history- enthusiasts, despite the plethora of meticulous descriptions ancient travellers have left us. Without their testimonies, much of the human past would have remained in the dark night of history. What is especially surprising was the speed they travelled at, even with thousand-strong annies, weapons, luggage, and supply lines. And, for example, while the dates of the retreat of the ten thousand in Xenophon’s Anabasis are probably inaccurate, Julius Caesar’s accounts of his movements in Europe can be checked and turn out to be totally reliable. Livy admiringly reveals that the Roman courier Semprione Gracchus, sent by Lucius Scipio to Philip the V during the third war against Antioch, travelled the 325 kilometres from Amphissa to Pella in only three days. And unlikely as it may seem, the Emperor Hadrian marched from Rome to Athens, travelling on foot up Italy to Tergeste (Trieste) and then down through Pannonia, Illyria and Macedonia. We can only conclude that it was easier to travel in those days than in later centuries.
According to Pasquale Vasio (Il postiglione, Editalia, 1974), ‘until the conquest of Gaul, the longest road was a three-day march from Rome to Chiusi (Tuscany). By the Augustan age there were 3,000 roads in Italy totalling 3,000 leagues, but by the end of the empire, there was a network covering 300,000 kilometres, the longest possible route being 4,500 kilometres from Scotland to Ethiopia’. These Roman roads were very well kept, whereas in the Middle Ages and Renaissance they fell into total disrepair. The various governments concerned only began to make provisions again for the upkeep of roads in the late nineteenth century. And of all the historical travelogues, you only have to read the story of the Empress Marie Louise’s flight from Paris, after the fall of Napoleon, to realize what hardships and suffering a fine lady had to endure before reaching the gates of Vienna. And what can we say of Cardinal Alberoni’s wild carriage adventures between Rome and Madrid.
I have deliberately omitted sea journeys and all their attendant perils to draw attention to the article by Gabriele Rossi-Osmida, page 74, dedicated to the fourteenth-century travels of the Berber ‘Abdallah Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati ibn Battutah. In the account of his wanderings, the Rihla, he describes his highly unlikely pilgrimage through the Middle East, India, the Gulf of Bengal and perhaps even to Sumatra and China. How he did it – and with that name! – defies the imagination. Yet the tale of his journey is absolutely fascinating, even though, unlike Marco Polo, he offers no personal opinions on what he sees, but simply relates where he has been and the stages on the way.
In the usual running of this magazine, we like to think we are not prone to the hypocrisy of false modesty. Nonetheless, if we indulge in a little self-congratulation in this issue, we have good reason to do so. And if I have taken a few lines to mention the recent election of the palaeontologist Dr Giancarlo Ligabue to the European Parliament, it is to stress the rather unique nature of the event, in that his success as a scholar and fame is founded on his Study and Research Centre, his explorations in New Guinea, Africa and Peru and his intimate knowledge not of politics but of dinosaurs.
At Strasbourg, Giancarlo Ligabue will take up the struggle to defend the environment, human rights and ethnic minorities for the future of our children. On page 34, he surveys the problems of minority ethnic groups. There are as many as 5,000 scattered in 70 countries round the world, most in need of protection. Dr Ligabue would like to see their gradual acculturation, avoiding environmental abuses and in keeping with their thousand-year-old histories threatened by the gruesome conflicts in our modern Babel. I have mentioned how ancient travel is shrouded in mystery, but there are also other absolutely mind-boggling enigmas of the past. Take the history of astronomy, for example, we may all have heard of the Chinese, Indian and Arab traditions, but the Maya studies of celestial phenomena are just as breath-taking. On page 138 we are provided with a detail account of the Maya observatory-monuments. The author, Giuliano Romano, is a lecturer in the History of Astronomy at the University of Padua and is currently engaged in archaeo-astronomical studies in Italy and Latin America.
Going much further back in time W. A. Kellner from the American Museum of Natural History, New York, delves into the world of pterosaurs on page 54. These ‘flying reptiles’ were the lords of the skies from 215 to 65 million years ago. On a more human subject, how many people knew that the earliest Americans, the Amerids, arrived in Alaska and California around 20,000 to 12,000 years ago? Even the present inhabitants of Anchorage and San Francisco would probably be astonished to learn what Maria G. Marmori has to talk about their earliest forefathers on page 116; she even clears up the semantic and chromatic muddle round the word ‘redskins’. Maria G. Marmori is a lecturer in biology at the University of Milan as well as a photo reporter, naturalist and sportsperson, who after ten years of expeditions to Nepal, Tibet, China and Africa, undertook six long expeditions in Canada and Alaska, inquiring into the State of the Union, to which she has dedicated a book, illustrated by her own photos.
On page 94, Laura Alunno describes the difficult search in Mauritania for a ‘ lost manuscript’ – a compendium of the words and deeds of the Prophet. The author is head of the cultural activities of ‘Africa 70’, an association involved in integrated development programmes in Mauritania and other African countries. She gleaned the information for her article from the manuscript scholars, Abdarrahime Ould Hanchi, a Chinguetti MP, Hadrami Ould Khattri, founding President of the Tidjikdja Zawia, and Mohamed Ould Barnaoui, lecturer at the University of Nouakchott.
And lastly yet another mystery – at least for the non-connoisseurs like myself. By now we are all used to admiring thousands of fabulous photos of animals, natural phenomena, plants and flowers. Well, on page 158 the work of those patient and talented photographers is set forth in plain language by Antonio Paolillo, an archaeologist at the Ligabue Study and Research Centre, director of the Crocetta di Montello Museum of Natural History and a researcher at the National Institute of Archaeology, Bolivia.

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