Ligabue Magazine 26

Mercator then translated this facetious explanation into the ‘cylindrical isogonic projection with gradually increasing latitudes’. Thanks to his mathematical genius and great imagination, he had managed to image what astronaut Franco Malerba actually saw from a ‘mountain 200,000 metres up’. On reading the article by the first Italian astronaut on page 112, I formed a remarkable impression of the man: a degree in electronic engineering and physics, an associate member of the National Research Council for the Cybernetic and Biophysics Laboratory in Genoa, a collaborator at the La Spezia Nato centre, selected by Italian Space Agency and NASA to be a scientific astronaut, and the author of a fine book on his space adventure – Malerba certainly doesn’t live with his head in the clouds, and given that he is also a Euro-MP, I would say he had his feet firmly on the ground. He is also even a poet.

Up there in the unending blue, it seems there was a Leopardian Malerba on that Atlantis shuttle, intent on pondering the infinite: ‘sitting in contemplation… of unbounded spaces… and silences beyond man, and deepest calm’. As he whizzed round the Earth in ninety-minute orbits, he forgot Mercator’s calculations and relived human tragedies and glorious historical episodes. He ends his account with lines by a French poet and the angst-ridden question: ‘who are we?’.
On the subject of unsolved mysteries, Francesco Jori’s article on the Quark Top is a journey into the enigmatic world of the first particles in our universe. 68.

A journalist with the Venetian daily Il Gazzettino, Jori is not only a special reporter and politics correspondent, but also an excellent populariser of complex scientific research. In this case he deals with a recent breakthrough made by the Fermilab, Chicago: on 3 March last, it was officially announced that the last quark, Top, had been discovered. This tiny subatomic particle is found inside the atomic nucleus, and the diameter of the nucleus is all of a millionth of a billionth of a metre – try and write that out in figures! According to the experts, the story of the atom goes back two thousand years to the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, while in 1939 in Finnegan’ s Wake, the extraordinary tale of a dead drinker who came to life again, James Joyce coined the word quark, which was then borrowed by astrophysicists.

As for discoveries, this issue of Ligabue Magazine reports on quite a few. The first geographic hop we make is to the Cordillera del Condor in the Andes. Here Mario Polia – a Ligabue Study and Research Centre archaeologist and expert connoisseur of dark Peruvian labyrinths – has studied the traditions of the Wayakuntur, an ethnic group that was already ancient when the Incas appeared on the scene to conquer their lands. They were called by the fascinating name, the ‘Condors of the Green Cordillera’. After years of repeated searches, Polia finally found the tomb of a Wayakuntur lord with an ‘armour chest-plate made of reeds and cotton covered in gilded copper and silver’ Thus up at 3,000 metres Polia found the finest and most complete grave goods for a fourth-century-BC physician-surgeon, a thaumaturge-king. On page 58 Mario Polia provides us with the opportunity to experience, stage by stage, this unique and unexpected discovery.

The indefatigable Viviano Domenici is scientific editor of Corriere della Sera. In addition to contributing excellent popularizing articles to his paper, he is an expert on archaeology and palaeontology. But none of this is done from behind a desk or based on second-hand information. He finds time to be out in the field, often with the Ligabue Study and Research Centre expeditions. This time he takes us to the ‘South Sea’ and the islands named after de Mendoza’s Marquesa, the beautiful Maria Pilar. She was not the legitimate consort of Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, Marques de Santillana and Viceroy of Peru, who had financed the expedition, but his lover. The explorer Alvaro de Mendana de Neira, being a man of the world, dedicated the island to her, after he had discovered the group to the east of Tahiti. The history of these islands is as old as the world. And even today, Domenici describes how the people still live in a supernatural dimension with their tiki, stone idols full of mysterious powers from the pre-animist era. Reigned over by the Make Make, the great Polynesian divinity, the open-air temples, or marae, are shrouded in taboo and mana.

Still in the same area, if I can put it that way, and following the same meridian, we cross the Pacific Ocean in 10,000-kilometre leap westwards to Polynesia and the little island of Sumba, or ‘Sandalwood Island’ as it was called by the British at the time when the Indian rajahs ruled and sandalwood was a precious export commodity. On this island Maurizio Leigheb, writer, documenter and long-standing collaborator with Ligabue Magazine, met people still living intimately with the supernatural, although their culture has nothing in common with the Polynesians of the Marquesas Islands. As on Bali, the original influence on Sumba was Hindu. But animist-type cults are to be found in the worship of the marà pu a god embodying the supernatural world who decides the fate of humankind. Dressed in cotton cloths, richly decorated with bright-coloured symbols, the people of Sumba live amongst temples and funerary monuments, thriving on magic and mysticism. They are constantly in touch with the dead. Many of the very costly religious ceremonies exorcising fear are dedicated to the dead, while the people still turn to shamans to ward off evil spirits.

Benign spirits seem to accompany Viviano Domenici. Among his many merits is that of having a son, Davide, whose degree dissertation in history was widely acclaimed when published. Having previously taken part on the 1994 dig at Teotihuacan (Mexico) Davide describes another mysterious region of pre-Colombian America. On page 132 he enters the ‘realm of the jaguar’ while exploring a fascinating archaeological complex. Roland Menardi is a writer, photographer and mountaineer. When only nineteen, the young lad from the Dolomites participated in his first expedition on Mt Hancohuma in Bolivia. At twenty, he was already the leader of an expedition to Nevado Kayesh in Peru, and immediately afterwards tackled Annapurna II.

Since then, he has scaled at least another seven peaks. On page 92 Menardi takes us to a lost world, like something out of a fantastic Gustave Dorè illustration. Only this lost world is real: an immense plateau swept by wind, rain and mists with mountains over two thousand metres high. They are the tepuy of the Gran Sabana, and their flora and fauna are quite unique. While I shiver at the thought of the antediluvian poisonous frog clambering up a tepuy, by all accounts, the Alpine ‘mountain squirrel’ Menardi was totally at ease up in that legendary lost world.