Ligabue Magazine 3

In this issue, as in the previous two, the most diverse subjects are linked by an invisible thread which ensures the overall harmony of the magazine. . We have given precedence to a subject which, in the terms of its own astronomical time-scale, might even define as dealing with current affairs: this is Halley’s comet, which is now approaching Earth and which, after an absence of 76 years, will once again become visible to the naked eye on 9th. February, 1986. To talk about the comet we asked Paolo Maffei, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Perugia, ex-Director of Catania Observatory, a post to which he was appointed after research work on the Sun, comets and nebulae carried out at the observatories of Bologna, Asiago, and Hamburg. He is the author of several books which are highly regarded both in ltaly and abroad, including «Beyond the Mooil», «The Monsters of the Sky» and «The Universe in Time».

Precious fibulae of extraordinary elegance and refinement, whose origins go back to ancient and remote civilizations, are described by Sandro Salvatori, an archeologist on the staff of the Superintendency of the Architectural heritage of the Veneto. Dr. Salvatori has published about forty scientific papers setting out the observations he has made during excavation work on Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. At present he is co-director of the Missione Archeologica Romana in Oman.

The story of the Phoenicians has caught the imagination of Mediterranean peoples for the last three thousand years. Professor Sabatino Moscati writes about the colonies established by these legendary Lords of the Sea and gives a brief account of the latest research on the subject. Sabatino Moscati is a Professor of the University of Rome and a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and the Pontifica Accademia Romana di Archeologia; he has directed archeological missions in Palestine, Sicily, Malta, Sardinia and Tunisia and is the author of more than thirty volumes, translated into several languages, all of them works which are distinguished by a perfect blend of authority and effective communication, the gift of the popularizer who, according to Croce, writes clearly because his ideas are clear.

It is no anachronism to speak of tortoises and turtles, those animals dear both to the philosopher Zeno of Elea and Walt Disney: Giancarlo Ligabue has encountered many of them on his travels and offers us a personal account which begins no less than two hundred million years ago. Giancarlo Ligabue has cultivated a scholarly passion for archeology and anthropology ever since he was a child. He graduated with a degree in Paleontology from the Sorbonne, is an Honorary Associate in Archeology of the Peabody Museum of Harvard University and also sits on the Board of Directors of the Museum. He is a corresponding member of the Museum of Natural History of Paris, has an Honorary Degree from the University of Modena and is the author of a dozen or more volumes about the expeditions he has directed in Africa, the Americas and the orient. In 1978, he founded the «Ligabue Research and Study Centre», whose activities are always briefly summarized in the last pages of this magazine where we also speak of the significance of the Centre’s symbol, based on a 3rd. millenium B. C. seal.

A true rarity are the original, unpublished caricatures of Giambattista Tiepolo which we publish in this issue, accompanied by a witty article on Venetian caricature written by the antique dealer Pietro Scarpa, the well-known and highly respected connoisseur of eighteenth century Venetian painting and an expert on early Italian drawings.

The «Hymn to Aton» (XIV century B. C.) is one of the most striking of poems to nature: it is quoted in an account of the heresy which we owe to the erudition of the Egyptologist Franco Cimmino, the author of valuable studies of the Egyptians, member of the Societé Française d’Egyptologie of Paris, of the Fondation Egyptologique Reine Elisabeth of Brussels, of the Egypt Exploration Society of London, of the Stiftung L. Keimer fur Vergleichende Ferschung in Archaeologie und Ethnologie of Basle and of the Ligabue Research and Study Centre of Venice.

Amongst the most powerfully evocative of shells is the cowrie (a good deal too evocative of certain things according to some puritanical spirits). The reader will be able to judge for him or herself from the illustrations to the article by Massimo Orlandini, malacologist and associate collaborator of the Civic Museum of Natural History of Venice. As an expert in marine biology and underwater photography, Orlandini took part in the scientific expedition to the coral reefs of the Maldive Islands, organized by the Ligabue Research and Study Centre in 1980.

And finally, after such wide-ranging leaps through time and space amongst the mysteries of the universe, something which reminds us of our needs as ordinary common mortals, so easily swayed by the temptations of the table: an essay on the cooking of the Veneto by Ranieri Da Mosto, a member of one of the most illustrious of Venetian families, a journalist, writer, poet, chief editor with the RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana, and the author, amongst other books, of «The Veneto in the Kitchen», published by Aldo Martello.
For the next issue of Ligabue Magazine we have many more marvels in store.