Ligabue Magazine 40

18.00

First semester 2002
Year XXI

In October 1982 the first issue of Ligabue Magazine was published. Twenty years have elapsed since then, studded with dazzling successes… Wait a minute! At a pinch “studded” is okay, but “dazzling” must go. Why? Because I was taught not to overdo it by one of the finest twentieth- century ltalian writers, Antonio Baldini. He in turn had been the favourite pupil of Ildebrando Della Giovanna, a legendary ltalian teacher at the Marco Visconti Grammar School in Rome. Baldini recounted that once in his second year at the school he had written a composition on Leopardi’s poem “Saturday in the Village”. Having handed in his work, on strictly protocol paper, the teacher gave it straight back to him without even glancing at it: “Sit down and get rid of the superlatives, and two out of every three adjectives. Then we will read it together. There is no room here for your usual purple prose, use it elsewhere, out of my sight.” Those were the days when teachers were very formal with students and addressed them as “Mr”. It was all a bit nineteenth century. But I will never forget the advice handed on by Baldini, since it still holds true today.

Also included in the price is the digital version *

* 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.

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Dear old Professar Ildebrando, you who from the heavens still mark my homework, lay down your red pen for a while and be a little indulgent. After all we are celebrating twenty years of real successes. I promise I won’t resort to hyperbole; I will be sober, modest, and almost essential with no self- congratulation. But let me at least say that Ligabue Magazine has become one of the finest Italian magazines. My opinion has been confirmed by thousands of readers, and we have won intonational acclaim and even unconditioned praise from the National Geographic Magazine (see Ligabue Magazine no. 17).

In that Autumn of 1982, at no. 499 Santa Croce, Venice, we met in the president’s office of Ligabue Cateting SpA, on the second floor of small white palace overlooking the Rio de la Scomenzera. Giancarlo Ligabue was no ordinary entrepreneur. And he was more than simply forward-looking. In fact, he was also a palaeontologist with such a reputation in Europe, Asia and the Ameticas, that he had successfully gathered round him in the Ligabue Study and Research Centre experts from major universities and world-famous explorers who became contributors to the magazine, bringing and receiving prestige in the process. In the first issue of Ligabue Magazine, the inventor and founder described the background to the magazine: “The reasons for launching Ligabue Magazine are implicit in our slogan ‘Ligabue, the dimension of a commitment’.

Communications are also an integral part of this dimension… Ligabue Magazine seeks to be an exciting venture, a publication which is rigorously scientific with attractive graphics, and a balance between image and text, treating very varied topics.”

I would modestly submit that very few other publications in the world have kept faith in the way Ligabue Magazine has done with the promises made in the original intentions to become rigorous popularisers of scientific knowledge and the very varied human world. And so, we forged ahead, year after year, in the wake of the challenge that Ligabue unassumingly set himself and his collaborators, according to the principle that every issue of the magazine had to be better than the previous one. The only drawback in all this was that focusing on working quietly and relying on the intrinsic virtues of our publication, we hadn’t reckoned with the widespread public interest it aroused. Today we don’t have enough stocks to meet the demands for back issues, and tracking them down is no easy task. Indeed, the early issues have become collector’s items. I’m confident that no. 40 fittingly marks the end of the first twenty years and the beginning of the next twenty years!

In this issue we encounter three brave women, bold travellers who set off for distant corners of the world with bags full of knowledge. Giovanna Fuggetta Marcolongo is a geologist and expert traveller who combines adventure and research in the naturalistic and ethnographic fields. When only just over twenty, she left Padua with her husband to drive to India. After a degree in Oriental languages and literature, she visited and described various countries and peoples, producing so many essays that this page is too short to list them all. But I’m convinced that what we have published on page 162 is one of her most inspiring accounts, because the adventures of the seventh- century Chinese pilgrim Hsuan-tsang are truly stirring. While reading the article I had to pause after each paragraph to try and imagine the impractical reaches this erudite Buddhist sage had explored in a region beset by dangers, as it still is today.

Francesca Mascotto’s Tibet is no less fascinating. A biologist and photographer, she has widely travelled to study the cultures of the peoples of Asia and Africa and was the first Western women to document the Tiji ceremony, a sacred performance held at Lo Manthang, the capital of Mustang, a little piece of Tibet in Nepal. On page 36, Mascotto describes how she managed to reach a forbidden region where she met the “peoples of solitude”, the indomitable tribes of noble bandits who “so they say – rob from the rich to give to the poor and, according to legend, were the forefathers of the Native Americans, who had crossed over to America before the continents were separated by the Bering Strait.

Leaping from Asia to Africa we land in Namibia. Still largely unknown to Europeans, this poverty-stricken country has a landscape of harsh beauty, including the Fish River Canyon, 161 kilometres long and 27 kilometres wide. Our guide this time is Mariagrazia Raffele, a journalist, head of the Nuova Venezia editorial staff and correspondent for La Stampa. Among the wonders she describes are the Huns Mountains with graffiti dating back 80,000 years and whose peaks were used for an unusual communications system.

Next, we take an only apparently more frivolous break as Gabriele Rossi-Osmida surveys “Casanova’s women”. His article on page 134 is not only a zestful account of the Venetian’s remarkable adventures but also gives due weight to his talent as a fine writer, now the subject of studies almost as inexhaustible as the memoirs of the self- styled “Knight of Seingalt” himself.

An archaeologist Gabriel Rossi-Osmida has always been a member of the Ligabue Study and Research Centre, and is as familiar to our readers as Bruno Berti, a naturalist, researcher and collaborator with the Venetian Society of Natural Sciences. On page 112 he describes the wondrous secrets of amber.

On the frontispiece of Ligabue Magazine is the phrase “for people who travel the world”, which brings us to Willy Fassio, an expert on cultural and ethnographic travel. His organisation Tucano Viaggi Ricerca explores and takes people on journeys through all the regions in the world. On page 90 you can read his thoughts on the travel phenomenon.

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