Ligabue Magazine 56

Our first journey takes us to Mongolia. That jar-off country has a very different culture from ours. Or should we say had? In fact, since 1991, when the Ligabue Study Centre made its first expedition to the Gobi Desert in search of dinosaur remains, the country has changed radically. At that time Mongolia was just emerging from the Soviet yoke and a cultural “Middle Ages” that had lasted from time immemorial to open up to the world for the first time. But what did it open up to? I can remember that at the end of expedition when we were in the capital Ulaanbaatar, Giancarlo Ligabue and I tried to turn on the television, a classic old “wooden box” of a set. To our astonishment what came onto the screen was Dallas. The American serial was being shown directly in English with no subtitles or dubbing. Only very jew Mongolians in the whole country could have understood it! At that time Mongolian television broadcast programmes and films only two or three days a week, and the rest of the time the screen was a noisy grainy blank. But those first programmes and films did have a strong impact.

The few Westerners on the move in the country were usually taken to be Russians and looked on with disdain. To avoid this happening, other foreigners adopted their own special methods of indicating their identity. We Italians soon realised that the best way was simply to say the word “Cattani”. The reference was to Inspector Cattani, the hero of the Italian serial La Piovra (“Octopus”), played by Michele Placido. The various series on the Sicilian mafia had evidently also been shown on Mongolia TV We only needed to pronounce that name and the faces of the Mongolians we were speaking to lit up with a broad smile. I still wonder what kind of image of Italy they had gleaned from the serial… But this is just a small example of the radical cultural changes which in a Jew decade have swept the planet.
To understand more about Mongolia, we can turn to Roberto Ive’s article and photographs in this issue. He illustrates what has happened in the country aver the last twenty years in its literature, music, painting, film, language and religion. They have literally gone from yurts.. to piercing!

Our journeying will take us through several historical periods and to many different sites. Thus, for instance, we set off in exploration of the true face of Arabia Felix and the Queen of Sheba’s lands in the Yemen. For some time now in this area a team of Italian archaeologists have been working on major discoveries, as Alessandro de Maigret relates in his article. Massimo Poli takes us to a completely different part of the globe, the Southern Andes in Peru, to explore a very special ritual dance with ancient origins: the Devil’s Dance. This is actually a remarkable ritual, rich in symbolic meanings and also requiring considerable physical prowess and endurance.

We then go to the banks of the Yangtze for Chinese reporter Zeng Nian’s very moving testimony in words and photographs to a now submerged world. Three years before the area was due to be flooded to create the Three Gorges Dam, the biggest in the world, he photographed everything that was about to vanish: cities, sights, customs and everyday life. The result is a report of great artistic, journalistic but above all human value. Nearer home, we take a look at a special Italian cultural event: the major exhibition on Giorgione now running at Castelfranco Veneto, his birthplace, to mark the 500th anniversary of the great artist’s death. We also celebrate another anniversary in this issue: the birth 200 years ago of the Italian explorer Giovanni Miani in the Veneto town of Rovigo.

Miani set off on two expeditions in search of the source of the Nile and was only three days away from discovering it when he was abandoned by his porters. In the early 1980s Gabriele Rossi Osmida wished to reconstruct his adventure first hand. And so, after having rediscovered and published the explorer’s travel diaries, thus making his achievements known, Rossi Osmida headed to Africa with a Ligabue Study Centre mission to “follow in Miani’s footsteps”. As his fascinating account reveals, the expedition also goes to into some very dicey situations as it strayed into areas still out of bounds for Westerners. But all of this was rather appropriate in an attempt to revive Giovanni Miani’s spirit of exploration and quest for discovery. Indeed, we like to think that they still inform our Study Centre’s activities today.

Happy exploring!