Ligabue Magazine 6

It was not for nothing that Paganini said once at the end of a concert: « That is how they play in Paradise». He had in fact spent an hour in Paradise. Stefan Zweig called these moments «the starry hours». They are the hours like those of the night of the 21st. August, 1741, when Georg Friedrich Handel, ill in bed, was inspired to write the «Messiah». They are the hours, or the passing instants, in which the genius forgets that he is an earthly creature and experiences deep emotions which are denied to the rest of us, as when, on 12th. October, 1492, the cry «Land ahoy! » rang out from the crow’s nest of a caravel and the miracle which changed the history of the world took place.

We do not have a record of all those hours, every one of those magical instants, but we do know of the sublime emotion which filled Galileo on January 7th. 161O, when he discovered the satellites of Jupiter, henceforth known as the Sidera Medicea; on the night of 1Oth. November, 1619, Descartes suddenly experienced the revelation of «the foundations of the Admirable Science» and thus conceived his universal method of analysis and synthesis; identifiable in time are the momentous early experiments of Marconi (28th. March, 1895), as are those of Herz and Rontgen, not to mention that of 14th. May, 1796, when Edward Jenner inoculated a child with smallpox vaccine, or the achievements of Fermi, Amaldi, Pontecorvo and Rasetti, or of Pierre and Marie Curie. What fire my imagination are the exultant, exalting feelings of the scientists who discovered Neandertal man in the Dussel Valley, dinosaurs in the Teneré Desert, in Madagascar, in South America or the ecstasy of Lord Carnavon when his eyes first saw the interior of the tomb of Tutankhamen. And among these select few stands Donald C. Johanson, Director of the Institute of Human Origins (Berkeley, California), whose «magical hour» is enthrallingly recounted on page 36.

Professor Johanson’s story culminates at the exciting moment when, as he was trudging wearily along a track in the Afar Triangle, for some mysterious reason he «glanced over his right shoulder» and glimpsed the first bone fragment of the skeleton of Lucy.

In Gèa Dourada, now Panaji, which was a Portuguese colony from the sixteenth century until 1961, lives Cristina Del Mare, a young archaeologist and explorer, who has been studying the customs of the Gujarat and Kutch («beach» in Sanscrit), peoples in North-West India, and includes in her article an evocative description of the traditional battle of the kites (page 96).

Giancarlo Ligabue’s latest expedition took him to the Indonesian province of New Guinea called Irian Jaya, better known as West Irian; and there, in an utterly unexplored part of the central highlands, the mission was the first to study pygmy peoples living in small groups, raising pigs and eating sweet potatoes and taro. Of surprising interest is the economic system of these pygmies who, since time immemorial, have been expert makers of stone knives and axes, which they then «export» to the neighbouring hill-tribes. The article in which Ligabue introduces us to these peoples, together with the fine photographs of Sergio Manzoni and J. J. Petter, starts on page 24. 24.

Theriac, an electuary invented by the physician to Mithridates in the second century B.C. as an antidote to poisons, later came to be considered as a kind of universal panacea. Venetian theriac was exported all over Europe, and its highly complicated preparation is described on page 48 by Bruno Berti, a Venetian who works at the Giustinan Hospital and devotes much of his spare time to the study of palaeontology and old Venetian coins.

Amulets are quite likely to have originated when the first man came face to face with the first black cat and they have been around to ward off evil ever since. On page 88 we publish a brilliant essay on science and the magic of amulets by Guido Cafiero, the founder of the review «L’Ellisse».

Dino Tonon is Venetian; he graduated in the philosophy of religions, works as an agency reporter for Ansa and is an amateur, but highly competent student of anthropology and an excellent photographer. His article on one of the poorest peoples in the world, the Dogons, begins on page 78, and is illustrated with photographs taken by Sandra Savella and Piero Basaglia.

Anyone who feels the pull of the mountains will certainly want to turn straight to page 106 and the article by Augusto Cosulich, a Venetian surgeon who has been working at Kalongo hospital in Uganda for the past two years. He offers a meticulous, elegant description of the natural Paradise of Mount Ruwenzori, which he recently climbed to a height of six thousand metres.

One of the normal editorial tasks in compiling a magazine is the search for suitable illustrative material for an article one wants to publish; very rarely does the contrary happen. But when we had the opportunity to use a splendid series of photographs by Folco Quilici I decided to delve deep into ancient memories and the well of fantasy to talk, on page 68, about the «charm» of opposites.

Can it be that beneath Earth’s mantle there are still more civilizations waiting to be discovered? Clandestine excavators revealed a few years ago that urban centres existed in Afghanistan in the 3rd. Millennium B. C.; the sites have since been investigated by Russian archaeologists and they have come up with some marvellous finds. Many of the mysteries of the region still remain to be unveiled but a fascinating introduction to the subject begins on page 56. The article is by Sandro Salvatori, an archaeologist working with the Superintendency of the Architectural Heritage of the Veneto and the author of accounts of excavations carried out in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Oman.

Caproni, a name which easily lends itself to Virgil’s apostrophe fama super aethera notus: yet the article on page 116, «Ancient Wings over Venice», bears the name Maria Fede Caproni, The Directress of the Caproni Aeronautical Museum at Taliedo, and A.I.A. and A.I.D.A.A. council member.