Ligabue Magazine 61

They are the vestiges of a lost civilisation and a people of which we know little more than the name – Nabataeans. This place is Petra, in Jordan. We know that the Nabataeans grew wealthy on trade and the caravans coming from Asia along the Silk Road.
Petra was like a motorway tollbooth between two worlds: the East and the Mediterranean. Only Trajan’s legions eventually defeated the Nabataeans and reached Petra. The site was then rediscovered 200 years ago by a young Swiss archaeologist.
His name was Jean Louis Burckhardt and he penetrated as far as the abandoned city by dressing up as a Bedouin with the pseudonym Ibrahim ibn Andallah. In this issue of Ligabue Magazine, with the aid of his journal, Sandra Gastaldo tells his story. Another anniversary that we wish to celebrate here is the 50th year of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), created by a group of European countries – Italy is now in the forefront – with the aim of studying the universe from a place with ideal viewing conditions: the Andes. In fact the ESO telescopes and radio telescopes are situated high up in the mountains where the crystalline air is more rarefied. Next year, 66 huge dish antennas, 12 metres in diameter, will be situated at Chajnantor, in the Atacama Desert, as part of the ALMA project: at a height of 5,000 metres, these ears will listen to and plumb the depths of the universe.

The landscapes up there are so impressive that a few years ago we filmed them to emulate Mars and the surfaces of some moons in our solar system for “Journey into the Cosmos”, a RAI Uno television series about space exploration shown in Italy and forty other countries. The next ESO masterpiece, made with Italian technology, will be the largest telescope ever built: the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). Weighing 6,000 tonnes and as big as the Coliseum, its mirror alone is 39 meters in diameter. Adriano Favaro and Gianpietro Marchiori explain how this “great eye” may finally be able to answer many of our questions. Not least: are we alone in the cosmos? We can see stars and celestial bodies light years away thanks to telescopes, and yet down here on the Earth we have been unable to see an animal as big as… an elephant. This is what we discover thanks to Marco Preti’s article and photographs. How many varieties of elephant are there in the world?

The Indian elephant is capable of working in construction sites, leading religious processions and carrying sightseers or, in the past, maharajas hunting tigers. The African elephant is documented in films about the savannah, showing, for example, the matriarch leading a group from one watering hole to another during the dry season. But there is also another little-known variety of elephant that has not been seen on film – the Pygmy Elephant. It is almost invisible because it lives in the impenetrable tangled growth of the African equatorial rainforests. Marco Preti, however, has managed to film one. The Pygmy Elephant is well adapted to life in the dense rainforest, in which its low trumpeting (i.e. infrasounds) propagates effectively between the trees, enabling the various individuals in the group to keep in touch without seeing each other. But there are also other particularly striking adaptations to forest life: the relatively small stature of the Pygmy Elephant (around 2 metres to the shoulder, compared to the 4 metres of the savannah elephant), its compact body and robust feet, better suited for trekking through the forest.

As if on a 19th-century journey, in this article we go in search of an unknown animal in the heart of darkest Africa. The dramatic energy problems that will increasingly affect our life in future have introduced to our mindset and vocabulary a term once only used by nuclear engineers and astrophysicists: “nuclear fusion”. Can what happens on the Sun be reproduced in a controlled way in a power station to yield unlimited clean energy? Some of the most brilliant minds in the world have been focusing on this challenge for decades. The recipe is simple enough: bring together deuterium and tritium from lithium and… water. Then with the help of special huge magnets, an electric current and extremely high-temperature plasma, we can generate such hot gases that they may be compared to miniature Suns. Is this what we will also see in the nuclear power stations of the future? Here Piero Martin explains fusion in a nutshell, or rather in a shoebox. Graziella Allegri explores the world of the people living on the Blue River – the Yangtze in China.

The journey that this amiable university professor undertook at the age of almost 80 was an extraordinary feat, a real modern expedition that would have been difficult and full of dangers even for her most intrepid, athletic students. She sailed all the way down the river’s 6,378 kilometres on four different journeys and, like some latter-day Marco Polo, she has retold the story of a world unknown to us. Describing, the ethnic groups living on the banks of the river or on the vessels plying up and down it, like an explorer from another age, Graziella Allegri gently accompanies us down the Yangtze. The last article in this Ligabue Magazine is a floral tribute from Tudy Sammartini, a garden restorer and guide, illustrated by the photographs of Cesare Gerolimetto. She explores the world of Venetian gardens, closed to the public and concealed between historic palazzi. Even for people well acquainted with Venice, these gardens are “mysterious lands despite being in one of the most visited cities in the world. We discover a new dimension to this unique city, as she captures all the charm of gardens surrounded by water and history.

Good reading and Bon Voyage!