Ligabue Magazine 81

Guglielmina Adele Diolaiuti discusses the poor health of alpine glaciers, their progressive melting, and the danger that ice water reserves are facing due to global warming. The 903 Italian glaciers, large and small, are continuing to retreat and lose mass. This dire situation brought the team of the State University of Milan, of which the author is a member, to monitor the situation of the Forni Glacier, in the Upper Valtellina in the Stelvio National Park, since 2005. The temperature at 2,800 meters of altitude ought to remain around zero degrees Celsius even in summer but now climbs to fourteen degrees. The ice tongue is losing eight meters of thickness every year, more or less the height of a two story house. The scarce winter snowfall is not enough to replace the summer losses.

The Codex Cospi is one of only thirteen Mesoamerican manuscripts from the pre-Columbian era that have survived to this day. Davide Domenici writes about this manuscript, after having had the chance to examine it in person. It is kept in at the university library in Bologna, where it came after having been gifted to Pope Clement VII and then to the Marquis Ferdinando Cospi in 1665, who gave it his name. The manuscript is an amoxtli, a divinatory tool used by the Nahua priests of ancient Mexico for astrology. The colours are particularly bright and luminous, prompting its material composition to be studied. The blue areas, for example, were painted with the most famous of Mesoamerican pigments, “Mayan blue”, a true treasure of indigenous technology. Zoic of Trieste is one of the most important companies in the world specialized in restoring dinosaur and large mammal fossils. The owner, Flavio Bacchia, tells how what started as a hobby forty years ago, collecting fossils with friends, turned into a business that led him to restore the largest skeleton of a triceratops ever found, among many others. “Big John”, as he’s called, was mounted in a dynamic pose as if he had to defend himself during a fight. It is possible that some wounds in his skull were inflicted by another dinosaur of the same species that “Big John” was fighting.

These days, when travelling to space, one eats well, even enjoying gourmet dishes prepared by professional chefs. But in the early days of space exploration, this was far from the case. Alessandro Marzo Magno tells us all about how American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts were subjected to foods reduced to pulp served in tubes just like those for toothpaste. The food was so unpalatable that on shorter flights American astronauts preferred to fast rather than have to force the terrible food down their throats. Then freeze-dried foods arrived, already an improvement. Spaghetti with meat sauce was one of the foods that landed on the Moon in the Lem capsule of the Apollo 11 mission, in July 1969. The orbiting stations increased the space available and greatly changed on-board diets. These days, astronauts eat well, not exactly like at a Michelin-starred restaurant but close.

Nico Stringa writes about abstract Venice, i.e., that period of Venetian painting between the late 1940s and all of the 1960s, when the rise of abstractionism allowed non-specialists to approach an artistic expression that went beyond the need to represent people and things, expressing itself by giving value to marks, actions, materials, and colour. This new path was blazed by a sculptor, Arturo Martini, inspired by meeting two young men: Mario Deluigi and Carlo Scarpa.

Bon voyage!
Alberto Angela