Gemelli Newsletter of Friends of Ravenna Issue 89 May 2023 Spring arrived at last! When I wrote in December, I wondered what the New Year of 2023 would bring?! Now we can see the beginnings of new life and new possibilities! Besides the interesting and informative evening talks from Dr Warren Cairns, Simon Martin, Dr Lorenza Gianfrancesca and Charles Hind (thank you to all those who so brilliantly summarised these) and welcoming new members, we are excited about what is unfolding. First of all, we have been thrilled to hear of Livia Caprara’s election as the new President of Friends of Chichester and the planned visit of the Ravennati here 4-8th October this year. After a “Covid” gap of 4 years, this promises to be a very special occasion. More information to follow as the planning group get to work! We also look forward to seeing how the recently celebrated addition of Speyer to Chichester’s network of twinning relationships develops. On 6th March, with great ceremony, a new agreement was signed by the Mayors of both cities. Accompanying speeches underlined the high value placed on these European relationships. We were especially delighted to welcome Dott.ssa Annagiulia Randi, Deputy Mayor of Ravenna who flew in especially for the occasion. FROM THE CHAIRMAN ( R a v e n n a i s twinned with both Speyer and C h i c h e s t e r ) . Annagiulia is keen to foster further cultural exchange projects: b u i l d i n g European links with Fishbourne Roman Palace and exploring the possibility of a visit by a Young Musicians European Quartet. The planned installation of a sculpture of Dante by Philip Jackson in Midhurst was of particular interest to her. We also discussed the possibility of celebrating belatedly our 25th anniversary… do we now wait for our 30th in December 2026?! After reading about the Friends of Chartres who have invested time and energy into sparking children’s interest in twinning, I was thrilled to receive an invitation from a teacher at St Joseph’s CE Junior School to visit Year 5 as they begin a Module on European Links. They have chosen to focus on Italy and I was joined by Sarah Quail on behalf of the City Council and Dotta.ssa Annagiulia Randi, Deputy Mayor of Ravenna at the signing ceremony
Gemelli 89 - May 2023 FRIENDS OF RAVENNA PRESIDENT The Right Worshipful the Mayor of Chichester Councillor Julian Joy VICE-PRESIDENT The Very Reverend Nicholas Frayling CHAIRMAN Jacky Storey07743 484059 VICE-CHAIRMAN Liz Turner 371309 HON TREASURER Richard Roberts 538004 HON SECRETARY Lynda Murray 788207 Alastair Alexander 532171 Jane Bartholomew 776231 Mike Bonser 01903 784911 Jennifer Bottomley 776810 John-Henry Bowden 07504 846083 Mike Evans 698113 Dave Heywood 530499 Steph James 07968 700083 Jennifer McNeill 07901 528397 Sarah Quail 776757 Anne Scicluna 789065 From the members PADUA—A stroll around my city By Carla Gaita Many of you will have visited or read about Venice and Verona; Padua, however, which is close to both, is less known and remains mostly overlooked by the large crowds. Padua is the city I come from, where I have spent most of my life before moving to UK and where I go back often to see family and friends. Padua is nicknamed “the city of the 3 withouts”: the city with a café without doors, a meadow without grass and a saint without a name. Are you not curious to know why? Then welcome to my city and let me take you on a walk around the city centre; I will show you just a few of the interesting places this city has to offer, and I hope next time you go to Venice you might want to stop for a day trip in Padua - I promise you won’t regret it! Padua is a relatively small city, but it has many interesting attractions and artistic treasures, a long past (did you know that it is more than 400 years older than Rome?) and is twice listed in the UNESCO’s World Heritage List. It has always been a thriving centre for trade, art and culture, and a spiritual and religious centre. Everything is within walking distance, so even on a rainy day you could walk under beautiful porticoes connecting lovely piazzas, medieval narrow cobbled streets, marketplaces, churches, and Renaissance buildings. Let’s start our walk along Piazza della Frutta and Piazza delle Erbe, the two elegant and Chichester’s friendship with Ravenna! We’ll tell you in the next newsletter what happened when Liz Turner and I visited the school! Finally, there are a few more events to look forward to! At the May Social on Wednesday, 17th at St Paul’s Parish Centre, we will be able to enjoy one another’s company while sampling Italian wines and trying some spuntini gustos (tasty snacks)! Then in June on the 12th we round off the year with our AGM followed by a meal at Franco Manca’s. Let’s not miss the “3 Cities that has become the 4 Cities event” on June 26th when we’ll celebrate our friendships with Valletta, Chartres, Ravenna and now Speyer! Hope to see you there! Thank you Members for supporting Friends of Ravenna. It really wouldn’t be the same without you!
portico-lined piazzas. Here on weekdays the market stalls occupy the squares with colourful displays of fruit & vegetables, flowers, clothing and leather items. It’s a foodshopping paradise with goods arranged like works of art and it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation to buy something and look for bargains! So very true to the ‘café culture’ the British like so much about Italy. So let’s now sit like the Padovani at one of the many cafes with outdoor tables along the piazzas, enjoying the busy life of the place and admiring the ancient buildings around the squares while taking a cappuccino or a spritz (did you know that Aperol was born in Padua?) The two squares are dominated and separated by Palazzo della Ragione, a magnificent building with a stunning porticoed and frescoed loggia. The building, which resembles a huge upturned ship, was built in the 13th century and served as the seat of the city courts and the covered market. While the ground floor still holds one of the oldest covered food markets in Europe, with some historic shops still owned by the same families selling meat, fish and fresh pasta, on the upper floor the Great Hall, called il Salone, is believed to be one of the largest medieval halls still existing. This impressive hall, measuring 80 by 27m and with a height of 40m, has a wooden roof and walls entirely covered with astronomical and allegorical frescoes. Among the many curiosities to be seen is the medieval Pietra del Vituperio (Stone of Shame), a stool of black stone that was used to publicly humiliate insolvent debtors, who were obliged to sit there as if in the stocks before being banished from the city. The gigantic wooden horse on the western side of the hall was built in 1466 and is modelled on Donatello's Equestrian bronze statue of Gattamelata, an Italian condottiero of the Renaissance, which is in place in front of the Saint Antony Basilica. From Piazza della Frutta let’s walk now towards the elegant Caffe’ Pedrocchi, one of the oldest and most famous historical and literary cafés in Italy. When it opened in 1831, it came to be known as “the Café without doors” because it was the only café in Padua that, until 1916, was always open day and night. Its architecture blends neoclassical style and Venetian Gothic, with references to exotic Egyptian. Inside, the numerous rooms on two floors are decorated each in a different style: Etruscan, Greek, Baroque, Renaissance, Medieval etc. The café started as a meeting place for students, artists, writers (even Lord Byron was here) and patriots, and it was also the scene of the 1848 student uprisings against the dominant Habsburg monarchy and today houses the Museum of the Risorgimento Italiano. I shall leave you here and catch up with you for the rest of our stroll in the next edition. Walking in the Sibillini Mountains By Julie Wyatt In October 2015 my husband Andrew and I spent a week walking a circular route through the Monte Sibillini Mountains. It was an adventure for us, as this area remains a lesserknown part of Italy, but shortly after our holiday it was to become a topic of international news as it was badly hit by the 2016 earthquakes. quite devastating. Gemelli 89 - May 2023
The Monte Sibillini Mountains are situated on the border of Le Marche and Umbria and are part of the Apennine mountain range. Most of the peaks are over 2,000m (6,600ft); Monte Vettore the highest, is 2,476m (8,123ft). The walk is called Il Grande Anello dei Sibillini (the Big Ring) and is a circular route of about 75 miles through the National Park, which covers 75,000 acres and has more than 20 peaks with an altitude of over 2000m. The mountains, made of limestone and carved by glaciers, are home to diverse wildlife: wolves, porcupines, wild cats and the amazing flora of the Piano Grande plateau, encircled by mountains and crowned by the ancient village of Castelluccio, famous in culinary circles for its lentils. The explosion of wild flowers in spring, (la Fioritura) attracts worldwide visitors with its display of native cyclamen, crocus, iris, and gentians, to name but a few. This plateau was originally a glacial lake and still today drains through a single sink hole only about 1 metre in diameter. We walked between 9 to 14 miles a day for 7 days from rifugio to rifugio over quite demanding terrain, climbing between 1000 and 1500m a day and during the whole time, although we saw the odd snake, horses, cattle, traces of wolves and the powerful Maremmano shepherd dogs, we did not meet another walker. It was a remote and peaceful area and we visited again the following spring to see the flowers at their best. However, a few months after our second visit, on August 24 2016, tranquillity was disturbed when the first strong earthquake of magnitude 6 hit the area. 300 people were killed and over the following few months, further segments of the fault line fractured, causing earthquakes of between 5.5 and 5.9 magnitude. Monte Vettore, the highest mountain in the range has a visible fault running along its flank and a local woman described the earthquake resulting from a disruption on the fault line as ‘like being in a washing machine’. Many buildings were destroyed or badly damaged, including some of the rifugi, and the fragile economy of Casteluccio and the surrounding area was threatened. Fortunately, although the whole of the Apennine area of Italy is extremely seismic, and further tremors were feared, another major earthquake has not occurred and Casteluccio is once more offering hospitality to visitors. The National Park has worked hard to repair or replace the damaged rifugi and homes and it is now possible once more to walk the Grande Anello and enjoy the historical and cultural heritage of this unique area. Gemelli 89 - May 2023 Castelluccio, the Piano Grande Castelluccio Monte Vettore showing the fault line
Gemelli 89 - May 2023 From AMICI DI CHICHESTER Piallassa Baiona: oasis of peace and nature in the surroundings of Ravenna By Paola Alessandri On the way from Ravenna to Marina Romea (a small village on the coast with long beaches and pine forest), you can meet, on one side, the industrial area of the port of Ravenna, and Piallassa Baiona on the other, a small lagoon extended for about 1000 hectares, with flamingos, herons and many other wild birds . The name Piallassa comes from the Venetian dialect words "pija" and "lassa", that means “take it” and “leave it” , because the lagoon takes in sea water twice a day, then releases it twice more during the low tide. This area, which in 1964 was chosen by the film director Michelangelo Antonioni as a set for his movie “Deserto Rosso”, still represents today an interesting observation point on the contrast between the landscape designed by nature and that built by man. But Piallassa Baiona is also a place linked to the history of Ravenna and Italy: in 1849 it welcomed Giuseppe Garibaldi (the hero of the Italian Risorgimento) while escaping from Rome, he found refuge in a fishing hut overlooking the lagoon. Capanno Garibaldi, after several restorations, is still a historical place full of peace, easily accessible on foot by visitors. But the Piallassa Baiona was also important during the Second World War, when in the second half of 1944 the Isola degli Spinaroni, a small islet in the middle on the lagoon, was the headquarters of the "Terzo Lori", a detachment of fighters of the Garibaldi Partisan Brigade. Today the Piallassa Baiona is a peaceful place, a natural oasis offering spectacular views appreciated by photographers, painters and people who love to walk, cycle or boat it: the flight of flamingos, the red sunsets that illuminate the nets of the fishing huts, the warm colors of autumn that explode in the vegetation that emerges from the shallow waters of the lagoon. Piallassa is next to my home in Marina Romea, my favorite place, which I was happy to share with all my Friends from Chichester I hosted with pleasure in the past, and which I hope to introduce to many more in the future .
Gemelli 89 - May 2023 general public that they ought to make sacrifices today in the interests of generations yet unborn. Andrew Wyatt February 15th, What Ho Giotto! By Simon Martin This was Stanley Spencer’s cry of joy when he heard that at long last the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in nearby Hampshire was underway, reported Simon Martin, Director of Pallant House Gallery at February’s lecture to the Friends of Ravenna. Simon Martin sub-titled his talk ‘Stanley Spencer’s Holy Box and the Influence of the Italian Primitives’. The ‘Holy Box’ was the Sandham Memorial Chapel itself. Managed today by the National Trust, it is, to all intents and purposes, a Medieval chantry chapel for departed souls, the Oratory of All Souls. In this case, the chapel commemorates only one departed soul: Lieutenant H.W. Sandham, the brother of Mrs J.L. Behrend who, with her husband, commissioned Stanley Spencer’s cycle of paintings. Lieutenant Sandham died in 1919 from an illness contracted while serving in Macedonia which was also where Stanley Spencer served as a medical orderly during the First World War and conceived his plans for a great series of war paintings. A student of Henry Tonks at the Slade before the First World War, Stanley Spencer discovered the Italian Primitives including Giotto, in a series of exhibitions at the National Gallery. He also discovered Gowan and Gray’s Pocket Masterpiece series which he read avidly. Designed by Lionel Pearson and built 1926-7, the Sandham Memorial Chapel is strikingly similar to the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Stanley Spencer would have been familiar from his reading of the series of episodes in the life of the Virgin Mary and Christ frescoed by Giotto between 1303 and 1305. The paintings cover the walls in their entirety. Stanley Spencer replicated the designs of the Scrovegni Chapel, covering the walls of the Sandham Memorial Chapel not with the lives of the Virgin and Christ but with images of men at Recent Events January 19th, The Venice Tidal Barrier and Climate Change by Dr Warren Cairns (via Zoom) According to the Chichester Harbour Conservancy, rising sea levels will breach their coastal defences in coming decades and much farmland reclaimed during the 19th and 20th centuries will revert to inter-tidal salt marsh. The Northern Adriatic is similarly affected and it was therefore timely that the “Friends” invited Dr Warren Cairns, Researcher at the Institute of Polar Sciences of the Italian National Research Council and Visiting Professor at the Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, to present a webinar entitled “The Venice tidal barrier & climate change: a tale of two cities, Venice and Ravenna” on 19th January. Dr Cairns’ presentation was wide-ranging and detailed, beautifully presented and startlingly clear. Although climate change is the main cause of alarm as sea levels rise and storms intensify, he also emphasised the unintended consequences of land reclamation, human engineered waterway diversion, dredging and industrial development, all of which had exacerbated the dangers to people and property, making remediation extraordinarily expensive. As many will know, Venice is now partially protected from tidal surges by means of the MOSE (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico) barriers sited at the three entrances to the Venetian lagoon. Sadly the design and procurement of the system was blighted by poor decision making and corruption, making it costly to operate and maintain. A passionate advocate of action to limit CO2 emissions and halt climate change, Dr Cairns expressed frustration that politicians in the developed world had failed to convince the
Gemelli 89 - May 2023 war in the early 20th century. The historian, Simon Schama has described the Sandham Memorial Chapel as one of the finest schemes using the techniques of the Italian Renaissance to commemorate the First World War. Sarah Quail March 16th, Academies, Museums and Laboratories in Early Modern Italy by Dr Lorenza Gianfrancesco Dr Lorenza Gianfrancesco, a Senior Lecturer at Chichester University, gave us a most interesting talk on the intellectual climate and scientific developments in 17th Century Naples. At this time Naples was the largest city in Europe with more than 400,000 inhabitants, capital of a Kingdom under Spanish rule from 1503 to 1707 which covered half of the Italian peninsula. Between the 1570s and the 1630s more than fifty academies were established in Naples. Consisting of aristocrats, clergymen and academics, they were an important means of exploring and disseminating ideas. Alongside these there existed scientific research centres, often based in religious houses, sometimes containing apothecaries’ shops, hospitals and infirmaries. Two key figures in Naples in this period were Donato d’Eremita, a Domenican Friar, and Ferrante Imperato, a scientist and major collector who established one of the most important museums of science in Europe. His work included drawings of plants, animals and minerals, demonstrating careful observation and classification rather than relying on classical texts as had been the previous practice. D’Eremita’s work included pictures of the distillation equipment he used in his experiments. He also grew plants for medicinal purposes such as passiflora (passion flower), brought from the New World and still used today in herbal teas. Lorenza’s talk covered an aspect of Italian history which was new to many of us and it prompted a large number of questions and a lively discussion, demonstrating the interest it aroused. Dick Bunker April 26th, Andrea Palladio and Palladianism by Charles Hind We were very fortunate to have one of the world’s leading experts come to talk to us on Palladianinfluenced architecture. Charles Hind the curator of archives at RIBA started by drawing our attention to the Palladian influence in the design of our own Assembly Rooms where we enjoyed his talk. Andrea Palladio started his career with a firm of stonemasons and consequently always had a practical approach to his designs in contrast to others of the era who came to it from the artistic aspect. Influenced by Palladio’s I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura and Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, it was really Inigo Jones, after his Italian visit and with his influence at the Stuart Court, who brought his concepts to the wider world. So the style which we call AngloPalladianism is really Palladio seen through Jones’s eyes, including among many others illustrated in this talk, his masterpiece the Banqueting House in Whitehall. Naturally, it became the greatest influence on Wren, Kemp, Gibbs, Wyatt, Hawksmoor and many others. Later, Lord Burlington put his own stamp on Palladianism initially with the Assembly Rooms in York and then in a number of country houses in England. The style was eagerly adopted during the 18th century in North America becoming the standard influence in the design of grand country houses and civic buildings throughout the colonies and subsequently in the new Republic. But the style was adapted and adopted more widely in British India and other Far East countries. The talk was not only brilliantly presented in great detail but superbly illustrated, finishing with an ultra-modern design for a building in Mongolia whose design was influenced by an inverted image of one of Palladio’s designs with a courtyard below ground! Alastair Alexander
Italian Language CLASSES and GROUPS Practise speaking Italian and enjoy the company of others of similar ability. The lessons are fee-paying but there is no charge for the conversation groups. LANGUAGE CLASSES We are very fortunate to have the help of Cristina Taylor, a native speaker and teacher of Italian. Cristina is offering classes at three levels, each with conversation, grammar, reading and some home study. This year classes will take place at Cristina’s home in Chichester. Advanced—Tuesdays 10.00 -11.30 Intermediate/Advanced— Tuesdays 2.30— 4.00 Intermediate—Wednesdays 10.00-11.30 Intermediate/ Advanced — Wednesdays 2.30-4.00 Intermediate—Thursdays 10.00—11.00 Intermediate/Advanced—Thursdays 12.00- 1.00 pm Cristina has spaces in some of these classes and anyone wishing to join one of them should contact Cristina directly on 01243 788804 or [email protected] We are fortunate to have the services of Andrea Hill, an experienced teacher of languages, who runs Beginners and Year 2 classes. This year, the classes are as follows: Beginners— Tuesdays 4.00– 5.00 Year 2 class—Thursdays, 9.30 to 10.30. Anyone interested in joining either of these classes should contact her directly on 07801 988257, or by email at [email protected] . CONVERSATION GROUPS In addition to the classes, there are two groups who meet informally once a month for Italian conversation. The Advanced Group meets on the second Thursday of the month from 5.30— 7.00 Intermediate Group on the third Thursday of the month from 5.30— 6.45 Anyone interested in joining one of these groups should contact Andrea on the above number or email. Gemelli 89 - May 2023 FORTHCOMING EVENTS Wednesday May 17th 7.15 pm at St Paul’s Church Hall Spring Social Event Wine tasting and light supper Monday June 12th 11am Annual General Meeting at St Paul’s Church Hall Followed by lunch at Franco Manca Thursday September 21st 'Roman Reflections', a talk by Canon Bruce Ruddock October 4th– 8th Visit of Amici di Chichester Tuesday October 17th 'Italian Fascism', a talk by John Foot Tuesday November 14th 'Italian Design', a talk by Greg Votolato December 5th, A musical event for Christmas, with Jon Grave