• Art - Featured - Italy - Travel

    Let them eat bugs

    March 3, 2024 - By 

    I am currently reading the souvenirs of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, or, rather, a part of it focusing on her travels in Italy after having escaped the French Revolution. Madame Le Brun was no Raphael or Rembrandt, but she was a talented painter, mostly famous for her portraits, in particular for the several portraits she made of Queen Marie Antoinette.

    Marie Antoinette, as everyone knows, was the Queen dethroned and guillotined by the revolutionaries and famous for supposedly saying “let them eat brioche” (in fact, it is very unlikely that she really said that, and she had no small number of detractors who invented all kinds of rumours about her).

    Madame Le Brun herself, at least according to Wikipedia, was not an aristocrat by birth and had humble origins, showing that even in pre-Revolutionary France there was a certain social mobility. Her mother was a hairdresser and his father an unknown painter. He taught her painting, but died when she was only 12. Her mother remarried and the new husband, who became Élisabeth’s stepfather, was a rich jeweller, but also not an aristocrat by birth. Yet Élisabeth became a requested painter quite early in her career, painting the portraits of several nobles, and eventually married an important art dealer, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun.

    Le Brun’s souvenirs, or at least the part I am reading, begin just as the royal family is removed from the palace and Le Brun flees France in disguise with her daughter (her husband remains in France and eventually joins the Revolutionary cause, but she remains a monarchist to the end of her life).

    Le Brun’s book depicts both her horror at the events taking place in France as well as her fascination with Italy, in particular Italian art (she’s a big fan of Raphael, Domenichino, Michelangelo and Corregio). It is a very interesting read, and I look forward to the volume about Russia, where she lived afterwards.

    But anyway — what I wanted to talk about was the French Revolution. To my mind, it was a senseless bloodbath and really the foundation of our modern world, based on idealistic but equivocated ideas of “equality”, “democracy” and “secularism” — in other words, the beginning of what we now call “globalism”.

    It is symptomatic that France, together with America, which was inspired by similar (Freemason’s) ideas, are the first countries poised to fall in the New World Order. France’s population is today composed of at least 40% non-European foreigners (they don’t keep statistics about ethnicity or religion, but a map of “sickle-cell anemia” gives the game away) and has so many social and economic problems that it is hard to see how it can survive as a “French” nation a hundred years from now — or even twenty.

    The funny thing about modern democracy — which started with the French and American Revolutions — is that it is supposed to be a system based on the will of the people instead of that of unaccountable elites, but, as we see more and more, the will of the people counts for very little. Just look at the farmers’ protests going on in France and other countries, which, despite their massive support by the public, have not moved the government’s position one inch. And why is the government set up against its own farmers, anyway?

    But, in fact, you can argue that everything that happens in modern democracy is done against the will of the population, or, at least, done without consulting them at all. Just look at massive immigration, gay marriage, the transgender stuff — all those are unpopular measures that no one voted or asked for, and yet keep being implemented.

    The problem of modern democracy is that the supposed leaders are no leaders at all, but puppets of a hidden cabal. So you have no one to protest against. Even if Macron or Biden became so unpopular that they were forced to resign, nothing much would happen — some other puppet would take their place and things would just go on as usual.

    Now the unaccountable elites are saying, not “let them eat brioche”, but, “let them eat bugs”. For some reason they really are pushing for insects on the menu, as well as all kinds of genetically modified veggies and artificial meat made in a lab. But the rich at Davos will still eat Kobe steak and caviar, thank you very much.

    I really don’t know what is the answer to our present quandaries, and as you can see I am not a great fan of violent revolutions — which are usually not the popular movements they are portrayed to be, but just the removal of one “elite” by another — but what can be done at this point? Except perhaps waiting and preparing for whatever may come?

    But let us finish with a short quotation from Le Brun’s book, while she visits a church in Bologna, and muses on the fate of her country. We are all Le Brun now.

    I went immediately to the church of Sant’Agnese, where this saint’s martyrdom is represented in a painting by Domenichino. The youth and innocence of Saint Agnes is so well captured on her beautiful face and the features of the torturer striking her with his sword form such a cruel contrast to her divine nature, that I was overwhelmed with pious admiration. As I knelt before the masterpiece, someone played the overture to Iphigenia on the organ. The involuntary link that I made between the young pagan victim of that story and the young Christian victim, the memory of the peaceful, happy time when I had last listened to that piece of music, and the sad thought of all the evils pressing upon my unhappy country, weighed down my heart to the point where I began to cry bitterly and to pray to God on behalf of France. Fortunately I was alone in the church and I was able to remain there for some time, giving vent to those painful emotions which took control of my soul.

    Whatever you think of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette, at least brioche — in the English translation of the phrase they usually say “cake”, but it is just a sweet bread — is delicious, nutritive and not difficult to make. While bugs are disgusting, dangerous and, when you make all the calculations, the economics for their production is not really that green. I know, Asians eat bugs, but I’d rather keep them out of my diet. I prefer the Italian/Mediterranean food.

    “Self-portrait”, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1790)
  • Art - Featured - Italy

    How much did Renaissance painters make?

    February 1, 2024 - By 

    An investigation into Caravaggio’s earnings

    And now for something completely different. According to historical records, the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio signed a contract in 1600 to create two paintings (which ended up being “The conversion of Saint Paul” and “The martyrdom of Saint Peter”) during a period of eight months, for 400 scudi — even though in the end it took him more than a year to finish them, the first versions were rejected, and his final compensation was reduced to 300 scudi.

    It is also reported that he sold one of his earlier paintings, “The Fortune Teller” (1594), for just 8 scudi, as he was apparently broke at the time.

    So far, so good. But how much was a scudo?

    The answer is not as easy as it seems to find out. A Roman scudo was the highest value coin in the Papal States of Rome at the time. It was subdivided into 100 baiocchi, which was further divided into 5 quattrini (incidentally, in some regions of Italy they still say “quattrini” when they mean money or coins in general).

    A scudo came in the form of a gold or silver coin. The gold coins had a weight of 3.35 grams of gold 22K. Let’s say that Caravaggio had been paid in gold coins. Calculating with current gold prices (55 euros per gram at 22K), we would have 184 euros per scudo, so 300 scudi would mean a total of 55,275 euros today.

    But would that be an adequate way of measuring its real value at the time?

    No, not really. The price of gold and what it can buy can fluctuate quite a lot, so it is better to analyse it in terms of cost of living and what you could buy with a scudo in Rome in 1600.

    Now, in the 1600s, Italy wasn’t a unified republic as it is now, and each region had its own monetary system. While Rome used the scudo/baiocco/quattrini, other regions of Italy used the lira, which was subdivided into 20 soldi and then each soldi into 12 denari — `again, “soldi” and “denaro” are also general terms for “money” in Italy). But converting from one system to another is quite complicated, as their value could change from region to region or from year to year.

    In Florence, in the early 1500s, Leonardo da Vinci is known to have been paid 200 florins for a painting. The florin in Florence was more less the equivalent of a scudo in Rome, that is, a gold coin of about 3 to 4 grams. (Technically, Caravaggio would be placed more in the “Baroque” period than in the Renaissance, as that had peaked a 100 years earlier and mostly around Florence, but here for simplicity I’m calling both of them “Renaissance painters”.)

    Anyway — because of the conversion difficulties, let us focus just in Rome.

    Cost of living in the 1600s

    What was the cost of living in Rome in 1600? According to a paper by Richard E. Spear, living in the Eternal City was not cheap back then (it still isn’t today). Just rent would set you down between 12 scudi a year in the poorest neighbourhoods to up to a 100 scudi in the really posh ones. The painter Artemisia Gentileschi and her family is known to have rented two of the rooms in their house to lodgers for 18 scudi a year. In 1619, painter Guido Reni received an allowance of 50 scudi a year to pay for his rent (on top of a monthly salary of 9 scudi).

    What about food? Also according to Spear, a merchant would spend about 70 scudi a year on food. A dozen eggs would cost 1 baiocco (0.01 scudi), a litre of wine 3 baiocchi (0.03 scudi) and a kilogram of bread, between 4 to 5 baiocchi. Pasta was considered a luxury good and could cost you thrice as much, 12 to 15 baiocchi. Fish was also very expensive in Rome, at 24 baiocchi a kg, while you could get beef and lamb for 9 baiocchi a kg. A pair of shoes cost 50 baiocchi, or half a scudo.

    And what were average salaries like? Again according to Spear, “during 1605-7, a field worker made between 15 and 22 baiocchi a day, or about 50 scudi a year; a muratore, or skilled mason, earned 35 baiocchi a day in 1624, that is, about 85 scudi annually.” On average, an ordinary worker would spend about three quarters of his income in food, and a third of that just on bread.

    On the other hand, a wealthy merchant could make as much as 40,000 to 50,000 scudi in a year, and a cardinal could get an ecclesiastical income between 10,000 and 20,000 scudi. A few made even more. Cardinal Scipiano Borghese, of the famous Borghese family, made 405 scudi a month as “superintendent of the ecclesiastical state”, and in 1612 he earned an astonishing 140,000 scudi in just a year.

    Let’s say that Caravaggio’s average contract was for a duration of 8-10 months, so rounding up, with 300 scudi for that period he was making about 1 scudo a day. However, he might have have multiple commissions at the time. Considering that Caravaggio is known to have been paid a total 4,400 scudi in the last ten years of his life for 17 paintings, but he is known to have painted at lest 40 works during that time, if we average 250 scudi per commission (4,400 / 17), Spear calculates Caravaggio’s yearly income at 1,000 scudi.

    However, we have to deduce from that all his other expenses — paying his assistants and models, buying painting materials, which could be quite expensive, and were not included in the payment.

    Nevertheless, with just one scudo you could buy 20 kg of bread, or two pairs of shoes, or a barrel of 40 litres of wine, or 4 kg of fish.

    Considering today’s cost of bread in Italy is about 3 euro/kg, 20 kg of bread costs 60 euro. Therefore we could say — very approximately — that Caravaggio was receiving the equivalent of today’s 60 euro a day, 1,800 euros a month, or a total of 18,000 euros for the 300 scudi during 10 months. However, if we calculate his yearly income as 1,000 scudi a year, as Spear does, then we have an income of 60,000 euros a year, or 165 euros a day, which is more, but not much more than what an average worker makes in today’s Rome (43,000 euro/year).

    But considering that at the time there were lots of people living in extreme poverty in Rome, and than an average worker would not make more than 60 or 70 scudi a year, 1,000 a year was a very respectable sum.

    It doesn’t seem like a lot now — considering that today a single painting by Caravaggio is worth 40 millions of euros — but back then, with 1,000 scudi you could live quite comfortably for a year and even afford servants (as some painters did, and relatively few people could afford servants in Rome back then).

    Caravaggio was not average

    Caravaggio was paid more than other artists, since he was even back then famous and requested. On the other hand, he was also infamous for his bohemian lifestyle, and probably spent a lot of his money in gambling, booze and prostitutes (*). He was also constantly involved in brawls and duels and was arrested and sued a few times, so a lot of money probably went into that too.

    And life can change a lot in a few years. In 1594, Caravaggio was poor and selling a major painting for just 8 scudi. In 1601, he was the most sought after painter in Rome, earning lots of commissions. But just five years later, in 1606, he was accused of the murder of a wealthy young man, Rannuccio Tomassoni, and had to flee Rome in disgrace with a bounty on his head.

    After that he lived in exile in Naples, Sicily and Malta, but got involved in fights there and made new enemies, so he had to flee Malta too. He died in relative poverty at only 38 years of age in the beautiful peninsula of Porto Ercole, Tuscany, and the causes of his death are still unclear. Some say syphilis, some say malaria, some say sepsis from a wound in yet another fight, and some say he was murdered by assassins sent by the Tomassoni family.

    (1) Much is made in the current discourse of Caravaggio being homosexual, but that seems to be based exclusively on the fact that he liked to paint beautiful young boys, which is not much evidence of anything. His known affairs were all with women. He is known to have had a relationship with the prostitute Fillide Melandroni, who posed for several of his paintings, and also a certain “Lena” is listed as his companion — this is likely Maddalena Antognetti, who posed for him as Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

     

    Fillide as Judith in “Judith beheading Holofernes” (1599)
    Maddalena Antognetti as “Saint Catherine of Alexandria” (1599)
    “The conversion of Saint Paul” (1600-01)
    “The taking of the Christ” (1602)
  • Articles - Cinema - Featured - Psychology - Women

    The Birth Rate Crisis: There’s something about Modernity

    January 24, 2024 - By 

    Perfect Days

    “Perfect Days”, Wim Wenders’ latest movie set in Tokyo, is a very poetic, minimalistic film about finding joy in the simple things of life. (I am usually not a great fan of Wenders, but this is a good one).

    In the film, the main character works as a public toilet cleaner, although his education level seems to be relatively high. He’s an avid reader (Faulkner, Highsmith), an amateur photographer, and he enjoys listening to alternative American music from the 1960s and 1970s (Nina Simone, Lou Reed and The Kinks are the main hits of the soundtrack that he plays from cassette tapes in his car while driving to work). Excepting one Japanese song and at least one Japanese book, most books and songs shown in the film are by Americans, so this looks like a demonstration of how Americanized Japan has become, although that might be a generational thing: it represents the Japanese who came of age in the 1960s/1970s, of which writer Haruki Murakami might be another example. (Today, it’s in large part the American youth who watches Japanese animes and gets “Japanized”.)

    The main character is a single man in his 50s living alone in Tokyo. He has no children and apparently has never married, although the film implies he had some form of relationship with a woman years ago. His only family connections seem to be a sister and a niece he rarely sees.

    The film is not really about the appalling birth rates in Japan, nor about the increasing loneliness in modern Japanese cities. But characters like the one in the movie, once an exception, must be very common now. A recent survey informs us that “More than one-third of unmarried Japanese adults in their 20s to 40s have never been in a relationship and one-fourth have no intention of ever getting married.”

    It’s no wonder that Japan has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.

    Why don’t Japanese people want to marry? For men, the alleged main cause was “the financial strain of married life”. For women, “they do not want to compromise their freedom and independence.”

    Freedom and independence, eh? How’s that working out for women, though? Most women appear to be increasingly unhappier than they were decades ago. In the following article from a left-leaning site, they call it a “paradox” and say that it is “strange”:

    Something strange is going on in women’s happiness research. Because despite having more freedom and employment opportunities than ever before, women have higher levels of anxiety and more mental health challenges, such as depression, anger, loneliness and more restless sleep. And these results are seen across many countries and different age groups.

    But who says it is a paradox? Isn’t it more likely that “freedom and employment” don’t lead to happiness, and that marriage and babies, while no guarantee of “happiness” either, at least give a more concrete sense of long-term satisfaction?

    As a fan of Ozu movies, I make a case that Japan should just go back to arranged or semi-arranged marriages. (By the way, in Ozu’s “Late Spring” there’s a good speech by the father about marriage.)

    Not just the Japs

    Japan may be an extreme case, with its young men “marrying” holograms or anime characters. But neighbouring South Korea has an even lower birth rate — and Asia is far from alone in that trend. In fact, most of the world, excepting perhaps Africa and India, is on a downward population trend. All Western countries right now, and many non-Western too, have below-replacement birth rates. Some, such as Germany or Italy, are dangerously close to the levels of Japan and South Korea.

    And recently even France, which for years used to be an exception with more robust birth rates — although that might have been caused by the influx of foreign migrants that the French government doesn’t like to count in its statistics — now had a “baby bust” with the lowest number of births since World War II.

    But why?

    There are lots of reasons, of course. Some are biological — micro-plastics, whatever they put in our food and water, vaccines. Some are economic — higher living costs and uncertainty about the future. Some are social — feminism, urbanization, loss of religion.

    The biological and economic causes warrant some investigation, but I’d say that the social causes are the most important ones.

    The loss of religion by itself seems to he a huge part of it. The groups with higher birth rates tend to be the most religious ones: the Amish, traditional Catholics, practising Muslims, Orthodox Jews. Having and taking care of several children is not easy. The idea of having a higher purpose in life beyond personal happiness certainly helps, as this memorable dialog from Tarkovsky’s “Nostalghia” reminds us: “I know, you want to be happy. But there are more important things.”

    Several years ago, I did a short documentary that no-one watched about exactly that issue. It was called “Childless in Europe” and you can watch it below.

    And Feminism?

    Feminism didn’t help either. Women, in the end, are the ones who decide if they will have children or not. And most are deciding not to, either because they prefer to focus on their career and marry later, or because they decide that having children interfere with their search for happiness, or because they consider marriage a form of prison, or… Who knows? Fact is, wherever feminism flourishes, the birth rate goes down.

    On top of that, there is a growing dissatisfaction between the sexes. Men and women no longer seem to understand each other. Many Western women, in particular, seem to have become totally unaware of what men want, and even of what they themselves want. A viral video recently showed a typical modern young Western woman saying that she “doesn’t cook, doesn’t clean, and doesn’t bring anything to the table in a relationship except her looks and personality”. Many such cases. Sad.

    Of course the men’s reaction is not much better, divided into either virgin MGTOWs or chad PUAs — both awful lifestyles that do not lead to higher birth rates, but rather increase even more the problem. Sexual liberation ends up being bad for both sexes.

    (This is not even new, as J. D. Unwin’s “Sex and Culture”, published in 1934, observed that sexual liberation and the end of strict monogamy always led to cultural decay).

    The role of digital technology

    Technology, and in particular digital technology in the form of social media and smartphones in general, might also be a factor.

    I don’t know the exact mechanism, but it seems that the more we live in the digital world, the less we want to interact with real people in real life. Some people even prefer to have “AI girlfriends” and pay for them.

    Autism is growing (although that could also be an effect of vaccines). Many young people no longer know how to communicate face to face.

    We have evolved into a society that talks a lot about sex, and inflicts graphic images of sex even on teenagers and children, but more and more it seems to be just images and talking. Narcissistic posturing. The more people talk or fantasize about sex and about their “sexual identity”, the less they seem to actually have sex, much less procreative sex.

    Many young people seem to make themselves ugly on purpose, consciously or subconsciously, with tattoos, blue hair, pink hair, piercings, nose rings. It might be a subtle, or perhaps not so subtle, way of avoiding sexual interest from others and further social interaction. Safer to interact just from behind a screen.

    Even prostitution has receded mostly to cams, nudes and other interactions at a distance. OnlyFans is the new brothel. Phones are the new bed. Everything is virtual.

    If it goes on like that, a few European ethnicities could disappear in the not too distant future, either by mixing into the general globalized gene pool or simply by failing to reproduce in enough numbers.

    No children.

    Is there hope?

    If there is, it lies in the young Catholic converts I saw singing in the Latin Mass in Finland. In the young woman in Spain kneeling in front of the crucifix during a Corpus Christi procession. In the young woman in Leipzig playing the piano at church. They are the future, whether they know it or not.

    And not necessarily because they are better or more moral than their blue-haired brethren, but simply because the blue-haired, tattooed, pierced folks will likely have zero or few children — if they even marry at all, I mean someone of their own sex — while those Catholic young men and women are more likely to form large families one day.

    But, more importantly, even if they don’t have any children themselves, they are establishing the foundations of a more stable society based on stable, time-tested values. Blue-haired, pierced, socially atomized individuals who marry holograms or anime characters don’t lead to any kind of society that can last.

    Latin Mass.

     

  • Articles - Featured - Italy

    From the lives of Tuscan Saints

    December 18, 2023 - By 

    Gemma

    Saint Gemma Galgani was born in 1878 into a poor family in a small village near Lucca, but they soon moved to Lucca as her father, a pharmacist, found work there. She was the fifth of eight siblings, only two females, the rest males. As it happened to other poor people at the time, death was an early companion. Two of her siblings died still in their early childhood. Then her mother died when Gemma was only 7 years old. Her father died when she was 19, and she herself was frail and plagued by many different health problems all her life, and died at just 25 of tuberculosis.

    And yet, looking at her photographs, you see a face that seems calm and serene.

    Most famous saints were born and died before the invention of photography, but we have wonderful paintings of them by famous artists. With Gemma, it’s the opposite. When Saint Gemma was canonized, in 1940, modern art was already in full swing, so there are no great paintings of her, but there are two or three beautiful photographs — and only because she was ordered to by her confessor, as she didn’t like to be photographed.

    I visited the Sanctuary of Saint Gemma in Lucca — which is also, by the way, the hometown of opera composer Giacomo Puccini, but I only found that out because there was a giant statue of him right in front of the place I was staying — and also Casa Giannini, which is the house of the Giannini family that basically adopted her after she became an orphan. A nun gave me a guided tour as she enthusiastically talked about Gemma’s life.

    There is another house where Gemma lived, which belonged to her father, the so-called “casa delle stigmata”, which is where she supposedly received the stigmata signs of Christ. I wanted to visit it too, but that required an appointment and unfortunately I didn’t have much time. Not having a car, my mobility was reduced, and I had to get to San Gimignano that same afternoon. It took me almost five hours to reach it by a combination of delayed buses and trains.

    Two other things impressed me in Lucca: that a lot of people moved around in bicycles, including some very elegantly dressed women checking their iPhone at the same time (this is not as common in Italy as it is in, say, the Netherlands), and the young students in the street selling, or trying to sell, the “Lotta Communista” newspaper. (I thought Italy’s love affair with the Communist Party was a thing of the past, but apparently not.)

    Fina

    San Gimignano is a wonderful little medieval town with nothing much going on except well, amazing churches and afrescos and towers, but during summer it is usually full of annoying British, American and German tourists. Thousands of them. (The American ones are particularly obnoxious. I remember once an American middle-aged woman saying about a similar medieval town: “it is beautiful, but everything looks the same”. “Let’s get a gelato”, his husband replied).

    Italy would be a wonderful place to visit if it wasn’t for the tourists.

    Now, I know, it’s not nice to complain about tourists when I am a stupid tourist myself. But the nice thing about visiting Tuscany in winter is that almost everything is empty and quiet. No lines, no crowds. The town, usually filled to maximum capacity in summer, right now has mostly deserted streets. I bumped with a few locals and a couple of Japanese tourists — there are always Japanese tourists, but they are quiet and polite and don’t bother me — but that was it.

    In San Gimignano, the most famous local saint is Santa Fina. Her life, if anything, was even more tragic than that of poor Gemma. Born in 1238 into a noble family that had, however, fallen into rough times, at just ten years of age she developed an illness that left her basically paralyzed. Refusing a bed with a mattress, which she thought too comfortable for a poor sinner like herself, she slept in a wooden pallet. During her five years of illness, her father died from some disease or other, then her mother fell down the stairs and died too. Fina got worse and worse and died at just 15 years of age, but with the same serenity as Gemma. There are no photographs of her, of course, and not even paintings made when she was still alive, but several paintings and afrescos in the local church and museum tell her story. Fina’s house also still exists, but unfortunately it is now a private residency and it not possible to visit it.

    For some reason, Saint Fina was never officially canonized, but don’t tell that to the people in San Gimignano. They hold not just one, but two processions in homage to her every year, one in March, and one in August. Unfortunately, none in December.

    Catarina

    Siena is another wonderful medieval town, certainly bigger than San Gimignano and even Lucca, although not as big as Florence. Dante visited it a few times  and mentions it in his Comedy. Catarina di Siena — Saint Catherine — was born there just a few years after Dante’s death.

    She didn’t live to old age either, but at least managed to reached a slightly more respectable age of 33 years old — the same as Christ — when she died. While like Gemma and Fina she also lived a personally humble and austere life, contrary to them she was not from a poor family and eventually she also became heavily involved in theology and politics. In fact, she’s famous for having managed to help solve a schism and convince the then Pope to return to Rome from Avignon — were it not for her, perhaps the Papal seat would today be located in France.

    There are many paintings of her, at least one of them contemporary, and her real head can be seen in the Basilica of San Domenico in Siena. It is an impressive sight. Her head is supposedly “uncorrupted”, that is, the skull was never mummified by artificial means, but somehow remained with skin around it — for over 600 years.

    When I visited it, Siena was also relatively quiet in the morning and early afternoon, but then, at around 4 PM in that lazy Sunday, the streets suddenly became filled with people. Where did all those pedestrians just come from? It seemed as if everyone and their mother had decided to come out of their home at exactly the same time. Perhaps it’s just because “lunch time” in Italy is from 1PM – 4PM and most shops are closed during that period, but it was odd.

    I don’t know about my two or three remaining readers, but I am fascinated by the lives of martyrs and saints. They usually have lead such rough, difficult, even tragic lives, full of suffering and pain, and yet they withstand everything with the utmost serenity. “Well, that’s why they are saints”, you’ll say, while we’re just stupid sinners, but having just a diminutive crumb of that serenity and internal peace would certainly help in this day and age.

    And by coincidence — but, some say, there are no coincidences — as I had finished writing this text at around 9 PM, I went out to see “what was going on” at night in San Gimignano in winter. As you can imagine, not much. The streets were deserted and all shops were closed. But there seemed to be light inside the main Church. The door was opened and I entered. Inside, there were a few people, mostly older men and women between the ages of 60 and 80, which I suppose is the average age of the local inhabitants. (This is not a joke, as the recent local obituaries posted in the street showed ages between 97 and 102.) Most young people who work in the local bars or shops don’t really live in San Gimignano, but in other nearby towns.

    Turns out they were all waiting for the “Novena di Natale”, or Christmas Novena. And, in his homily, the priest spoke about “sanctity”. But he emphasized that he was talking, not about the sanctity that we associate with the most famous Saints, but the everyday “sanctity” that even we can achieve, in little ways, or, at least, in some ways. The Novena ended with the beautiful Christmas song “Tu Scendi delle Stelle” (you can hear it here in a version in a more polished version by Andrea Bocelli).

    Merry Christmas to all.

    Saint Gemma’s house (“Casa delle stigmata”) in Lucca.
    Santa Fina in her wooden bed fighting demons.
    The amazing Chiesa della Santissima Anunziata in Siena.
    My only dinner companion in San Gimignano.
    San Gimignano at night in December. Merry Christmas.
  • Art - Articles - Featured - Psychology

    The Interior World

    December 5, 2023 - By 

    In one of the stories by Frank O’Connor, “The Ugly Duckling” — the title is of course a reference to Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale, but this story about a tomboy girl is as Irish as it gets — there is a wonderful observation about certain types of people who, because of certain inadequacy or perceived inadequacy in their early life (poverty, ugliness, shyness, family problems etc), they escape their outside circumstances by creating for themselves a “rich interior world.”

    I suppose this is common enough. A child or teenager withdraws into himself and, if he’s at least a little bit creative, he will put his feelings into writing or drawing or singing. Some of these unhappy children or teenagers will later on grow up to become poets or artists or drunkards or saints, but not all.

    It has nothing to do with talent, necessarily, but with forging a sort of barrier against the perceived rejection by the world. As Paul Simon described the feeling in his classic song “I am a rock“:

    I am a rock
    I am an island
    I’ve built walls
    A fortress, steep and mighty
    That none may penetrate
    I have no need of friendship
    Friendship causes pain
    Its laughter and its loving I disdain

    This phenomenon is related to, but also not exactly the same, as the contrast between introversion and extroversion. Introversion and extroversion are more related to our abilities to socialize, but not to our creative impulse, although perhaps there is a relation there too. Introverted people will probably tend to go more towards solitary arts like writing and painting, while extroverted people will probably prefer more social arts such as acting or singing or dancing.

    But I have noticed — and it was almost a shock at the beginning — that there’s many people who have no creative or even meditative impulse whatsoever. All their energy is purely directed to the outside world, to action, to the material: to consuming and moving and talking and watching. People who can’t stay five seconds with their own thoughts, or they’d go mad. I’ve seen them, I even talked to them. Take away their smartphone for ten seconds and they start to panic: “And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen / Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.” (T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”) Or, as Pascal said, “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to stay quietly in a room alone.”

    Introspection does not necessarily mean being alone. In fact, there is probably more loneliness among young people today than at any other period in history, and lots of people, perhaps even a third of all adults, live alone. It doesn’t mean they are introspective — they will be chatting online or watching pornography or playing video games or doing any para-social activity that will occupy their time, but mostly in negative ways.

    As our society creates more and more noisy distractions to avoid the horrors of inner gazing, people become less interested, not only in creating, but even in reading or watching more meditative, introspective forms of art. Instead of retreating into an interior world, they desire, on the contrary, to escape it at all costs.

    There was a time when film directors such as Ozu, Tarkovsky or Bresson could create slow, atmospheric films without “plot points” or special effects, and still be relatively successful, or at least find their niche audience. I watched Bresson’s “Mouchette” for the first time recently and it is such a masterpiece — the George Bernanos’ novel in which it is based is very good too.

    (Here’s a short clip about the filming that includes a brief interview with Bresson).

    Sure, it’s not a film for everyone. Reading the comments on a trailer of the movie, I saw a comment of someone who showed the film to a group of teenagers. All of them walked out in the first fifteen minutes, but one kid remained, and then when the film ended he asked: “can I watch it again?”

    I have similar experiences teaching film or literature in college. I would show a movie or talk about a book and most students would be bored out of their minds, but there would be that one kid or that one girl who loved the book or the movie because it touched deeply into his or her soul.

    Bresson and Tarkovsky and Ozu kept making movies until the end of their lives. But, as they say, those were different times. Is there anyone who even tries to do such kind of films today? Would he find someone to finance him? Or someone who creates actual poetry, or actual painting? Very few. Even when many people still have talent — and there’s always talented people in every generation — modern culture seem to lack the depth and spirituality to generate great transcending art. Almost everything these days seems to be done either just for money or to promote some kind of political message.

    But things will change, surely. I think that the last decades of the Western world, or this period of accelerated social change that we’ve seen from, say, the mid-1960s until today, is in the end an anomaly. Already we see cracks on the façade, and the yearning of many young people for something different. The New World Order will break apart, and I don’t think it will take that long.

    In the meantime, we can cultivate our interior world.

  • Art - Books - Featured

    The Snow Queen, with 32 classic illustrations

    November 11, 2023 - By 

    Just in time for Christmas, we have created a new version of Hans Andersen’s Story “The Snow Queen”. Yes, you read it right, it’s not “The Drag Queen”, to keep up with modern times, it’s the original “The Snow Queen”, Andersen’s immortal beloved classic.

    You can buy it now at a cheaper price in our shop! Or at the regular price at Amazon.

    The story is the same everyone knows and loves, but we revised and updated the English translation and, most importantly, we added 32 classic illustrations by 13 different illustrators, from Anne Anderson to Charles Robinson (there are in fact three different Robinsons illustrating here, including two who are brothers) to Edmund Dulac, Margaret Tarrant and Rudolf Koivu.

    Tarrant and Koivu are the ones who have more illustrations featured, in part to promote their work a bit more. Tarrant was an English illustrator from the early 20th century. But Rudolf Koivu was interesting to us because he was a Finnish illustrator, and while he’s relatively famous in Finland and has become the name of a prize for children’s books, he’s not so well-known abroad. So we thought it would be nice to use his illustrations in this version. Of course all the others are nice too.

    Anne Anderson, a Scottish illustrator, was interesting too: she lived in Argentina until she was a teenager, as her parents had some business there, and it appears that it was in Argentina where she became interested in illustration. She moved back to Britain as a teenager.

    I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for old-style illustrations, and for illustrated books in general. As Lewis Carrol’s Alice would say, “what’s the use of a book it it has no pictures in it?” Well, we wouldn’t go that far, but we do think that illustrations usually add to the enjoyment of reading. The book is available in paperback, hardcover and ebook, and is a nice Christmas gift for all.

     

  • Books - Featured

    Three new books

    October 26, 2023 - By 

    We have published three new books by our imprint Contrarium. The first one is a bilingual Spanish-English edition of a selection of Horacio Quiroga’s short stories. Quiroga was a South American master of the short story genre. Many of the stories presented here are translated into English for the first time. Others are classics but presented here in a new, revised translation, next to the original Spanish text.

    Another book we published is Hilaire Belloc’s “The Path to Rome“, the narration of his walking journey from Toul, France, to Rome in Italy. There are other editions of this book, but this one has the original illustrations rescanned in high resolution. We also added two short biographical sketches, one by his friend G. K. Chesterton and one by Jorge Luis Borges.

    And the third book is Edward Burke’s “Bachelors’ Buttons“. Edward Burke is actually Winifred Boggs, an authoress of funny romantic comedies which were a success at the time. This book was originally published in 1914 and was out of print.

    We also have an illustrated anthology of stories for children on the way, but it may take a little bit more time to finish that one. In the meantime, you can check our Dark Fairy Tales collection.

     

  • Articles - Featured - Italy - Russia

    You can’t go home again

    October 6, 2023 - By 

    Language as a home

    “The Russian language is my homeland”, wrote the great poet Anna Akhmatova. She was born in Odessa but lived mostly in Saint Petersburg. She descended from Ukrainian cossacks on her father’s side and from Russian nobility on her mother’s side.

    She could have escaped during the 1917 Revolution, as friends of hers did, but chose to stay instead. She knew she was giving up freedom, but she said she could not bear to live in exile, like a stranger in a strange land.

    Her first husband was shot by Lenin and her son was sent to the gulag by Stalin. But she never left the Soviet Union, except for brief trips at the end of her life, authorized by the regime.

    She wrote patriotic poems and read them to soldiers during the siege of Leningrad, but she also wrote “Requiem”, a long poem about the Stalinist terror, published only posthumously in Russia in 1987.

    The English language is not my homeland. I write in English because I lived for many years in English-speaking countries but it’s not my mother tongue — I think I write decently in it, but it still doesn’t feel completely natural, and my pronunciation is not great. But I lived in so many countries, I don’t know in which language I should write anymore. And, unlike Akhmatova, I live in exile. A stranger in a strange land.

    Tradition as a home

    There is a YouTube channel I like called Pasta Grannies. It interviews year old Italian grandmas who make pasta the traditional way. The last one was about a 96-year old grandma making homemade pesto.

    It is beautiful, but it’s also kind of sad. Will this tradition be kept alive in the future?

    Italy has a fertility rate of less than 1.3 children per woman, and, on top of that, it is receiving thousands of foreign migrants every year. As in France, increasingly even small towns are full of immigrants, and locals are not having children, but just getting old.

    Will these African, Arab and Asian migrants keep the handmade pasta tradition alive? Highly unlikely. They are bringing their own traditions with them.

    Most of the illegal migrants board boats on the Libyan coast. They could be easily transported to Tunisia, which is much closer, but Tunis doesn’t want them. So German NGOs picks them up just a few miles off the Libyan coast, and bring them to Lampedusa. There, the EU makes it impossible for them to be deported. So they remain, but many don’t have jobs, and not even a lot of benefits.

    Italy is not really a rich country, and many Italians are struggling right now, so you can imagine that most of those migrants are not really having the dream life they were told they would have.

    Since it’s German NGOs that bring them, perhaps the Italians should put them all on buses and send them to Berlin. Germany also offers better benefits to migrants, so it would be win-win.

    But Meloni is not doing anything about it, and she recently even implied that she wants to increase legal immigration to the country, bringing in people from India too.

    Say what you want about Salvini, at least he wasn’t as big a disappointment as Meloni proved to be.

    Now the EU has a new agreement that all member countries must share the enrichment. So Poland, Hungary and other countries not so near the Mediterranean will receive their share too. It’s only fair.

    No home even at home

    In 1973, French writer Jean Raspail wrote the novel The Camp of the Saints, which was an early warning about mass immigration. Despite its relevant theme, the book is out of print. You can buy it at Amazon for 1,000 dollars, which is more than most immigrants pay to the smugglers for their boat ride to Europe.

    I don’t even blame the migrants. Some demonize them, but, well, most of them are just poor people who are just being used by others in power — to lower salaries, to create conflict, maybe one day to start a new war, who knows. They probably wouldn’t even come if there wasn’t an incentive from the European governments for them to do so. As Akhmatova knew, it’s hard to live away from one’s homeland.

    And in the end, that’s what it is all about. Those migrants only come because the European and American governments are pushing it, and even paying for it.

    Just the other day some mayor of a small town in Germany said he was going to install converted containers to house refugees in a primary school, against the parents’ wishes, and he even bragged that there was nothing anyone could do about it.

    What is that if not a big “F.U.” to the local population?

    Mass migration is portrayed as some kind of natural, unstoppable force, like a tsunami, but it’s exactly the opposite. Billions of dollars or euros are spent to bring those migrants, and then other billions are spent to host them in apartments or containers or camps, and sometimes they even receive a monthly wage.

    Occasionally the governments even complain that it costs too much. Well, what about, just stopping spending all those billions?

    Of course, it won’t happen. It’s an engineered program that could easily be stopped if there was just the will. But there isn’t.

    If the migrants feel bad, if they can’t find a job, if they suffer with racism and xenophobia, if their life sucks and Europe or America is not the shining city on the hill they were promised, they can always go home.

    But you, my friend, who grew up under the shadow of those native trees, whose ancestors built these old medieval towns and churches that still stand, you have nowhere to go.

    Your country has changed. Your life has changed.

    You can’t go home again.

    No one wants to help us
    Because we stayed home,
    Because, loving our city
    And not winged freedom,
    We preserved for ourselves
    Its palaces, its fire and water.

    (Anna Akhmatova, Petrograd, 1919)

  • Art - Featured - Magazine

    Geist magazine nr. 5 and its future

    July 26, 2023 - By 

    Our last and so far final number of Geist magazine (nr 5, Spring 2023) was received with great success and we did a small event to commemorate it. You can read it here, or purchase a print copy in full color at our shop. There are no plans at the moment for a new edition, although perhaps we will look into it in early 2024. We do thank all the people that participated in this project, as artists, writers or just readers. Perhaps we will continue it next year, we will see.