Slave Sculpture

Head of a black man holding up the tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro, designed by Baldassare Longhena, 1665-69. In the defence of Candia (modern Herakleion), the Venetians defeated the Ottomans at sea and African galley slaves were among their prisoners. Basilica of the Frari

The image comes from JMSmith, who took the photo in Venice. The caption comes from a book review of  Monumenti dei Dogi: sei secoli di scultura a Venezia in The Art Newspaper. The images are different, but I am certain they are of both photos of the same sculpture. The book is in Italian, costs about 70 Euros and is available from Amazon. Another book also has a picture of this same sculpture.

Brigands: Quest for Gold

Brigands: The Quest for Gold - Official Trailer | Netflix
MVSRS
19th Century Sicily, brigands, which used to be bandits, have become a political force. The show is pretty bad. This line is sums it up pretty well: Valeria Maiolino of Cinefilos.it gave the series two-and-a-half stars out of five, but commended its set design, costumes, and makeup.

Part of the problem is that most of what the characters do doesn't make any sense. Nobody trusts anybody else, and for good reason, they can't be trusted. Alliances are formed and reformed so quickly that it's hard to tell if they are for real or fake. Even if they are heart felt at the moment, the heart is fickle so they may change at any moment.

Then you realize this is war-torn Sicily where we have bands of criminals roaming the countryside and it's the 19th Century so the drink of choice is red, red wine, so they're basically all drunk all the time, so it's actually pretty realistic. But that's not what we want. We want a nice story with honest heroes and brave damsals, but what we've got is reality TV.

This castle shows up as a prison. It is actually Castello Alfonsino in Brindisi, Italy, which is in the boot heel of Italy a couple hundred miles from Sicily.

Maserati Mostro

2016 Maserati Mostro

This Maserati is a real Italian hot rod. They built five of them to celebrate Maserati's 100th year anniversary. The company was founded by five brothers sometime around 1920. A couple of those brothers lived very long lives. Some of them didn't.

MV Agusta Motorcycle

MV Agusta

This MV Agusta motorcycle is likely a 1972 model. When this model was introduced in 1966 it was the first production motorcycle with a four cylinder transverse engine. The Honda CB750 with the same transverse engine layout was introduced in 1969. 

The MV Agusta displaced 750 cc and used DOHC (Dual Over Head Camshafts). It also used a shaft to drive the rear wheels instead of a chain. This is kind of nuts since you need to use two sets of right angle gears to transfer power to the rear wheel. I don't know of anyone else who has done this. I've heard of MV Augusta motorcycles before, but only in the context of racing. This is not surprising since the MV Agusta cost $6,500 and the Honda only cost a shade over $2,000.

Wikipedia has a long article about the history of this Italian company and the variety of motorcycles and other machines that they built.

Lampedusa

Tunisia (left side), Lampedusa (bottom center), Malta & Sicily (upper right)

You may have heard about the boatloads of people fleeing from Africa to Europe. If you were like me you might have assumed that they were making landfall on mainland Europe. Seems that is not the case. Seems a large number of them are landing on Lampedusa on account of it being the bit of Italy closest to Africa. Lampedusa is tiny. I've spent some time looking at the Mediterranean on Google Maps and I've never noticed it before.

Aerial view of Lampedusa

Paper Donald Triumphant

Dazi Nostri (our duties) - Paper mache statue of Donald Trump  in Viareggio, Italy
Photo by Benjamin Prosnitz February 10, 2019

I walked into my office and there was a cool picture of a piece of jewelry on my computer screen, courtesy of the Chromebox screen saver. There was a note in the corner that said 'Benjamin Prosnitz', so I looked him up and found he has an Instagram account with a zillion pics. I'm scrolling through them looking for some jewelry, not finding anything and this photo pops up. Not quite sure what kind of message they are trying to send, but it does make Donald look like some kind of Samurai warlord, which, if you are into old Japanese Samurai movies is kind of cool. If you like the Donald. If you don't, well, you can make up your own fable.

P. S. I suspect the reason the sword is pointing down is due to the limitations placed on the floats in this parade or the structural limits of making something out of paper mache. I am sure someone has a philosophical reason for it, but I haven't heard it.

Reputation is All

Villa Jovis Capri Italy

How to destroy a reputation by Andrew Doyle starts out by talking about Tiberius, a first century Roman Emperor. Tiberius built a villa on the easternmost extremity of Capri. Cool, fancy house on an island in the sunny Mediterranean. What they don't tell you is the eastern end of Capri ends with some giant cliffs and the house is perched right on the brink. Those are the ruins of the villa in the center of the picture above.

Anyway, Andrew talks about how easily reputations are destroyed and how people (you, me and everyone else) have an innate tendency to believe the worst.

P. S. I think my mind came up with the title because I heard Uhtred of Bebbanburg say 'Destiny is All' about a zillion times in The Last Kingdom.

The Law According to Lidia Poët - Netflix Series

The Law According to Lidia Poët | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Lidia was a real person:

Lidia Poët (1855 – 1949) was the first modern female Italian lawyer. Her disbarring led to a movement to allow women to practice law and hold public office in Italy. - Wikipedia

In the show she is a cute, bright pixie, member of a wealthy family. I mean we don't really care about the peasants do we? She's basically a 19th century Nancy Drew, using her wits to solve a murder in each episode, and or course exonerating the falsely charged fool who has gotten arrested.

19th century technology is in evidence: she has a typewriter, she trades a priceless Ming vase for a bicycle, the concept of using fingerprints to identify a person is known, though not commonly accepted. And the prosecutor's office has a volumetric glove, which is basically a mechanical lie detector.

The first scientific lie detector test was invented by Cesare Lombrosso in 1895. This was known as the Volumetric Glove. The subject's hand was placed in a container of water. The amount of water displaced as the subject was asked questions indicated peripheral vasoconstriction, and thus the amount of stress present. - Polygraph Solutions

Cesare Lombroso, a famed criminologist, described a primitive lie detector called a volumetric glove in his 1876 book Criminal Man: "The glove is filled with air, and the greater or smaller the pressure exercised on the air by the pulsation of the blood in the veins of the hand acts on an aerial column. . . . [T]his chamber supports a lever carrying an indicator which rises and falls with the greater or slighter flow of blood in the hand." - Chegg

Mosso was encouraged in his studies of the emotions by Lombroso, his tutor and contemporary. His work is of unusual interest to the student of deception, particularly his studies of fear and of its influence on the heart and respiration. As early as 1875 Mosso demonstrated, by means of a "plethysmograph" (an instrument for measuring blood pressure and pulse changes) periodic undulations in man's blood pressure caused by the respiration cycle; " and his ingenuous studies of the circulation of the blood in the brain opened up new avenues for the study of the influences of fear. In 1895 he described a new device for measuring blood pressure, giving credit to Vierordt for first measuring man's blood pressure, from the outside, in 1855. - Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The device in the show is a mechanical device that holds the subject's wrist and records the changes in pressure on a black tape that also runs through the device.

Luna Nera - Netflix Series

Luna Nera season 1 trailer
Season & series

Luna Nera is Italian for Black Moon. This is a odd kind of show. We're back in the bad old days in Italy, back when people were superstitious and believed in all kinds of nonsense like witches and curses and black magic. Some bad things happen and the local lord gathers his thugs and they set out to destroy all witches. Meanwhile his son, Pietro, has returned home from university to see his ailing mother. Pietro being all scientifically educated doesn't believe in witches or curses or black magic and thinks the local people are stupid, ignorant fools. Except. There are witches and black magic and curses, and naturally Pietro falls for a young woman who has more magical powers in her pinky than the rest of her coven. So this odd little story has three sides. Who's right? Pietro and his science? The witches with their magic? Or the ignorant locals?

Production values are pretty good, but the portrayal of the witches is a little weak. It's like the producers couldn't quite agree on a theme for the witches, so we've got a mishmash of styles that don't quite fit.

Il Processo - Netflix Series

Il processo - Il trailer ufficiale
Mediaset Infinity

Il Processo - The Trial - an Italian murder mystery. We watched this last year, but I never got around to publishing this post.

The above trailer is in Italian. We watched it on Netflix with English subtitles enabled. You can turn on subtitles in the above clip, but they are in Italian. YouTube has an auto-translate feature, it works on some videos but not on this one. The video clip will give you the look and feel of the show.


Locations used in the show

The show is set in Mantua in northern Italy. Several old, fancy buildings are shown and used.

Palazzo Te

Fall of the Giants - Giulio Romano ~1530
Palazzo Te Ceiling Fresco

Nomadic Niko has a page about some of the places in Mantua.

Wikipedia has a history of Mantua. It's quite the place.

The tune in the clip is by Billy Eilish:

Billie Eilish - bury a friend
Billie Eilish

The video is a little odd, but you know, kids these days.

Funiculi, Funicula

Rodney Dangerfield - Funiculi, Funicula
Justin Plowman

I haven't heard this tune in a long time. Liz Hinds posted a version of this tune, but it doesn't have any video, just a static image of the Italian flag. Come on, YouTube, you can do better than that, so I go looking. There's a bunch of similar videos, just a recording with a static image. There are also several concert performances with big orchestras, but this is only one I found that really gets into the spirit of the tune.

Where did this tune come from? My first suspect is a show tune from a post-WW2 movie, but no, it's much older than that.

Funiculì, Funiculà is a Neapolitan song composed in 1880. It was written to commemorate the opening of the first funicular railway on Mount Vesuvius. The sheet music sold over a million copies within a year. Since its publication, it has been widely adapted and recorded. - paraphrased from Wikipedia

Italy & Politics

Brothers of Italy's leader Giorgia Meloni shows a placard thanking Italian voters after winning last Sunday's election [Gregorio Borgia/AP Photo]

There was an election in Italy recently and a woman won. I just read two articles about her and I still can't remember her name. Forgive me, I haven't had my coffee yet. But the two articles aren't really about her. The one from Al-Jazeera is just a smear. I read about half of it waiting for any kind of evidence but none appeared, so I left it. The other is from Professor Ornery Dragon and it talks about the totalitarian tactics used to demonize anyone who deviates from the party line. He could have use the story from Al Jazeera as prime example. The Professor's story is pretty great.

The Professor's story comes here via Foxifier

Lisa Beat e i Bugiardi

Dramma della Gelosia - cover of Liar Liar (The Castaways)
Steve Martini

Flares Into Darkness posted a music video. It's just wild, an Italian cover of a hit from the 60s with a video made of clips from an old, presumably Italian, movie. I liked it so much I went looking for more and found this playlist of similar tunes. The above video is the first one on that list. Most of the tunes in the playlist are performed by Lisa Beat e i Bugiardi which translates as Lisa Beat and the Liars.

Tower Prendiparte, Bologna Italy

Tower Prendiparte, Bologna Italy
144 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

The default setting for this puzzle is 300 pieces, but you can choose from a variety numbers. I've done a couple of puzzles with that many pieces and it just takes forever. 100 to 150 pieces is more comfortable. It was a very challenging puzzle. The only pieces that I could identify by sight were ones for the tower and the large building with the big windows in the lower left corner corner. After that, it was just try and find place where they fit. Once I got maybe 75% done, there were enough restrictions that I could identify pieces by shape and it went much smoother. The title didn't give any clue as to just where this tower is. A little Google got me to Bologna, where it was easy enough to locate the tower.

Bologna Italy Tower

The angle isn't quite right, and the viewpoint elevation is a little low, but this view is pretty close to the image used for the puzzle. 

Identifying this particular tower was a little tougher. There are a bunch of medieval stone towers in Bologna Italy. At one time there may have been more than 100. Now there are fewer than 20. They are not all marked on Google Maps. However, at least some of them are labeled on Wikimapia, which is where I finally found the name. It is now a hotel and might be the largest one room hotel in the world. I don't think there are any windows.

Aloha Wanderwell

US actress, Aloha Wanderwell, with her husband Walter Baker, in front of the Arch of Constantine in 1928 -  Roma Ieri Oggi

Aloha has appeared here before.

Via Roger Pearse

Shame & Guilt

Guilt and Shame Matrix from Dr. Sanity
Notice the difference between the blue and red text

These three posts explain a great deal about all of the crazy loose in the world.

Honor – Definitions and Meditations - Head Noises

Honor – Definitions and Meditations - Cat Rotator's Quarterly

SHAME, THE ARAB PSYCHE, AND ISLAM - Dr. Sanity

P.S. A little bit of Greek Mythology for those who are weak in that area, like me:

Scylla and Charybdis were mythical sea monsters noted by Homer; Greek mythology sited them on opposite sides of the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria, on the Italian mainland. 

Between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom meaning

• to choose the lesser of two evils
• on the horns of a dilemma
• between the devil and the deep blue sea
• between a rock and a hard place

The mythical situation also developed a proverbial use in which seeking to choose between equally dangerous extremes is seen as leading inevitably to disaster.

On the Rocks

The incredible ibex defies gravity and climbs a dam | Forces of Nature with Brian Cox - BBC
BBC

I had seen pictures of these guys before, but I thought they just like climbing on rocks and maybe nibbling on a little lichen or something. Looking for salt makes more sense.

The dam is the Cingino Dam in the Italian Alps.

This giant frigging dam is the little gray smudge along the bottom edge of the lake.

Via California Bob

Botticelli

Primavera - Sandro Botticelli ~1480

We just finished watching season 2 of Medici - The Magnificent this evening. Sandro Botticelli was an intimate of the Medici brothers Lorenzo and Giuliano. The season ends with Sandro starting on this painting.

The Vasari Corridor

The Vasari Corridor: The World's Least Secret Secret Passageway

What do you do if you're the 16th-Century Duke of Florence and you need a way of getting between your two palaces without being seen by anyone? You build a 1km passageway 3 floors up in the air, of course... - YouTube blurb

I just came across Tim, The Tim(e) Traveler, and he's pretty entertaining. His specialty seems to be going to strange, obscure places and giving us a bit of history.

The Duke was a Medici and we already know they were a big deal in Florence. Also enemies of the Borgia.

Map of the Vasari Corridor

Tim's route starts at the Palazzo Vecchio on the left and follows the corridor along to the Palazzo Pitti on the right.

You can sort of see the corridor on Google Maps, but all the roofs on all the buildings in Florence are red tile, so it can be a little difficult to pick out.

Paolo Conte 彡 Via Con Me

Paolo Conte 彡 Via Con Me
Paolo is an Italian singer who is also a lawyer, or vice versa. I really like the tune. The video, I dunno, pretty girls, but pretty much an alien world. Or maybe I'm just old.