Sarto Dear Writer,
an article that tells me the speed. Greetings to all the authors in your studio Este, Carlo from Monaco
A city that tells
Written by Carl Wilhelm Macke
Ferrara seen through the eyes of a German journalist who chose her as his second home.
The Italians, so at least I think, like statistics.
Their newspapers are always full of tables, lists of bestsellers and opinion polls.
Very popular seem to be also the charts of the Italian cities with the best quality of life, regularly published magazines. The most important evaluation criteria consist of the average wage of citizens, the quality of municipal services, the provision of cultural activities from the operation of public transport and the number and area of \u200b\u200bgreen space.
It is, undoubtedly, the major indices, but there are also other criteria - not material - to define the value of the city: for example, literary criteria. How important buildings, churches, houses, squares, streets, corners, monuments, and not forget them, the places that a city dedicated to their deaths? The cities are submerged by the use of dead cities, do not tell us anything, and their inhabitants are interchangeable, as the shops.
For me, Ferrara, however, is a living city, which gives the reading: the streets and alleys are like "the common thread of a story," as he wrote in the Berlin of the twenties the writer Franz Hessel. In Italy and in Europe, it is increasingly difficult to visit a city where you can rediscover the "ability to tell" so intrinsic to Ferrara, the town of Este.
"The way Bassani said Ferrara has attracted the attention of tourists on the city, "wrote Alfred Andersch, one of the most famous post-war German writers, in his essay On the trail of the Finzi-Contini. Many foreign visitors and then associate the Novel of Ferrara Ferrara Bassani, try the Garden of the Finzi-Contini, and finding none, they are disappointed. But the foreign visitor that he was able to stay longer turns out, beyond the streets narrated by Giorgio Bassani, including new tracks that lead to other stories, novels, essays, and why not, even in poems not yet written.
Everywhere you can find details and ornaments, votive tablets and inscriptions that testify to a long history and the most mysterious stories of Ferrara. About can listen to the heart of this city, perhaps brought from wonderful to listen to wise up Savinio Milan, fail to capture the charm and discover the magic of Ferrara and its surroundings, beyond the most popular tourist destinations.
Ferrara, in fact, is a school of the senses, for those who want to hear and see. Therefore allows a visitor like me to talk about some of his early discoveries. For example, the Jewish cemetery at the end of Via delle Vigne, so different from the German cemeteries will be maintained with meticulous care and designed as if they were highways. In the shadow of the city walls, covered by a strip of trees, the dead can rest in peace. No one sweeps the leaves, no headstone is cleaned, the decay is spreading everywhere.
How many stories tell of the inscriptions still visible on the memorial stones of the Jews of Ferrara, now washed out by time. Remind people with a "great heart" and then, behind the figures already corroded the years between 1940 and 1945, "the Nazi death camps 'and' deported to Auschwitz." And the stories told by those who sleep in the Jewish cemetery of Ferrara are particularly humiliating for a German. Then you come across in the older inscriptions, if not ancient, like that of Jacob Massarani, died March 22, 1877, in life "scrupulous observer": an expression that seems easy to translate into German spoken, although with time the meaning of the word "sloppy" has faded. It is natural to ask when and why the adjective has been removed, as bulky as a burden, from the vocabulary of modern life. In times of fast and unambiguous those judgments - except the artists - can afford the luxury of being a "conscientious observer" of his time? Sometimes it is the stones of the old cemeteries to remember catastrophic loss.
In cities bordering the Po, is still given a special meaning to the slowness, which is perhaps best expressed in the "bicycle culture". In Ferrara there are so many bicycles as in any other Italian city: I have never bicycles luxury mountain bike or refined, two wheels and a chassis is not too rusty enough for most cyclists, even the lighting does not always work properly.
on these vehicles - which Germany would be considered an offense to all the rules of the road - moving with great ease separate bank employees committed and elegant fashion boutiques who go to work.
Older people are masters in the 'art of recreational cycling "move defying the limits of immobility in order to maintain peace of mind with the cyclist on the side. In the era of high speed, the concept of time, for cyclists of the Lower Valley, is linked to a culture that is passed: to move, while still maintaining an appearance of immobility, without sacrificing communication development. That in the past, cycling has been anything other than an environmentally sound tool for keeping in shape, you can learn by watching the taste and phlegm mountain bike with which the villagers along the banks of the Po But as soon as joints on the main thoroughfares, this admirable phlegm turns into a ridiculous nostalgia, in an anachronism, in the long dictatorship of the twentieth century.
But back to the city. The Lane Leocorno, hidden at the edge of the old city, where I recently bought an apartment, bearing the name of a grocery who was towards the middle of the sixteenth century, whose symbol was the fabled unicorn. From this detail, you could tell the whole history of the businesses and small shops Ferrara currently facing closure because of the large supermarkets who settled outside the walls.
The day I saw a woman who, late into the night, decorate the windows of his shop on Via Carlo Mayr to attract new customers could perhaps tell us something about this fight for survival.
Next to a copy of The Pink Lady by Giovanni Boldini, available in its lovingly showcase cosmetic: I have rarely seen customers in that store. Perhaps because we all forgot that for each shop, each restaurant, for each bar that closes, the city is deprived of a small part of its identity and individuality.
"The new wealth," he writes Italo Calvino Invisible Cities, "was the cities overflow of materials, buildings, new objects, new people streamed out, nothing and no one had something in common with or Clarice Clarice of first, and more are setting up the new city triumphantly in the first place and in the name of Clarice, the more he realized that to get away from, not to destroy less rapidly than the mice and mold. "What he was thinking about writing these sentences in Ferrara?
In Germany, the city is justly famous Este also for its cultural policy.
The high-level cultural events such as concerts and ballets at the Teatro Comunale, are able to compete with those held in European capitals. The exemplary work of restoration of its historic center has had the widest international recognition. Schifanoia exhibition at the Palazzo, Palazzo dei Diamanti and Casa Romei, have an irresistible appeal to all lovers of art.
Castle and the Cathedral are among the essential goals of Emilia. Poets and writers such as Carducci, Bassani and Piovene Ercole I have erected a monument to the course literary experience.
All guides praise, and rightly so, the artistic heritage of Ferrara, but the city still has a wealth of history and culture of which the guidebooks do not mention, a heritage that allows us to trace the reasons for a reading of Ferrara that other cities, with perhaps a better quality of life, lost forever.
"The cultural problem of modern cities," writes American urban sociologist Richard Sennett, "is to be able to speak to an anonymous environment, to leave the city from their degradation and their neutrality." This issue, Ferrara, does not arise. Maybe it just needs to rediscover and learn an important element of quality of life: his ability to narrate.
(translation by Runngaldier)
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