BEAUTY, CURIOSITY, HARMONY AND ESPECIALLY REBIRTH : THESE
CONCEPTS INSPIRE OUR MAGAZINE, SHARING SPECIAL MOMENTS
AND CARVING OUT A NICHE FOR YOURSELF.
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ALCHEMY OF REBIRTH
Give me a tomato, I’ll make you fall in love
Tomato was imported in Europe from South America during the 16th , probably by Cortès. Its dissemination was very fast, especially thanks to the magical and aphrodisiac powers attributed to it. Because of these powers, tomato was given the name of “Love apple” in many European languages (pomo d’amore, love bomb, Libesapfel ...).
For a long time its food value was snubbed: after all, at that time the eating habits did not offer much space to a kind of food that in itself couldn’t satiate people and could not even be assimilated to spices such as cocoa and cinnamon, who were considered prestigious on high-end tables. Tomato was instead used as an ornamental plant, for terraces and gardens, besides it was usually given as love token.
Today it is not even the case to dwell on the fortune that this ingredient has had in international cuisine, becoming an icon of goodness and Mediterranean diet. We’d like to stress the most romantic look of this plant, whose leaves smell of fresh summer and secret vegetables gardens, giving us a unique and special olfactory emotion. What a triumph of the senses, happiness for both body and spirit in just one plant!
Taste, smell, fall in love.
TALES IN MILAN
Dialogue in the dark: you don’t have to see to look far away
Since 2005 in Milan, there is a special and truly magical experience, a sensory path without a sense, that of vision, but by no means less exciting and interesting.
In the wonderful venue of The Blind Institute (Istituto dei Ciechi) in via Vivaio, anyone of us can take a-hour-long journey in total darkness, transforming simple everyday gestures into an extraordinary experience. Whether it's a coffee or a walk, the total absence of light in the environment changes our way of dealing with space and objects, forcing us to "see" with the touch, the hearing, the taste and the smell.
Small groups of visitors, guided by a blind person, explore different environments (including a bar) immersed in total darkness and comment on the situations in which they are. Here, the individual's ability to discover new dimensions, to experience the intensity of flavours and fragrances comes out, in the lack of light. In this way, one can understand that life, though confused and disconcerting, always reserves a chance of knowledge, and that the light of heart and mind reach what eyes cannot. Thanks, Milan.
Dialogo nel Buio (Dialogue in the dark) is held at the Blind Institute in Milan (Istituto dei Ciechi di Milano) - via Vivaio 7
T: 02 77 22 62 10
email: dialogonelbuio@istciechimilano.it (email is just for queries, booking are accepted only via phone)
SELF MOMENTS
The wonderful Kolymbethra Garden in Agrigento
Called by the ancient Greeks the "Pool of Gods", it is said that Kolymbethra was a large tub-nursery containing sophisticated vegetation and a large variety of aquatic fauna, inside which the waters of the garden’s aqueducts were flowing.
The Garden was initially a relaxing stop for the Akragantines tyrants and then became a meeting point for the inhabitants of the ancient city: women went there to wash clothes and people used to cool down in fresh water of the clear pool.
After more than a century the pool was covered with land and transformed into a garden. After years of abandonment, the five acres of the Kolymbethra today offer a remarkable variety of trees and plants typical of the Mediterranean scrub like myrtle, lentiscus, terebinth, fillirea, euphorbia and broom: this result was possible thanks to the care of FAI (Fondo Ambiente Italiano – Italian Environment Fund).
A citrus garden stretches in the flatland of the valley floor with ancient varieties of lemons, mandarins and oranges, and it is irrigated according to Arabian traditional techniques. In the land not touched by water, mulberries, carobs, figs, almond trees and gigantic "Saracens" olive trees are born.
As it is written on FAI’s website:
"Kolymbethra represents, by its perceptive, environmental and productive features, the most excellent landscape of Sicilian arboriculture, or the irrigated one of citrus fruits cultivation. In Sicily, citrus plants are called "gardens" to emphasize their beauty, as well as the productive purpose. The smell of the zagara (orange blossoms) thus assumes the sense of a tree presence that is never linked to production only but also to pleasure.
According to local farmers'words, until the last decades of the Twentieth Century Kolymbethra was cultivated as a citrus and vegetable garden and maintained the appearance of a wonderful garden full of lemons and oranges but also rich in almonds, olive trees, mulberries, pomegranates and prickly pears.
Here is another authentic wonder of The Valley of the Temples, not only archaeological but also botanical and landscaping treasure. Have a good stay!
Kolymbethra GardenValle dei Templi (Agrigento)
Tel. 335 1229042 - Fax 0922 416787
E-mail: faikolymbethra@fondoambiente.itvisitfai.it/giardinodellakolymbethra
Opening hours:
From Monday to Sunday 10am-6pm from April to June, 10am-7pm from July to September, 10am-5pm from October to March
Closed from 7 January to 31 January.
immagine: fondoambiente.it
STORIES OF REBIRTH
Ceronetti, Not to forget the Memory
Memory, a precious companion on mankind’s path, is still largely unknown and is appreciated especially when one begins to get weak, when it has not yet vanished but is about to do so, leaving people in a state of terrifying disorientation.
The author, no longer young (he was born in 1927) and showing the first symptoms of discernment, calls all his experience and knowledge back to him to reveal a truly enviable wealth of life. The funny advices to mankind to "keep, preserve memory for as long as it lasts both in the old people as they feel the darkness of sunsets and in the young people before they get caught by early pathologies and psychic decay " range from literature to tongue-twisters and, above all, they warn against the E-Memory, a surrogate of reality that shakes young minds by making them slaves in the “stalinization” of thought.
Think about it, readers.
Guido Ceronetti, Not to forget the Memory
Italian edition: Adelphi