Ethiopia is on display in Verona: Beauty revealed takes a journey through history and nature

The photography exhibition Ethiopia. Beauty Revealed, at the Museum of Natural History in Verona from March 24 to June 30, 2019, leads visitors in the footsteps of the explorers who in past centuries traversed the fantastically evocative landscapes and described the animals of great beauty, in the land that was once the Queen of Sheba,Ethiopia . Almost an imaginary journey traveled alongside some of the scholars and explorers who most contributed to the knowledge of that land, accompanied by the animals that populate it and the ancient objects of its people. With the intention of reviving for the visitor the feeling of wonder that often transpires from the pages they left us.

Starting from the descriptions contained in some of their book works, whose editions (often of great value) are preserved at the Library of the Geographical Society, the environmental and cultural richness of Ethiopia will be evoked by objects from the ethnoanthropological collection of the Museum of Natural History in Verona and by the evocative photographs and videos of Carlo and Marcella Franchini. The naturalistic richness and exclusivity of Ethiopian fauna will then be told by animals from the collections of the Verona Museum. The multiplicity of documents, specimens, objects, and images in the exhibition allow visitors to appreciate the richness represented by the country’s natural environments and cultures and its ancient roots.

Ethiopia is a melting pot of realities, each unique but all interconnected. Beginning with the environmental variety characterized by often extreme elevation changes: one can move (often rapidly) from lowland regions or the Afar depression, which exceeds 100 meters below sea level, to the more than 2,000 meters of the high plateau, with the Semien peaks in the north touching 4,550 meters. The differences in altitude are associated with a monsoon climate regime, with accentuated seasonality. This combination creates ecological niches that explain the extreme environmental, fauna and flora diversity over even limited distances. Such diverse environments have fostered diverse economic systems and extraordinary cultural variety. The differentiated distribution of resources has also always favored seasonal movements and interaction between different populations, which often depend closely on each other, having developed complementary and synergistic economic systems. Ethiopia’s beauty, both environmental and cultural, lies precisely in this extreme differentiation and the related unity that lies beyond it.

Ethiopia has been the cradle of humanity due to its abundance of mineral, animal and plant resources. The region thus played a central role in long-distance trade networks, supplying ivory, aromatic resins, ebony and gold to the rest of the ancient world for centuries. For this reason, this country and the other regions of the southern Red Sea were central to the interest and imagination of the ancients, often being depicted as lands beloved and frequented by the gods. After several centuries of oblivion, in which only rare echoes of the region and its people reached Europe (transfigured mostly in descriptions of the fabled and powerful kingdom of the Priest John), the treasure chest of Ethiopian beauties was once again and gradually opened up beginning in the 16th century. Then began the era of travelers and later explorers, who are, in fact, also the basis for the scientific knowledge of Ethiopia documented and recounted in this exhibition.

The exhibition is organized by Carlo and Marcella Franchini(Caluma) and the Museum of Natural History in Verona in collaboration with theUniversity of Naples “L’Orientale,” the Italian Geographic Society, the Italian Cultural Institute Addis Ababa, the Embassy of Ethiopia in Rome and Addis Ababa University.