A tiny, probably long-forgotten anecdote: a few years ago, the town where I live was abruptly roused from its usual lethargy by a study that the regional government had commissioned from an engineer, a university professor, who had been asked to devi...
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To help his readers understand just how steep and arduous the ascent of Antipurgatory was, Dante suggested they imagine a whole range of inaccessible places, starting with Noli, which—if we are to trust the fourth canto of *Purgatory*— must have been...
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To see the palace, you have to turn your back on the Duomo; if you want to see the Duomo, you have to forget about the palace. Two visions of stone and marble. The palace and the cathedral scrutinize and measure each other, standing face to face—for ...
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The landscapes of his homeland would always remain etched in Guercino’s mind: the woods along the banks of the Rhine, the countryside around his hometown of Cento, and the dusty roads that cut through this stretch of the Po Valley halfway betwe...
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A cloudburst of superlatives bathes the paper on which Nicolò Dorigati, a Trentino painter from a noble family, and therefore always well-connected, had tried to state the reasons for the altarpiece, his altarpiece, destined for the church of ...
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Medieval man dwells within a tangle of symbols, lives by visions that lie between the earthly and the divine, conceives the universe according to an order that is not our own. In the mind of medieval man drowns all geometry; there are no straight lin...
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Dust, damp patches, dirt encrustations, cobwebs, walls covered with lime, Giambattista Tiepolo's frescoes hidden by heavy metal grates. Those who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, had entered Villa Cordellina, a splendid neo-Palladian resid...
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As soon as you go up to the Belvedere of Albugnano, a village of five hundred inhabitants announced by the vineyards that, having finished the Turin hinterland, rise from Chieri to the bald hillocks of the Basso Monferrato, a sign explains that this ...
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