tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-131370042024-03-07T05:25:12.822+01:00'English' Cemetery and its Library, FlorenceThe Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence, Italy, is in great need of restoration. Famous poets, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Savage Landor and Arthur Hugh Clough, and sculptors, like Hiram Powers and Joel T. Hart, are buried here. Also many who were against slavery. This weblog seeks to raise interest, participation, funds.Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comBlogger73125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-77211988275501037792018-08-08T09:06:00.001+02:002018-08-08T09:37:39.427+02:00MELCHISADEK<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br /></div>Melchisadek, King of Righteousness, greeted the nomadic cattle-herding invader Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees to Salem, Jerusalem, meaning Vision of Peace, with the gifts of bread and wine, for his Palestinian people were peaceable agriculturalists. I had been taught his story by a beautiful nun in school in Sussex, then travelled to Australia to be taught it again, more deeply, by Aborigine explaining that the Joshua model of conquest and slaughter is less desirable than the Melchisadek model of the sharing of skills for human survival. Jesus in the Galiliee region would have seen Mary bless the Sabbath candles, Joseph the bread and wine, on Friday at sundown, the Sabbath Eve, the Melchisadek rite shared from the indigenous people with the laity, rather than the cattle slaughtering and the bartering of the Temple with its Aaronic priests and Levites. The Epistle to the Hebrews, perhaps written by Prisca/Priscilla, for its Greek is certainly not Paul's, stresses the one High Priest Melchisadek as the Messiah of Justice. Jesus in the Gospels listens to the voices of those outside of power, Samaritans, Syro-Phoenicians, women, lepers, cripples - and restores them to health, to power-sharing. For this he is unjustly crucified. But a Melchisadek Christianity, a Melchisadek Judaism, would listen to the indigenous voices, to the feared, hated Others, sharing with them the Thanksgiving Feast, the Eucharist. This our library and our cemetery seek to do, with books on those outside of power and subjected to Holocausts, Aborigine, Native American, African American, Roma, Jew, Women, with work for Roma families to whom no one will give work, with listening to the voices of Maori, Amerindian, even recording them, and many others, to all who come here, celebrating a rich and compassionate humanity. We are the World's citizens, mending the cracks in it.
Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-23242392084661085602017-07-27T06:05:00.001+02:002017-07-27T06:05:41.961+02:00POISON PAPERSAlas, this article I find on Facebook proves the corporate Ayn Rand-like abolition of ethics and morals, endangering us all and now embedded into the political process with Citizens [Corporations] United against 'We, the People':
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/26/chemical-industry-herbicide-poison-papers/
For decades, some of the dirtiest, darkest secrets of the chemical industry have been kept in Carol Van Strum’s barn. Creaky, damp, and prowled by the occasional black bear, the listing, 80-year-old structure in rural Oregon housed more than 100,000 pages of documents obtained through legal discovery in lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the Air Force, and pulp and paper companies, among others.
As of today, those documents and others that have been collected by environmental activists will be publicly available through a project called the Poison Papers. Together, the library contains more than 200,000 pages of information and “lays out a 40-year history of deceit and collusion involving the chemical industry and the regulatory agencies that were supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,” said Peter von Stackelberg, a journalist who along with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project helped put the collection online.
Van Strum didn’t set out to be the repository for the people’s pushback against the chemical industry. She moved to a house in the Siuslaw National Forest in 1974 to live a simple life. But soon after she arrived, she realized the Forest Service was spraying her area with an herbicide called 2,4,5-T — on one occasion, directly dousing her four children with it as they fished by the river.
The chemical was one of two active ingredients in Agent Orange, which the U.S. military had stopped using in Vietnam after public outcry about the fact that it caused cancer, birth defects, and serious harms to people, animals, and the environment. But in the U.S., the Forest Service continued to use both 2,4,5-T and the other herbicide in Agent Orange, 2,4-D, to kill weeds. (Timber was — and in some places still is — harvested from the national forest and sold.) Between 1972 and 1977, the Forest Service sprayed 20,000 pounds of 2,4,5-T in the 1,600-square-mile area that included Van Strum’s house and the nearby town of Alsea.
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A view of the Five Rivers valley in rural Oregon looking southwest from Carol Van Strum’s front door.
Photo: Risa Scott/RF Scott Imagery
As in Vietnam, the chemicals hurt people and animals in Oregon, as well as the plants that were their target. Immediately after they were sprayed, Van Strum’s children developed nosebleeds, bloody diarrhea, and headaches, and many of their neighbors fell sick, too. Several women who lived in the area had miscarriages shortly after incidents of spraying. Locals described finding animals that had died or had bizarre deformities — ducks with backward-facing feet, birds with misshapen beaks, and blinded elk; cats and dogs that had been exposed began bleeding from their eyes and ears. At a community meeting, residents decided to write to the Forest Service detailing the effects of the spraying they had witnessed.
“We thought that if they knew what had happened to us, they wouldn’t do it anymore,” Van Strum said recently, before erupting into one of the many bursts of laughter that punctuate her conversation. We were sitting not far from the river where her children played more than 40 years ago, and her property remained much as it was back when the Forest Service first sprayed them with the herbicide. A mountain covered with alder and maple trees rose up across from her home, just as it did then, and the same monkey puzzle tree that was there when she moved in still shaded her dirt driveway.
But Van Strum, now 76, is much changed from the young woman who politely asked that the federal agency stop spraying many years ago. After the Forest Service refused their request to stop using the herbicides, she and her neighbors filed a suit that led to a temporary ban on 2,4,5-T in their area in 1977 and, ultimately, to a total stop to the use of the chemical in 1983.
For Van Strum, the suit was also the beginning of lifetime of battling the chemical industry. The lawyer who had taken their case offered a reduced fee in exchange for Van Strum’s unpaid research assistance. And she found she had a knack for poring over and parsing documents and keeping track of huge volumes of information. Van Strum provided guidance to others filing suit over spraying in national forests and helped filed another case that pointed out that the EPA’s registration of 2,4-D and other pesticides was based on fraudulent data from a company called Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories. That case led to a decision, in 1983, to stop all aerial herbicide spraying by the Forest Service.
“We didn’t think of ourselves as environmentalists, that wasn’t even a word back then,” Van Strum said. “We just didn’t want to be poisoned.”
Still, Van Strum soon found herself helping with a string of suits filed by people who had been hurt by pesticides and other chemicals. “People would call up and say, ‘Do you have such and such?’ And I’d go clawing through my boxes,” said Van Strum, who often wound up acquiring new documents through these requests — and storing those, too, in her barn.
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Some of the more than 100,000 pages of discovery material related to the chemical industry that were stored in Carol Van Strum’s barn in rural Oregon.
Photo: Risa Scott/RF Scott Imagery
Along the way, she amassed disturbing evidence about the dangers of industrial chemicals — and the practices of the companies that make them. Two documents, for instance, detailed experiments that Dow contracted a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist to conduct on prisoners in the 1960s to show the effects of TCDD, a particularly toxic contaminant found in 2,4,5-T. Another document, from 1985, showed that Monsanto had sold a chemical that was tainted with TCDD to the makers of Lysol, who, apparently unaware of its toxicity, used it as an ingredient in their disinfectant spray for 23 years. Yet another, from 1990, detailed the EPA policy of allowing the use of hazardous waste as inert ingredients in pesticides and other products under certain circumstances.
There were limits to what Van Strum could prove through her persistent data collection. The EPA had undertaken a study of the relationship between herbicide exposure and miscarriages and had taken tissue samples from water, animals, a miscarried fetus, and a baby born without a brain in the area. The EPA never released the full results of the “Alsea study,” as it was called, and insisted it had lost many of them. But a lab chemist provided Van Strum with what he said was the analysis of the test results he had been hired to do for the EPA, which showed the samples from water, various animals, and “products of conception” were significantly contaminated with TCDD.
When confronted, the EPA claimed there had been a mix-up and that the samples were from another area. Van Strum filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the results and, for years, battled in court to get to the bottom of what happened. Though the EPA provided more than 34,000 pages in response to her request (which Van Strum carefully numbered and stored in her barn), the agency never released all the results of the study or fully explained what had happened to them or where the contaminated samples had been taken. And eventually, Van Strum gave up. The EPA declined to comment for this story.
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Carol Van Strum prepares to work on her property with her dogs Maybe and Mike at her side in May 2017.
Photo: Risa Scott/RF Scott Imagery
She had to make peace with not fully understanding a personal tragedy, too. In 1977, her house burned to the ground and her four children died in the fire. Firefighters who came to the scene said the fact that the whole house had burned so quickly pointed to the possibility of arson. But an investigation of the causes of the fire was never completed.
Van Strum suspected some of her opponents might have set the fire. It was a time of intense conflict between local activists and employees of timber companies, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies over the spraying of herbicides. A group of angry residents in the area near Van Strum’s home had destroyed a Forest Service helicopter that had been used for spraying. And, on one occasion, Van Strum had come home to find some of the defenders of the herbicides she was attacking in court on her property.
“I’ve accepted that I’ll never really know” what happened, said Van Strum, who never rebuilt her house and now lives in an outbuilding next to the cleared site where it once stood.
But her commitment to the battle against toxic chemicals survived the ordeal. “If it was intentional, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “After that, there was nothing that could make me stop.”
Still, after all these years, Van Strum felt it was time to pass on her collection of documents, some of which pertain to battles that are still being waged, so “others can take up the fight.” And the seeds of many of the fights over chemicals going on today can be tied to the documents that sat in her barn. The Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories scandal is central in litigation over the carcinogenicity of Monsanto’s Roundup, for instance. And 2,4-D, the other active ingredient in Agent Orange, is still in use.
Meanwhile, private timber companies continue to use both 2,4-D and Roundup widely, though not in the national forest. Van Strum has been part of an effort to ban aerial pesticide spraying in the county, and is speaking on behalf of the local ecosystem in a related lawsuit.
“I get to play the Lorax,” Van Strum said. “It’s going to be fun.”
Top photo: From left, Carol Van Strum and her neighbor Kathy clean and pull staples as Peter von Stackelberg, who covered Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories as a reporter for the Regina, Saskatchewan, Leader-Post, operates two scanners simultaneously, May 2017.
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Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-69727543030235216722017-07-19T11:53:00.003+02:002017-07-20T06:21:05.736+02:00PROPERTY IS THEFT<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br /></div>PROPERTY IS THEFT
was written on John Reed's door in Warren Beatty's film 'Reds'. Have been having an argument about Property Rights and Human Rights. My Devil's Advocate proclaims that Property Rights are a Human Right. I see a clash between the two. That only those with privilege get to have Property Rights, by means of gender, race, education, religion, title, wealth, etc., from which they exclude the Other, who are women, children, indigenous, nomadic, illiterate, poor, those Many who labour for the wealth creation of the Few.
<P>If I were male I could claim Versailles, Irish Georgian mansions, Saltaire, as my ancestral privilege. But these are best as humankind's patrimony, UNESCO World Heritage Sites, not mine.
<P>Today the battle is raging in America and in Europe to tax links on the Web. But after WWII there was the Florence Accord and the Nairobi Protocol (<a href="http://docplayer.fr/22195583-L-accord-de-florence.html">http://docplayer.fr/22195583-L-accord-de-florence.html</a>) in international law forbidding the use of customs duty on the scholarly exchange of information, on books, films, etc. As an author I find it is now the publishers and the libraries with manuscripts who profit from our research, not ourselves, blocking us from sharing the world's intellectual inheritance. Copyright for authors is become meaningless though it is our intellectual property that we seek to share with others with just sufficient return as our livelihood. At the French Revolution monastic libraries with their manuscripts were seized by the State so that they could become France's great Bibliotheque Nationale and bibliotheques municipales. But now one finds oneself forced to pay reproduction rights if one attempts to share their holdings with the congregation of Benedictine nuns who wrote them and from whom the manuscripts were seized at the Revolution, the nuns themselves imprisoned, awaiting the guillotine.
<P>I and my library signed the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the BOAI. These are the principles of the Republic of Letters. That our scholarship is to be generously shared and made freely accessible. Not swallowed up into capitalistic profit-making concerns that pay themselves, strangling academic libraries economically with huge subscription payments, and not paying the authors from whom they profit.
Where profits are disproportionate there needs to be a fair sharing instead, not today's austerity of the many for the benefit of the few, We don't need to accept, to our detriment, the Orwellian world of 'Citizen's United', which is really 'Corporations United' against 'We, the People'. We need our intellectual commons, free democratic education, access to land, the World Wide Web, for the common prosperity of the globe.
Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-91626109464269799112014-12-08T10:56:00.000+01:002014-12-08T11:21:45.885+01:00BICAMERAL EDUCATION, HOLISTIC EDUCATION<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBKWWbksudzOUvmNGcoaFAldQuRvvFHxDQeD5hkHPTlgPMM6YChhUelLt2rGs1grQq2a8cuT7t27UzAZonCTatzvVi8z9oz-kyKs4D_grpontK806ENau9AaVtEXBXqdgW-LK4/s1600/P9202232.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBKWWbksudzOUvmNGcoaFAldQuRvvFHxDQeD5hkHPTlgPMM6YChhUelLt2rGs1grQq2a8cuT7t27UzAZonCTatzvVi8z9oz-kyKs4D_grpontK806ENau9AaVtEXBXqdgW-LK4/s320/P9202232.JPG" /></a><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br /></div><P>I have taught at all levels, nursery school, junior high, high school, university, graduate students. I see our present economy crashing because we do not educate fittingly. At Princeton I spent many hours talking Julian Jaynes into the writing and publishing of the controversial best-seller <i>The Origin of Consciousness of the Bicameral Mind</i>. Later came holistic thinking in the counter culture, and later still, neuroscience finding Jaynes' concept about the functioning of the brain as true. At present our education, churning out bureaucrats, technocrats, is mechanistic, linear, checking/ticking boxes, rigid. And it doesn't work. Here in Italy young people find no work. And cannot work with their hands, their bodies, while their minds have become a trap. They live with their parents whose pensions support them, and cannot marry and have families, lacking a house, a job.</P>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiulEJc3iC3WcQU44545wL4I9WqGV911mBUZ_AmAXwglqeXfMsqn_jIkJlB_tEkGxZPvxWTQiRU0wpJUituq6et5wgZ3sHSVncq693F75Ramf-a6mqwMLozwyVVeAkPVQLTdAE5/s1600/DSCN0149.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiulEJc3iC3WcQU44545wL4I9WqGV911mBUZ_AmAXwglqeXfMsqn_jIkJlB_tEkGxZPvxWTQiRU0wpJUituq6et5wgZ3sHSVncq693F75Ramf-a6mqwMLozwyVVeAkPVQLTdAE5/s320/DSCN0149.JPG" /></a>
<P>Our educational system is designed for ivory tower universities, derived from Greco-Arabic misogyny adopted by western crusading Christianity in the twelfth century, out of sync with nature, with humanity. There was an earlier and healthier form. Monasteries and convents used, and still use, the body, the mind, the soul, in self-sufficient but celibate communities, balancing work, study and prayer, the learned genders in the greater span of Christianity having been separate but equal. 'Use it or lose it' is a wise statement. One cannot only be in prayer, or only in study, or only in work. Combining all three keeps all three aspects in harmony, in health.</P>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRa02fnG5maDAT6BAaW2hewJ1FEmRIsxCYylFhXO-8cXYKqSmuaaJ8S4NF6wbGLBjidqiyaoOyGwDRypZIpvDqBnQLeUtJXWWzzLCeGjLCYD1HHWi1dLBzK5nOoSAg0k3bxXYA/s1600/DSCN8887.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRa02fnG5maDAT6BAaW2hewJ1FEmRIsxCYylFhXO-8cXYKqSmuaaJ8S4NF6wbGLBjidqiyaoOyGwDRypZIpvDqBnQLeUtJXWWzzLCeGjLCYD1HHWi1dLBzK5nOoSAg0k3bxXYA/s320/DSCN8887.JPG" /></a>
<P>Accidentally I have discovered that if one has a garden (mine is a cemetery) and a library, the two things Cicero said were needed for happiness, one has the ideal setting for education. We combine the German concept of 'kindergarten', but for all ages, we use Margaret McMillan's early childhood education for those in poverty, Dr Maria Montessori's concept of freedom to explore tanglible surfaces and shapes learning through the body's senses in tandem with the brain, Don Lorenzo Milani's education of the most deprived, Fernando Cardenal/Paulo Freire concept of alphabetization for all ages, and we do this in a library in a cemetery where on Sundays Romanian Roma families come to learn and work joyously.</P>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-YoU1bUkY4xYdCMIeqv-ifef_pDotS0yPt4qcQaQiZSvkDuCH42g8pVz8xXKga27d72JQg7tUHhD7hnMzQYr6SmGOMAYihFzBe4v6Cyu_RaO4y8BnGOJFFOo50QVdN9MdKWSQ/s1600/DSCN0231.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-YoU1bUkY4xYdCMIeqv-ifef_pDotS0yPt4qcQaQiZSvkDuCH42g8pVz8xXKga27d72JQg7tUHhD7hnMzQYr6SmGOMAYihFzBe4v6Cyu_RaO4y8BnGOJFFOo50QVdN9MdKWSQ/s320/DSCN0231.JPG" /></a>
<P>Just as the irises we plant in this garden multiply and need separating so do the books in this library multiply from its rule that to become a member one gives it a book a year. So, with Progetto Agata Smeralda, we create library schools, with each of seven Roma families receiving an encyclopedia, school books, children's books, an illustrated Dante, <i>Commedia</i>, alphabet sheets, books the Roma themselves write and illustrate in four languages, these going to six mothers and a widow, each receiving a monthly stipend so they do not need to return to Florence to beg, leaving their babies with grandmothers. If they came and begged with their children they would be imprisoned.</P>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk0sILvWNzTEo38Xzii6Fs_faJKxje8je-ASSnTpg3KPxIrgP6MQMR_IhEHHMtihhCX8f6bMWTSxsDAhdtbOq7Llv6pEL8F984rC3ZrrhaQDLzfoXMgReXT1CV723FdfxGjZ22/s1600/DSCN9608.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk0sILvWNzTEo38Xzii6Fs_faJKxje8je-ASSnTpg3KPxIrgP6MQMR_IhEHHMtihhCX8f6bMWTSxsDAhdtbOq7Llv6pEL8F984rC3ZrrhaQDLzfoXMgReXT1CV723FdfxGjZ22/s320/DSCN9608.JPG" /></a>
<P>Sitting around two tables, the men at one, the women and children at another, for they are very traditional and the women won't allow themselves in a room with men not their husbands, we discuss their poverty, their lack of housing, sleeping in streets in Florence, in camps with mud in Roma, in overcrowded council housing with concrete where children can't play and where TB is rampant, and they suggest the solution, since they are no longer allowed their caravans, could be garden cities, with libraries, with orchestres, with market gardens, with botteghe workshops, families becoming self-sufficient, interdependent, cultured intellectually if not rich materially with unnatural machines of metal and plastic.</P>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbF1mIGp-U6AAcW69H-SwxNLce1MNbuP9tVddgXnT2yeRXkxnHGHEiddVS83V0vM7GktFynaSV8FXVTDgc1c4F9snQ4rk_a4PNRK1rsEmY8uibNgfRGO8fMGfpcyh66Sg2vJSb/s1600/RomaWomen.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbF1mIGp-U6AAcW69H-SwxNLce1MNbuP9tVddgXnT2yeRXkxnHGHEiddVS83V0vM7GktFynaSV8FXVTDgc1c4F9snQ4rk_a4PNRK1rsEmY8uibNgfRGO8fMGfpcyh66Sg2vJSb/s320/RomaWomen.jpg" /></a>
<P>So from our Alphabet School I took this proposal to the European State of the Union meeting held in Florence this year:</P>
<P>Debate Question: EU Labour Market and Migration Policy (<a href="http://www.umilta.net/Xanadu.html">http://www.umilta.net/Xanadu.html</a>): </P>
<P>Could the European Union in this time of austerity and scapegoating racism restore hope by responding to its EU citizens' needs for work and housing by enabling 'green' garden cities, like Florence's Isolotto, Yorkshire’s Saltaire? With housing and landscaping to be built and maintained in part by EU citizens currently out of work and homeless, including nationals and Roma/Traveller EU citizens, western and eastern EU citizens, working and living side by side? Garden cities that would have space for children to play and learn, with bicycle and bus transportation, workshops for craftspeople and apprentices, vegetable gardens and farmers' markets, libraries and orchestres. Priority for work and housing to be for EU citizens. Non-EU citizens could have dormitories, the right to study, to make and sell artefacts, to grow and sell garden produce, to share their skills with citizens, eventually themselves to achieve citizenship, but not factory or construction work needed by EU citizens. Land could be obtained by raising taxes on abandoned industrial properties, then re-zoned as residential with lowered taxes where 'green' garden cities are being built. One member to be guaranteed work to house, educate and receive medical care for his or her family, achieving this through fair taxation, while reducing EU bureaucracy that currently does not reach its increasingly impoverished EU citizens? </P>
<P>Julia Bolton Holloway, Ph.D. Citizenship: United Kingdom, EU; Residency, Florence</P>
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<P>I'm afraid the eyes of Mario Monti and Jose Manuel Barroso just glazed over when I said these words. The left-hemisphere technocrats cannot understand the holistic, natural, human concepts of the right-hemisphere synapses. But it is access to the land we need most for our economy to recover and flourish, the sense of the Commonwealth that Florence and Rome and Athens once had from which came their rich cultural flowering. Money becomes meaningless unless it is anchored to work, study, prayer, in harmony. We need gardens, workshops, libraries. We are not machines, but flesh and blood, marvelously made by our Creator, and needing to be in harmony with Creation.</P>
Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-91348226632728738082014-07-28T15:44:00.000+02:002016-11-14T08:46:06.336+01:00POVERTY AND WEALTH: GENETICS AND GENDER<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<P>A section of our library with its hand-made rocking cradle is on exclusion from power due to race and gender, believing that in this study we can find the causes of war, genocide and slavery, undoing these trauma crimes against our common humanity. These shelves contain books on the Holocaust, on Aborigines, on Native Americans, on Afro-Americans, on Roma, on women. Its shelves are built by Roma women who participate in our Alphabet School on Sundays while speaking together in Romanì, their language descended from Sanscrit.</P>
<P>Genetics: Biologically we are generally either female or male in order to reproduce the species. Culture and law have tended to further differentiate and define our gender status. Our DNA carries our haplogroup coding from the past, the male through the incomplete Y chromosone, the mitochondria for both. Our DNA can be altered by trauma, perpetuating it to future generations. We can also maintain, or attempt to restore, our cultural and linguistic purity or lose its identity and its language to a dominant other - or we can share our heritage.</P>
<P>Tectonics/Migrations: To study this genetic coding as it makes up distinct racial groups with their concomitant cultures, art forms (such as embroidery, tattooing, scripts, etc.), and languages, requires us first to look at the template of plate tectonics, the shifting of land and sea masses and the patterns of migrations through time. Gondwana becoming Pangaea, then separating. For instance, Brazil, Africa and Australia were once the same land mass which drifted apart. It is thought that man, Adam, our common ancestor, began in Africa, while the Americas were later populated from the Asian land mass in the Clovis migration by the bridge of the Bering Straits, yet in Brazil archeologists have found far earlier traces of human activity in cave paintings, tools, a skull, connected with Africa. While the Aborigine in Australia date back 50,000 years. The waves of Semitic migrations took place around 5000 years ago from Iraq's Fertile Crescent and its record keeping in cuneiform to Canaan, Phoenicia, Palestine, the Israelites adopting and adapting the Semites' Ugaritic alphabet for written Hebrew. Our own Indo-European makeup and our languages come from migrations similarly around 5,000 years ago, and which adopted and adapted the Phoenician runes, pirated as the Greek and Roman alphabets - while the migrations of the Roma from India reached Europe a thousand years ago. The Indo-European migrations to North America began with the Icelandic settlers a thousand years ago.
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<P>Interruption: A young Roma mother and her child have come. The baby carriage has broken. She asks for help for carrying her baby. So we put little Sonia in the wooden rocking cradle we had made and which we keep in the library while I sewed for her a marsupial, giving her mother material and needle and thread so she can sew two more.</P>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEO11uZS_dYXJmv7Xu4LTAtM7tzxAqU4dpUvOoKyS1gj1YL9ksD6OvNHC4kikMOGRu-poy513pw3VWo5C9rsNoAnkNgkwlvsNFcwnnsFezFDcYO8jRx-BZYZQ5CN43Hcrh_f4S/s1600/AuricaSonia.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEO11uZS_dYXJmv7Xu4LTAtM7tzxAqU4dpUvOoKyS1gj1YL9ksD6OvNHC4kikMOGRu-poy513pw3VWo5C9rsNoAnkNgkwlvsNFcwnnsFezFDcYO8jRx-BZYZQ5CN43Hcrh_f4S/s320/AuricaSonia.JPG"></a></div></P>
<P>Aurica was noticing the design I had painted on the cradle and around the chandelier that I had copied from the fresco in the villa of the Cardinal Bessarione in Rome when I was twenty-one and with my first baby, fifty-six years ago. I was telling her of how the Renaissance began because this Greek scholar brought manuscripts from Constantinople to Italy, and briefly re-joined the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. We as women know we cannot be rigid amongst such needs as Aurica's and Sonia's, that we must drop the intellectual essay-writing, the false paradigm for the real world, to care instead manually and physically for the nurturing of a baby's body, mind and soul, and once that task is finished, then we can return to the abstracting computer. And can share together that intellectual world of cosmopolitan enriching cultures, too.</P>
<P>The Roma, like the Palestinians, are subjected to much discrimination and poverty. They are for us the Jungian 'Other', who is really everything about ourselves we cannot accept. Genetically the Roma are like ourselves, as Indo-Europeans, from India, though in a later migration, coming to Europe a thousand years ago. Because of that discrimination they are generally denied access to land, to water, to decent housing, to education, to medicine. Genetically the Palestinians are not like ourselves. Instead they are from the Fertile Crescent, the Semites, their genetic makeup that of the Jews, most so with the Sephardim, less so with the Ashkenazim, who are mixed with the Khazar converts to Judaism. The Palestinians are denied access to their land, to water, their homes destroyed, in punishment for desiring freedom. How can we learn to see the 'Other' as ourselves? To stop projecting our 'Shadow' onto scapegaot others. To stop the bloodshed. To stop the trauma.</P>
<P>I was in the United States before Civil Rights. I came from Europe where we idealize Native Americans. I saw park benches and drinking fountains labeled 'Whites Only'. I heard people say of Black Americans, who had been their slaves, that they were congenitally criminal and subnormal. I hear people say the Roma are thieves in their DNA. I saw - and see - how enslavement requires this Platonic mythology, Plato's 'Myth of the Metals'. That illiterate slaves are only iron, that educated people are silver, that the king is golden. It is a lie but if both oppressor and oppressed can be made to believe it, how very convenient it is for the rich, for the privileged, for those in power. The settlers fail to subdue the indigenous peoples, so massacre them, and/or corrall them on reservations, next they import foreign workers to build their land, again along racial lines, using the greatest contrasting skin colour. First from Africa, next from Latin America. Or outsource manufacturing to China and Bangladesh. Women no longer sew their own clothes. They do not know who does. The clothes themselves become less beautiful.</P>
<P>The Biblical geneaology of Adam, Eve/ Shem, Ham and Japheth is largely validated by the studies of genetic sequences. We are one, but, with patterns of nomadic migration and/or indigenous isolation, we come to differ, to separate. Traumatically we tend to enslave what seems to be most the 'Other'. Traumatically we tend to wage war against what is most ourselves. Civil War. Which is an oxymoron. Recently the worst wars have been fought over 'nationalism'. Julian Benda, in <i>Trahison des Clercs</i>, the <i>Betrayal of the Intellectuals</i>, prophetically warned against political nationalism. Yet our different genes, our different histories, our different languages, are treasures, both old and new. Internally, the dominant group may silence the 'Other', the Romans obliterating the Etruscan culture and its language, the Spartans enslaving the Helots. This will create a military caste. In its classism lie the seeds of Empire. From which, in the nineteenth century, nations sought freedom, Poland from Russia, Hungary from Austria, Ireland from Britain, Europe from Napoleon, Italy from the Pope, the Austrians, the French, the Spanish, a fracturing, a cantonization. Just as also religion splinters into warring sects. In the twentieth Germany and Italy sought to be Empires. Now America is Empire. Eisenhower warned against the Military/Industrial complex. It is really the Military/Industrial/Academic complex and it seeks to brainwash whole populations into being the Myth of the Metals, into being the iron of slaves, the CEOs, the silver, all subservient to the 'gold' of a tyrant.</P>
<P>Neuroscience: Years ago I worked with Julian Jaynes on his book, <i>The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind</i>, in which he discussed the cultural evolution, through religion and education, of the brain, shifting it from a balance of the right and left hemispheres to becoming left hemisphere dominant through literacy, a culture we adopted with the alphabet from the race which invented it, the Semites. Shem's descendants. Bible, Gospel, Koran shaped the Middle East, Europe and the East, become the genetic coding of our neighbouring cultures. While Chinese culture in the Far East adopted a different literacy. The problem with left hemisphere dominance is that it is less flexible, prefering linearity, and it rigidly differentiates itself from the Other. It becomes Pharisaical (a word which means 'separation'). For centuries education was carried out with flogging, with sexual trauma, with paedophilia, religion even resorting to genital mutilation, of both genders, as these short-circuit the brain's electrical chemistry. It produced a result that seems rational but is not, that seems to be conservative of values but can be insanely destructive of them, leading to Holocausts. Jayne's theoretical work was later validated by the neuroscientist Jill Bolt Taylor's own experiencing of a cerebal shutdown in <i>My Stroke of Insight</i>. Naomi Klein brilliantly describes this social engineering carried out through 'Shock Doctrine'. And warns us against it.</P>
<P>In Florence the Romanian Roma are forced to sleep in the hard streets in the rain. In Rome they must live in the mud of camps. In Romania in social housing with concrete. They were the slaves of the monasteries and the nobles from the Middle Ages until <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> was translated into Romanian. They were taken away to gulags with no shelter, no food, just the bare earth into which they had to dig for shelter. The grandmothers as small orphan girls remember walking back to Romania from the killing fields. Roma were massacred in the Holocaust. No reparations were paid to them. They cope by not remembering the past, not thinking of the future. But they have told me that what would work for them would be garden cities, where Roma and Gadge (non-Roma) families could live together, with workshops and vegetable gardens, a market, a library, an orchestre, with bicycles and buses, not cars, to downsize from petroleum dependency. For me they garden magnificently in a cosmopolitan anti-slavery cemetery in the heart of Florence, where slave and noble, Austrian and Hungarian, Russian and Pole, Swiss and English, women and men, even the Romanian nobles who once owned the Roma as their slaves, lie peaceably side by side. Elsewhere the Roma are not allowed to work or to sell, they can only beg or steal for survival, here they restore tombs, harvest lavender, make cradles and library shelves, and learn, for the first time for many of them, how to write their name, the alphabet.</P>
<P>Homer says that when a man becomes a slave he loses half his soul, his life energy. But he also tells of Achilles in Hades wishing he could be his father's poorest slave and alive instead of King of all the Dead. 'Death is a slave's freedom'. Best of all is life and freedom, the love of God and neighbour, not worldly power or wealth or fame.</P>
<P>What if Palestianian and Israeli could live together, as families, in garden cities? What if we downsized our economies from its militarized globalization, those airport checks, the control of all our electronic communication? What if we studied each others' languages, our shared alphabet in its genetic forms, Hebrew characters, Arabic script, so we would be less threatened by our different likenesses? What if we shared our manual skills, our books, our music, our land? What if we became Citizens of a Gardened Earth? And raised our babies, skin on skin, cradled, loved? Repairing the cracks of the world (tikkun olam/תיקון עולם). Healing our human DNA from its Cain and Abel trauma?</P>
Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-80234593761562405712014-05-10T18:26:00.000+02:002014-12-08T20:05:13.457+01:00XANADU OR GARDEN CITIES: A PROPOSAL FOR THE EU<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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So twice five miles of fertile ground<br>
With walls and towers were girdled round;<br>
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,<br>
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;<br>
And here were forests ancient as the hills,<br>
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.<br>
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'Kubla Khan'/1
<P>We recognize that the European Union is at a crisis, a crisis occurring simultaneously with climate change, increasing unrest in Africa, Syria, Ukraine (following wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were waged without taxing for them), along with the melt-down of global indebtedness./2 Loyalty to the EU is being shattered by its desire to be inclusive while many EU citizens in the face of austerity seek a return to the nationalism that had caused the genocide of WWII./3</P>
<P>There is a partial solution that is ecological and inclusive while at the same time serving EU citizens and others with their greatest needs for sustainability: for work and for housing, without which they cannot raise a family. I see young Florentines graffitoing their schools, even the Ospedale degli Innocenti, in their anger that there is no hope for their employment when they leave school. I hear Italian artigiani, craftspeople, complaining that their rent and taxes are too high and they must abandon their skills. Florence is a microcosm of Europe. In the past it flourished because of its skilled craftspeople and its careful banking. It invented the florin, Europe's first Euro. But the florin was based on work, the work of its citizens. Now work is outsourced to the Third World as being cheaper, slave labour. It is even insourced with Chinese workers in Prato creating cheap good with labels, 'Made in Italy'. This is a failed economy. Henry Ford made it possible for his workers to buy a Model T. Now Detroit moulders. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2011/jan/02/photography-detroit#/?picture=370173060&index=15">http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2011/jan/02/photography-detroit#/?picture=370173060&index=15</a></P>
<P>Instead of falsely relying on high technology to fix economic problems, we need to balance it with the human dimension: the family; the house. To enable an economy in which one member can work to support his or her family. Eliminating car ownership through the intelligent use of land in this model would decrease the cost of raising a family. Reducing carbon energy.</P>
<P>This essay proposes building garden cities,/4 microcosms of the European Community within the European Union. Around our cities are abandoned industrial sites. Where these are not polluted such areas could be subjected to high taxation unless released for the building of garden cities, a mixture of balconied and arcaded buildings and cottages with verandas, with tree-lined landscaping where children can play and learn. The garden cities should contain workspace for craftspeople and their apprentices, and at the periphery allotments for vegetable gardens supplying produce to a central market place. Bicycles and bus service could provide transport, reducing the carbon footprint. There should be a library, an orchestra, a park, a school.</P>
<P>The architects should plan and discuss the landscaping and buildings with those who will build and maintain them, immigrants and nationals, working and living side by side, learning each others’ cultures and skills. In this way there can be hope for families to have living and working space with access to land and fresh air and to create self-sufficient economies, with a family-run bakery, grocery, laundry, ironmonger. We need to return to that sense of economy, which in its Greek meant 'home'. To centre it on the home of the family, sheltering it, sustaining it, serving it. Without damaging the environment.</P>
<P>Some positive models are these:
<P>Saltaire in Yorkshire was built as the antithesis to the crowding, squallor and disease of Bradford as a model mill town by Sir Titus Salt, then doubled in size by Sir James Roberts. It is built on the river Aire, an adjacent canal and a railroad with a station in the countryside. Its 800 row houses for the workers are built of stone next to the great wool mills. Salt designed the village with wide streets, a large dining hall and kitchens, baths and washhouses, an almshouse for retired workers, hospital and dispensary, educational institute and church, ample recreational land and allotments, in order to improve the diet of the workers. Four lions flank its main street, named 'War', 'Peace, 'Diligence', 'Vigilance'. The architecture is borrowed from the Italian Renaissance. Now mainly used for a computer centre since the mills shut down, it is filled with crafts people selling their wares. The local people flock to it for its beauty and friendliness. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. <a href="http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltaire">http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltaire</a> <a href="http://www.saltairevillage.info/">http://www.saltairevillage.info/</a> <a href="http://www.umilta.net/SirJamesRoberts.html">http://www.umilta.net/SirJamesRoberts.html</a></P>
<P>Isolotto in Florence, designed partly by Giovanni Michelucci for the mayor, Giorgio La Pira, following WWII, was built on the periphery of the city to give 1000 poor families, who had lived in San Frediano in crowded, often windowless, slum dwellings, apartments within buildings and cottages set amongst trees by the river Arno./5 It is still beautiful though it has lost its original library. <a href="http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolotto">http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolotto</a></P>
<P>The University of California after the war bought up shipyard builders' housing in the township of Albany on the San Francisco Bay. The original family barracks are now replaced by more tasteful buildings but which are still set amongst a landscape where children can play and which has always included a childcare centre. The students are from all parts of the globe, reach the university by bus or bicycle, and live here as in a Global Village. <a href="http://www.housing.berkeley.edu/livingatcal/video_uni_village_apts.html">http://www.housing.berkeley.edu/livingatcal/video_uni_village_apts.html</a></P>
<P>Negative models are the following: crowded inner cities with stone and cement paving; suburban subdivisions based on car ownership as in the US and in Melbourne, Australia, where matching homes are built each with their own lawns that use too much water, and which are serviced by vast shopping malls with concrete parking lots at a considerable distance from the homes; Roma camps set in polluted mud on the peripheries of cities.</P>
<P>Such garden cities in Romania could reduce the migration of Roma to Italy, France and elsewhere, as these families seek space in which to raise their children and work alongside Romanians. Such garden cities in the British Isles could provide homes for British and Travellers also to live alongside each other. Vandana Shiva is speaking of the need for access to land, a diminishing of the control of multinationals creating debt cycles in agriculture, and of common good of seeds.<a href=" http://www.navdanya.org/"> http://www.navdanya.org/</a> When I spoke with her about this concept of garden cities for Europe she immediately saw that it provided, through the government, beneficial infrastructure for its citizens, the interlacing of the earth and the people. Which is the true task of government.</P>
<P>Notes</P>
<P>1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem describes the yurt of gold and wicker as summer palace built by the nomadic Emperor Kubla Khan. This essay seeks to explore ways in which the EU could enable the housing of its own largest minority, the nomadic Roma, who themselves say they cannot accept social housing with cement or camps with polluted mud, but could acclimatize themselves to garden cities. In poor housing they become ill with TB. Before, in their caravans with their outdoor living, they were free of the disease.</P>
<P>2. I am writing these lines following the May 7-9 State of the Union of the European Union in Fiesole and Florence where all these topics were under discussion except that of climate change.</P>
<P>3. Julian Benda, La Trahison des Clercs (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals), 1927, presciently saw the growing danger of nationalism. Germany, between the wars, on top of the costs of World War I, was made by the Allies to pay reparations, often funded by loans at interest. In turn Jews, because they were bankers, were scapegoated. The Holocaust by Germany thus had its partial cause in these reparations paid to France, Belgium; Italy and England. None of our nations is innocent. See <a href="http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations</a>.</P>
<P>4. <a href="http://www.navdanya.org/">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Cities_of_To-morrow</a>
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<P>5. From the Fondazione Michelucci: <i>Firenze: Tracce di un'altra storia/traces of another history, 2002</i>; <i>1954-2004, Città nella citta: Il quartiere dell'Isolotto a Firenze</i>, 2006; <i>Firenze verso la città moderna: Itinerari urbanistici nella città estesa tra Ottocento e Novecento</i>, eds. Andrea Aleardi, Corrado Marcetti, Giulio Manetti, n.d.; <i>Firenze crocevia di culture</i>, 2010.</P>
Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-79496758018714027262013-06-08T20:45:00.001+02:002013-12-18T09:00:30.482+01:00CHE COSA E’ IL MALE?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Saturday, June 08, 2013
Sto catalogando dei libri per la nostra biblioteca. Biblioteca in cui i Rom apprendono l’alfabeto e scrivono il ‘Padre Nostro’. Una sezione è dedicata alla discriminazione, che altro non è che la 'demonizzazione’ dell’Altro e la proiezione del male che abita in noi. Due i libri in particolare che sto catalogando per questa sezione: <i>On Evil</i> di Terry Eagleton e <i>Il Male</i> di Paul Ricoeur, traduzione italiana del suo <i>Le mal: Un défi à la philosophie et à la théologie</i>. Ho già in questo stesso sito pubblicato ‘Perché il male?’ di Don Divo Barsotti, che mi richiama alla memoria la discussione dialogica sul male nel <i>De consolatione philosophiae</i> (<i>La Consolazione della filosofia</i>) di Boezio, riflessa in <i>The Showing of Love</i> (<i>Le Rivelazioni dell’Amore</i>) di Giuliana di Norwich e nella <i>Summa Theologiae</i> (<i>La Summa Teologica</i>) di Tommaso d’Aquino. Il male è nulla. Il male è il tendere al non essere. Dio è al centro. L' Essere perfettissimo, il Sommo Bene, l'Essere Eterno. Allontanarsene – o altri allontanare da questo – è tendere al non essere, alla dispersione nel limite del tempo, nel sempre meno tempo, conduce alla non esistenza, alla pochezza. Una bomba è il male perché annienta e distrugge l’Altro. Così come male è un fucile. Male tutte le armi della violenza. È la sezione questa sugli esclusi, su chi riduciamo al rango di inferiori. Donne, Ebrei, Rom, Neri, Nativi americani, Aborigeni. La sezione sul trauma, sui danni subiti da cui originano quelle alterazioni chimiche del cervello che ci rendono più timorosi dell’Altro, più punitivi, più rigidi. Sviliamo l’‘Altro’quando all’altro neghiamo terra, lavoro, un tetto, cibo, acqua, ciò di cui vestirsi, una coperta. Noi siamo la causa prima di questo male. La loro povertà. Questo è ciò che Firenze fa ai Rom. <br>
Studiando il cervello scopriamo che la parte destra è inclusiva, include l’altro. È la parte che mostra misericordia. È l’anima. È la parte in contatto con il divino. La parte sinistra, di contro, esclude l’Altro, categorizza, separa, giudica, condanna. È la mente intellettuale. Le due parti devono essere in armonia. In passato conoscevo intimamente una persona molto ammalata, che quasi del tutto dominata dall’emisfero sinistro del cervello si è separata da moglie e figli, da noi derubando tutto. Non sono riuscita a convincerlo di quanto fosse amato. Per lui io ero l’‘Altro’da distruggere. Il male sarebbe stato rimanere, annientata e partecipe di quello stesso male subito. Eppure ancora ho cercato di raggiungere quell’abisso. Sperando nel condividere le mie ricerche egli potesse acquisire il tenure. La persona più malvagia nell’intero universo, queste le sue parole, nella sua ultima conversazione telefonica con me. Ero la sua anima da rigettare. La madre dei nostri figli. La Desdemona di Otello. <br>Gesù nel suo ministero, con le donne, gli indemoniati, i lebbrosi, i samaritani, i palestinesi, la siro-fenicia agisce mosso dall’emisfero destro. È questa la cristianità di Cristo. La religione si vincola, di contro, alle divisioni dell’emisfero sinistro. La parola ‘Fariseo’ significa ‘separato’. Gesù è il principe della pace. Le separazioni, le divisioni, gli scismi, le demonizzazioni, sono i semi di guerra con cui sul nemico proiettiamo il male che alberga in noi. Guerra che estendiamo e moltiplichiamo con bombe a grappolo, missili a testata nucleare, campi di sterminio, olocausti, nuove Guantànamo. Firenze quale atto di riparazione per l’affamata Pisa - causa dell’orrido cannibalismo di Ugolino che divorò la sua progenie, figli e nipoti - edifica Orsanmichele, loggia del mercato del grano, per nutrire anche i nemici in tempo di carestia. L’amore, la comunione, la condivisione cancellano il male. Il ritorno all’innocenza cancella il trauma. Il procedere a ritroso - o l’andare verso il centro annulla il tempo. Dio è l’assenza di male. Il male è l’assenza di Dio. <br>Se procediamo con il Padre Nostro a ritroso, verso il centro, con il rovesciamento dell'immagine riflessa, non è la parola male a chiudere la nostra preghiera, ma il nostro condiviso essere con Dio, nostro 'Padre': ‘ma liberaci dal male, e non ci indurre in tentazione; come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori, rimetti a noi i nostri debiti; dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano; come in cielo e così in terra, sia fatta la tua volontà; venga il Tuo Regno; sia santificato il Tuo nome; Padre Nostro, che sei nei Cieli’. Qui con queste parole viviamo il regno dei cieli.Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-11932356283517168282013-06-07T12:31:00.001+02:002013-06-13T04:11:15.974+02:00WHAT IS EVIL?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I am cataloguing books for our libray, a library in which Roma learn the alphabet and write the Lord's Prayer. And a section of it is on discrimination, the 'demonizing ' of the Other, who is a mirroring of ourselves, onto whom we project our evil. Two books I catalogue in that section are Terry Eagleton's <i>On Evil</i> and Paul Ricoeur's <i>Il male</i>, a translation into Italian of his <i>Le mal: Un défie à la philosophie e ò la théologie</i>. Already on this website I have Don Divo Barsotti's <a href="http://www.umilta.net/whyevil.html">'Why Evil?</a>' These remind me of Boethius' discussion of evil in the <i>Consolation of Philosophy</i>, reflected in Julian of Norwich's <i>Showing of Love</i> and in Aquinas' <i>Summa Theologiae</i>, the evil is nought, is the tending to non-being. That God is at the centre, all Being, all Good, all Time; while absenting oneself from that - or absenting another from that - is the tending toward non-being, the dispersal into time, into less and less time, less being, lessness. A bomb is evil because it causes the less-being, the non-being, of the Other. Likewise is a gun. Likewise all weapons of violence.<br />
This is the section in the library which is for the Outsiders, those 'lessened' by us, Women, Jews, Roma, Blacks, Native Americans, Aborigine. This is the section of the library on Trauma, that which damages us, which alters our brains and its chemistry, which makes us more fearful of the Other, more punitive, more rigid. We lessen the 'Other' when we deny them land, work, shelter, food, water, clothing, a blanket. We cause the evil that is their poverty. All this is done by Florence to Roma.<br />
When we study the brain we find the right side is inclusive of the other, merciful, the soul, in contact with Godness, while the left excludes the Other, categorizes, separates, judges, condemns, is the intellectual mind. The two need to be in harmony. I once knew intimately a very ill person whose brain functioning was almost entirely in the left hemisphere, who had to separate himself from wife and sons while stealing all we had. I could not convince him I loved him, because to him I was the 'Other', to be destroyed. It would be evil to stay and be so destroyed, which would be to permit and participate in evil. But I still reached across that abyss to share my research so he could get tenure. His last telephone conversation was to say to me I was the most evil person in the whole cosmos. I was his soul he rejected, our sons' mother. I am Othello's Desdemona.<br />
Jesus, in ministering to women, lunatics, lepers, Samaritans, Syro-Phoenician Palestinians, was right hemisphere dominant. This is Christ's Christianity. But religion binds itself into left hemisphere separations, the word 'Pharisee' meaning 'separate'. Jesus is the Prince of Peace. The separations, the divorces, the schisms, the demonizings, are the seeds of war. During which we project onto our enemy our own evil. Multiplying it into cluster bombs, nuclear warheads, extermination camps, holocausts, Guantanamos.<br />
Florence, in reparation for the starvation she inflicted on Pisa, which caused the evil of Ugolino's cannibalism of his sons and grandsons, built Orsanmichele as a granary to feed even the enemy in times of famine. Evil can be undone with love, with communion, with sharing. Trauma can be undone with returning to innocence. Time can be undone with going backwards - or to the centre. God is the absence of evil. Evil is the absence of God. <br />
If we go backwards with the Lord's Prayer, into the centre, mirror-reversing it, we do not end it with the word 'evil', but in our shared being with God, our 'Father': 'But Deliver us from evil, Lead us not into Temptation, As we forgive those who trespass against us, Forgive us our trespasses, Give us this day our daily bread, On earth as it is in Heaven, Thy will be done, Thy Kingdom come, Hallowed by Thy Name, Who art in Heaven, Our Father'.
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Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-72370268588377680752013-01-12T19:32:00.000+01:002013-04-22T10:44:35.242+02:00FROM GRAVES TO CRADLES': AN APPEAL<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Vandana and Daniel saved Florence's Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence. It had been abandoned. They gardened, restored its ironwork, cleaned its tombs, and earned enough in five years to build their home in Romania, with three rooms and four windows, on land they bought. Vandana, Daniel, their daughters, Alexandra, Elena and Gabriela, and Vandana's mother, Amanda, are Romanian Roma, who were slaves of the nobles and monasteries from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century when <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> was translated into Romanian, and family members were killed in the Holocaust. We called our project 'From Graves to Cradles', as the two parents also made a cradle for their new born, Gabriela. Then disaster struck. The land and house, registered with the city, was taken from them by the rich owners who had had it before Communism. No compensation. They lost everything. They had to return to living in one room with three daughters and the grandmother, paying rent. Vandana is in hospital, unable to speak as I write. Can we make a home possible for them again in time to give Vandana the hope she has lost, she has earned?
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For the full story see <a href="http://http://www.ringofgold.eu/house.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/house.html
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You can make PayPal payments towards helping make their home possible again at <a href="http://www.florin.ms/pp.html">http://www.florin.ms/pp.html</a>
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Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-46184866999204988592012-05-24T14:35:00.000+02:002012-07-06T23:12:56.582+02:00LEFT/RIGHT BRAIN: AN ESSAY ON EDUCATIONAL LEARNING
- AND A LESSON ON THE EURO
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<p>Europe's First Euro</p>
<p>The Florin of Florence</p>
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<p>Lily of Florence - - John the Baptist, Patron of Florence and of austerity</p>
<p>He was a dear friend with writer's block. It took months of talking, dialoguing, about his book. We spent hours in my apartment, hours in the Annexe, at Princeton. A friend of my father's, a classicist, translating Homer, joined us. Our conversation ranged - and linked - right and left hemisphere brain functioning (like the obverse and reverse of coins), Babylonian gods with great staring eyes, Athena being hallucinated, externalized, by Odysseus in moments of crisis, Catholic schoolgirls seeing statues of the Virgin nod to them, and the monsters under the bed children know are terrifyingly real. He finally came to me with the cover of his book, great bold letters across the title page, a photograph of himself on the back. I objected to both, the title too long, the photograph so unlike his genial self. It will never sell, I said. It became immediately a best-seller! Julian Jaynes' <i>The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind</i>. His other friend - my father's friend, the classicist who studied under W.B. Stanford at Dublin's Trinity College - Thomas Day.</p>
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<p>I used to love the great libraries of Britain and France, the Pannizzi dome of the British Library, the great hemispheres of the Bibliothèque Nationale, libraries replicating the human brain with synapses and the domed sky above. John Ruskin complaining about the cheapness of material for the upper stairs out of sight, William Morris beginning News from Nowhere there. Then, in my lifetime, these libraries were placed instead in square glass boxes. A loss. And damaging to the books. We need a strong opaque rounded bone structure to protect our soft brain cells and their synapses, our book bindings and their pages. Our modern architects are insufficiently holistic, are out of touch with practicality or with Pythagorean ratios and harmonies, or with the Fibonaccian curves that conform to Nature. Too, our clothes, once of organic materials, curved to our bodies, dyed and printed and embroidered with colours and designs from Nature, have become made of chemicals and mechanized with zippers, have become monotones, have become angular, have become like cars. Ancestral hand-made wooden curving rocking cradles that kept babies from crying by their soothing movement have become throw-away unyielding ugly things of plastic and metal. School desks that once sloped to accommodate the curving eye are now flatly square. Quality and practicality that had formerly aided children's well-being and development from centuries of wisdom now replaced with damaging shoddiness and boxiness for maximum profit.</p>
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<p>A school friend's husband and his friend were working on Crete, studying the development of the human brain with the human hand in tandem, Jonathan Musgrove and Colin Groves. I mentioned their work to Julian Jaynes, noting that the movement from the use of the hemispheres in balance with each other to the domination of the left hemisphere governing the right hand and side of the body appears to come about with literacy, it being pre-literate children who hallucinate monsters under the bed. Homer is an oral, not a scribal, poet. Plato's <i>Phaedrus</i> and Havelock Ellis came in useful here. Buckminster Fuller taught that the cup is an extension of the human hand, the vehicle of our legs, the camera of our eyes, the hearing aid of the failed ear, the computer of our brain. Frustrated by his deafness when speaking with us, I took his hand and placed it on my hearing aid and smiled. And he smiled too.</p>
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<p>Byzantinist colleagues taught me that mosaics in rounded domes and apses in Orthodox churches of Christ/God as Pantocrator have one side of the face be stern and judgmental, the other kind and merciful. Look at your self in a mirror and hold your hand over your left side (governed by your right hemisphere), then your right (governed by your left hemisphere). You will see the same. One side sad, the other merry. Dante, when he sees God in the <i>Commedia</i>, says he seems 'as if painted in our image'. This bicameral aspect of our brain in our body gives one side as discriminating, remembering the past, planning the future, the other accepting, in the present moment. A woman anthropologist friend doing field work in Spain after cattle from America were introduced which yielded more milk so babies could be bottle fed, found the Madonnas with Babies at their breast came to be covered up as they were now regarded as obscene, expendable, instead of as sacred and nurturing. Have you noticed how in paintings of Mary her Baby is held on her left side? That is because mothers who hold their babies find a child is calmer, more tranquil, when she/he can hear/feel the mother's heart beat, restoring that connecting music of the womb, that secure love, governed by the right hemisphere. I wrote a different essay long ago on 'Cruelty and Mercy' (<a href="http://www.umilta.net/mercy.html">http://www.umilta.net/mercy.html</a>). The right hemisphere is the God/Human side of our brain, of mercy, of kindness; the left, that of the machine, the Golden Calf, Pharoah's chariots, the world of money, cut off from reality, schizophrenic, of cruelty. Both are needed for survival in modern society, but not with the left hemisphere as dominant; instead the two in balance, the one tempered by the other, justice tempered by mercy.</p>
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<p>A friend, retiring from teaching, decided to take intensive Italian in Florence. He struggled with memorizing grammatical paradigms, hours upon hours, to the point of exhaustion. But the language did not come. I mentioned that I found with learning languages that first one dreamed in them, then one thought in them, and last of all one spoke in them. Right-brain learning. That each language became easier than the last one. But that I used to have to drink a glass of wine when memorizing left-brain paradigms, verbs and declensions. Just as I found that the night before an exam one should go to a film, rather than cram-memorize dates and facts, and then these would come up to the surface from unknown layers of the brain. I observed my oral illiterate Roma friends, already having their Sanskrit/Persian/Turkish Romanì, as well as their Romanian, immediately learn Italian, even English, much more quickly than I can. Just as children learn, orally, without books. Through the music, the context. I, being deafened in WWII, was taught lip-reading formally, to no avail, only to find that where I relaxed, the meaning, from the contexts, came naturally from a bundle of clues, that I could not force myself to understand but which instead were intuitive. With the right hemisphere which links rather than divides, which constructs rather than analyzes. And I remembered Thomas Day and W.B. Stanford and Sir Uvedale Price and Elizabeth Barrett Browning discussing the scansion of Greek, its pitch marks, its music, as intrinsic to its language and its poetry. This is what we do not teach. But should. Languages are holistic song, not linear prose, poetry, not memorized paradigms. Augustine said, 'He who sings, prays twice'. The acoustics of Gregorian chant in vaulted stone monastic churches excels over the prose of sermons, both architecturally and in its brain hemisphere reception. I mentioned all this to a couple from San Francisco, he, black, she, white, both psychiatrists, and they said 'Yes', that the primitive limbic connection between the two hemispheres is crucial, that in medical school there had been too much to memorize and they had found it best instead of cramming these at the last moment to go to museums, to concerts. Then the right answers would well up from the unconscious - where it had been effectively processed in sleep, in dreams. The right concepts do not dredge up from the memorizing, compartmentalizing left hemisphere, but from the processing, connecting, right one.</p>
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<p>Struggling with the problem of Roma illiteracy and with my own discontent with the increasing left-brain managerial bureaucratization of universities - which I describe in 'Arabesquing the University', a presentation I gave in Antwerp and which I discussed in Rome at two conferences on the future of the University (<a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/ArabesqueUniversity.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/ArabesqueUniversity.html</a>) - I came to see how important it is in education not to overstress the left hemisphere aspects only but to maintain the balance, the linking, to allow the play between the two. Likewise that it is important to maintain the medieval monastic balance between body, mind and soul, work, study and prayer, manuality with the intellect and the spirit. Christ was a carpenter, a scholar needs to know how to build bookcases for her books, a father a cradle for his child. That desperate cry from Heloise, that one cannot combine ink wells with distaffs, cradles with libraries, causing women's exclusion from the pagan Greco-Arabic categorizing university lecture halls in which Christian theology came to be taught for centuries and which cripples human families, is something I defy. We proudly have a curved wooden Roma rocking cradle in our library.</p>
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<p>In a sense Erasmus, More and Montaigne, in their rebellion against Greco-Arabic Scholasticism of the Aristotle-espousing universities, tried to balance the hemispheres with Humanism, Virginia Woolf echoing them in her brilliant essays on other writers. Jean Leclercq found contemplative theology by women and men, freed from the left-hemisphere dominant Scholasticism of the university, to be deeper, superior, and Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict agreed with him, speaking of the revealed theology of Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich. I was precepting for a Dante scholar, Professor Robert Hollander, in a Humanities course at Princeton where the students were asked to write on Montaigne. Bob Hollander instructed them to write analytical essays in the Scholastic manner. I was disobedient and suggested that the students instead write essays in the Humanist manner of Montaigne. I explained they could use snatches of poetry, even in other languages, play off these, digress, allow the mind to wander as it does in dreams, and permit the self a presence. Wonderful essays came in, the students beaming, exclaiming this was the most splendid experience they had had in writing. It was right-brain work in which the microcosm tuned to the macrocosm, to the great Pannizzi domes and Fibonacci curves and Pythagorean harmonies of things. One can't do this when functioning in hierarchical, specializing, narrowing little self-contained boxes shaped by so-called detached observers in sterile white lab coats, deliberately cut off from life, from reality, learning 'more and more' (really, less and less) about less and less. The right hemisphere is universalizing, rather than particularizing, of 'we', rather than 'me'. It is the paradox of humility leading to inclusion, that curvingly stoops to conquer, instead of the ego which despises - and rigidly seeks to annihilate with pogroms, the Inquisition, lynching, the Holocaust, the Porrajmos, with Fascist salutes, with goose-stepping marches, - the 'Other'.</p>
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<p>My great challenge in retirement is caring for a cemetery, Florence's English Cemetery, in which are buried poets, sculptors, Abolitionists, of the nineteenth century. When I came in 2000 the garden had been put to weed-killer for thirty years, its plants were uprooted, the tombs were vandalized, the white marble black with atmospheric pollution, their stories un-researched, untold, syringes were everywhere and Black Magic and suicide attempts carried out at its gates, an abandonment, an undoing. This photograph is from 1990.</p>
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<p>I and the despised, hated, feared Roma, repaired its dry-walls that had collapsed in 1977, gardened, planted irises, lavender, roses, and cleaned and repaired tombs within its great oval from which we glimpse Florence's Duomo's dome. These photographs are taken in 2012.
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<p>With wild irises, Florence's purple lily.</p>
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<p>A Romanian Roma family, members of our Aureo Anello Associazione, mothers and children, work together.</p>
<p>On Sundays we hold Alphabet School. Because we combine literacy and work. To become members our Roma must first learn to sign their names. And they do, along with scholars and descendants, in our membership book, learning which letters have curves, which have angles, and with them their sounds, creating necklaces that spell their names, the Lord's Prayer. This is an economy of sharing knowledge, where we all mutually benefit. This is an economy of sharing knowledge, where we all mutually benefit. Our restoration and cultivation of this oval in Florence is a microcosm of what is possible economically as macrocosm with the whole globe. With what the Roma earn they repair their homes in Romania. It is possible. And creates great beauty and healthier families. We call our project 'From Graves to Cradles'.</p>
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<p>But we question ourselves seriously about Roma and education. Theirs is an oral culture, where skills are passed down, father to son, mother to daughter, mother to son, father to daughter, for generations, how to be blacksmiths, coppersmiths, stonemasons, carpenters, gardeners, how to sew, how to cook, from watching and learning - right brain and left brain in balance. And the music is so splendid, yet with great sadness, the Romanian Roma traumatically enslaved from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. I use methods from Maria Montessori (who devised hers for deprived slum children though now they are only used for the deprived children of the rich), Joseph Lancaster, Margaret Macmillan, Don Lorenzo Milani, Paolo Freire. I challenge the concept I heard in Brussels and in Romania, that Roma children must be put in Nursery Schools to integrate them into the dominant cultures. Repeating the error of the Aborigines in Australia's Lost Generation and that of the Native Peoples in Canada, repeating the error of America's Headstart project which considered that black children should not have books as 'they needed to work on their socializing skills first'. That is the age when the young would most learn their own and valuable culture of manual skills from their parents. And most adventure in the world of the book. We need to value home as well as school education. Instead I argue for preserving these skills at the same time all ages are taught the alphabet and surrounded with books. Indeed, access to library/schools for all ages in families would be preferable. Whole families together can become literate. In this way there is not an abyss between parent and child enforced by state schooling, but a sharing. Women were barred from the great but left-brained Scholastic universities. But where they had access to libraries, as did Christine de Pizan to the French King's library in Paris, and as did Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her father's and brother's fine library of books in Malvern, they became the great writers of educational and liberating poetry for women and men. In our pilot model the Roma teach each other in their own beloved oral Romanì, immediately spilling over into all our scribal languages. Next, we hope to bring five Tuscan school leavers without work to our project, the Roma teaching them their manual skills (though it is much harder learning skills, as with languages, in one's teens than as a pre-school child), in exchange for their teaching the Roma the alphabet.</p>
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<p>I have now come to understand that there is a spectrum amongst persons that ranges from the universalizing circling right-brain individuals (the God/Human side) to the most taut squaring left-brain ones (the Atheist/Machine side). At that far end I place acquaintances of mine with schizophrenia who rigidly define themselves as the all-important narcissistic centre, the others as expendable, and who must have things performed in a pre-determined linear sequence, a Procrustean bed, not permitting deviation from its linearity, who discriminate against the 'Other', dehumanizing women, immigrants, and racial groups ear-marked for slavery, genocide, war, and who may become mass-murderers slaughtering the young (Dunblane, Columbine, Beslan, Utoeya), who split themselves off from reality into their rigid self-centering that they then seek to impose on all. Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik deliberately medicated himself into such a left-hemisphere dominant condition to carry out his acts. That word 'schizophrenia', 'split-brain', is actually a just description of the condition. Something of that far end of the spectrum can also be induced, through pain, deprivation, abuse, shock, war, in early childhood or later trauma, PTSD, not into schizophrenia but into depression, bipolarity, self-harming, multiple personality, etc., where the brain's chemistry itself is changed through the limbic region, the caring, nurturing, playful part in the mammalian brain, but which responds in crisis with heightened response, with excess sometimes being damaged, engineered, tailored, in that process. Initiation rituals so play with conforming personalities into group loyalties by these means, through 'shock and awe', through terror, through violation. Sparta did this to children to create a warrior class to suppress the Helots, their slaves, leading to Plato's Myth of the Metals, where he admired the enemy's hierarchy of King, Nobles, Slaves, of gold, silver and iron, Karl Popper, I.F. Stone and Michel Foucault correctly seeing that Socrates and Plato in so doing were betraying Athenian democracy, <i>eleutheria</i> (freedom) and <i>parrhesia</i> (the obligation to speak the truth at personal risk and to be protected for doing so). In my English convent school it was the girls who submitted to trauma who became scornful of those who had not, creating of themselves a master class who collectively bullied the threatening and free 'Other'. I saw the same pattern in American college fraternities and sororities where we, who again were the free 'Other', internalized our status, and sadly, proudly, called ourselves 'Pariahs'. Twelve years ago I wrote about St Augustine's education/trauma (<a href="http://www.umilta.net/trauma.html">http://www.umilta.net/trauma.html</a>), which had caused him to believe that children were not innocent, as Christ taught, but instead depraved with Original Sin. That act of trauma changed a Christian saint into the left hemisphere dominance, from the maternal right-hemisphere one - to his mother's tears. At first, from my father's and my brother's scorn for women, bred into them at all-male schools, like Ardingly, Oxford, Spyway and Shrewsbury, where they were abused, I, too, internalized this great myth of women's inferiority, despising women's writings, completely believing we were inferior. Then I discovered Birgitta of Sweden, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Julian of Norwich, among many other women, and edited them, publishing them for women and men to value and share. This perception of the 'split-brain' of schizophrenia now means I can look back at abusers and see them, too, as victims of their childhood traumatizing, which has changed their brain chemistry, their wiring. From this came the gifting of blessed olive leaves, small tangible healing objects sacramentally placed in the hands of trauma victims, be they Jew, Christina, Muslim or other, even to be gifted by the victims to the perpetrators for their mutual healing from the harm caused, as a freeing from the inability to forgive, the bondage/bonding with what is unforgivable (<a href="http://www.umilta.net/oliveleaf.html">http://www.umilta.net/oliveleaf.html</a>). Christ in his teaching opposed the Myth of Metals, broke down the barriers, exalted the down-trodden, women, lepers, Samaritans, the poverty-stricken, prisoners, thieves. Christianity is right-brain. Though not necessarily the Church.</p>
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<p>Naomi Klein in her <i>Shock Doctrine</i> showed how governments manipulate the electorate through trauma, rewire them to admire and vote for the rich and the criminal and the war monger, to vote for Barabbas, not Christ. Tolstoy said governments create the enemy to have an army, create the criminal to have police - against their own people - to stay in power over them. The fulcrum is here in Florence, between the Primo Popolo and Republic, the Res Publica, the Commonwealth, of Arnolfo di Cambio, Giotto, Dante, the great city walls, the Palazzo del Popolo (now Vecchio), the foundations of the Duomo, Orsanmichele, the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova, the Misericordia, all of these medieval, versus the Renaissance princepality of the Medici, who built fortresses against their own people, and palaces and villas just for themselves. Savonarola sought to return Florence to her Commonwealth, against such Princes. One visits the Uffizi to see paintings in the first rooms of the gold-leafed beauty of saints, the Madonna nurturing the Child, once in the churches for the people; in the later rooms, instead, paintings of pornography against bitumen backgrounds for the Medici's private palaces. Machiavelli, former Chancellor of Republican Florence, wrote his <i>Prince</i> with the greatest irony, advising the returned tyrants how to be such, a diabolic counselling to be overheard and overturned by the people, whom, Machiavelli says (within that text as its true key) 'having once been free will never consent to be ruled by tyrants'. The <i>Prince</i> is Swift's <i>Modest Proposal</i>, Orwell's <i>Animal Farm</i>, the deepest satire. It is taken seriously, as doctrine and dogma, by CEOs who hold seminars funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities with taxpayers' money in which they read its twistedness straight. Where the spectrum goes too far, through indoctrination, through trauma, to left-brain dominance, morality is cast aside, criminality ensues, profits trump persons, the centering upon the self to the cost of the other destroys the economy and its delicate balance of reciprocity, of democracy, of equality, of civil rights. As with churches so with political parties, what had been right-brain, Guelf, Labour, Democrat, will become infiltrated and subverted to the left brain, to be wolves in sheep's clothing, to be Ghibelline, Conservative and Republican, waging multi-murdering bankrupting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You do not wage wars without raising taxes and practising austerity. But we did. To an inevitable collpase. The great capitalists, the pre-Medici Florentine merchants of the Guilds, the Quakers, Cashes, Cadburys, Frys, and Warren Buffet, knew to live simply and that adopted poverty is, paradoxically, great wealth.</p>
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<p>We seem to forget that the European crisis began, besides these cruel wars for petroleum, with banks in America, England and Iceland disconnected from reality, behaving deceitfully, with magical thinking, with smoke and mirrors, seeking a Darwinian and Machiavellian market 'killing' for themselves, and then going bankrupt. We are fostering a culture of competitiveness, 'he who dies with the most toys, wins'. It has crashed. Iceland has been intelligent, refusing to pay the bankers' indebtedness. If we ring-fenced the banks, instead of rewarding them, they might learn to reign in their recklessness with our money, our work, our energy, our property. We own them. We need to fire them. They don't own us, despite all their mortgage foreclosures. They should be a service to the people. We learned this lesson already in the 'Thirties and regulated them then. Keynes and Galbraith were right, not Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand. They must be brought to heel, not pampered with huge bonuses. Just so did Florence exile her land-owning, money-grubbing Ghibellines outside of the city where they became robber-barons in the countryside, while the Guelfs poured their profits back into education, hospitals, a granary, caring for the poor, the stranger, the sick, the dying, the orphan, creating a great Republic, until the Medici in turn became a Ghibelline princepality. Florence's Patron is the austere Saint John the Baptist. Italian laws required savings banks to spend a handsome proportion of their profits on culture and charity, not on themselves, were excellent - until Berlusconi hedonistically undid this wisdom. IBM began Silicone Valley and flourished when it poured its profits back into its development - as a service - not into its shareholders' pockets. Jimmy Wales' <i>Wikipedia</i> is such a service model, democratically sharing knowledge, not money.</p>
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<p>But simultaneously with a curbing of the false economy of today's banking industry we must also ourselves return to the work ethic, an economy outside of money (which is a false symbol system by which we lived, and moved and had our being until it collapsed), curbing consumerism and encouraging thrift, curbing debt and encouraging sharing. This real, rather than false, economy, needs to be based on a circling excellence of work, of knowledge, of love, of ethics, of morals. Where we do not seek for ourselves in a left-brained way, but for all, with the right-brain, where we share and build and exchange what we have and what we create, composting for soil, farming organically for food for our tables, building roofs for the homeless, schools and libraries for children and adults, hospitals with doctors for the ill and the well, to prevent as well as cure diseases, and where we learn again how to sew our clothes, build our homes, farm our land, and where we bicycle to our schools, our libraries, our museums, our workplaces. Where we throw away our tvs, billboards, advertizing. Where we reduce our dependence on petroleum, plastics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals. Where we do not go into debt. Where we curb lobbyists and directly participate in our governing. Where we exile speculators, futures traders, hedge-fund corporations, and ring-fence their offshore islands against activities on the mainlands. Sending a clear message about our need for economic health, rather than disease. Then we will be free and have prosperity.</p>
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<p>The left-hemisphere aspect, by its very nature, has to exclude, women from men, emotion from reason, religion from science. It is rigid, it compartmentalizes, it hierarchizes, it enslaves. Balancing the hemispheres, obverse and reverse, of the florin, of the euro, includes women with men, compassion with justice, the reverence for the Creator and the Creation, the body, the mind, the soul. And it allows us to see how the brain in tandem with the hand and its manuality evolved - but that it may now be self-destructingly mutating. It allows us to see how the right and left hemispheres of the brain and our modes of learning can interact; it does not impoverish us. It opens rather than closes.</p>
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<p>Then I saw a splendid TED presentation by Jill Bolte Taylor in which she, a neurologist, had the privilege of observing her own massive stroke and its effect upon the two hemispheres of her brain: <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html">http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html</a>. She lived to tell the tale.</p>
<p>Europe's First Euro</p>
<p>The Florin of Florence</p>
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<p> Lily of Florence - - John the Baptist, Patron of Florence and of austerity</p>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-70133204848168254072011-07-01T06:54:00.027+02:002011-08-24T13:48:50.691+02:00THE FLORENTINE GONFALONE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTY_BybY4NAdAFIngX3HdJmVHD_elGqDbWFCv0x2FDQpG2cutXOwk_bsjgpg64T9roypUZSA80kjO5HGXD2nBMBDdXCtrLbnvPeJW8AgKhlomoadbzA8-AalUgPwhboSsunMTF/s1600/DSCN6979.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTY_BybY4NAdAFIngX3HdJmVHD_elGqDbWFCv0x2FDQpG2cutXOwk_bsjgpg64T9roypUZSA80kjO5HGXD2nBMBDdXCtrLbnvPeJW8AgKhlomoadbzA8-AalUgPwhboSsunMTF/s320/DSCN6979.JPG" /></a></div>Florence's Gonfalonieri who carry her great lilied banner, the 'Gonfalone' of Justice, and trumpet fanfares at civic celebrations in Florence.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuhYCr-B58wtP9yIXi5UnO8dfoOraMeUwPE7jc70wRpKEtg23yqOkosGwqNAm3-RI4Y-bqR50ZG4KFQ6ukBoC5ehGwvvUKS3g3Im7k6hb_WiTcNqPZd1g8JEM2DUgPU_AUCVk2/s1600/DSCN6973.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuhYCr-B58wtP9yIXi5UnO8dfoOraMeUwPE7jc70wRpKEtg23yqOkosGwqNAm3-RI4Y-bqR50ZG4KFQ6ukBoC5ehGwvvUKS3g3Im7k6hb_WiTcNqPZd1g8JEM2DUgPU_AUCVk2/s320/DSCN6973.JPG" /></a></div>JBH, Signor Gerardo Kraft, Pastore Mario Marziale<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAxOAZ-Qmad6SGXgp5sYmldKLVef1Y9Qmm55afH_XFuoGZjny_jq3Jpsou4_aZPm3Za9_LLFYZeVodZhrG9__1eXAuACE-C9lRlDpTg4TicqsIvn5anLR7vfU1DOEAphN9ZroI/s1600/DSCN6977.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAxOAZ-Qmad6SGXgp5sYmldKLVef1Y9Qmm55afH_XFuoGZjny_jq3Jpsou4_aZPm3Za9_LLFYZeVodZhrG9__1eXAuACE-C9lRlDpTg4TicqsIvn5anLR7vfU1DOEAphN9ZroI/s320/DSCN6977.JPG" /></a></div>Professoressa Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti, Professor Leopoldo Stefanutti<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgQjST62C_5IUNCAD31dfrZ_v5MYvgUjvw9kpszlMksCQkJZhBvJhev8GvUm3kpvEPX7b0HckivMSlvtukCs3ssnPTECqMq-CyLkKHK5qis_uMjaKCr7grX2K5ZIeoOqtQMiU9/s1600/DSCN6982.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgQjST62C_5IUNCAD31dfrZ_v5MYvgUjvw9kpszlMksCQkJZhBvJhev8GvUm3kpvEPX7b0HckivMSlvtukCs3ssnPTECqMq-CyLkKHK5qis_uMjaKCr7grX2K5ZIeoOqtQMiU9/s320/DSCN6982.JPG" /></a></div>Gabriella, JBH, Scott Lewis, Katerine Gaja, Elena Capolino<br />
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It was a magnificent day, thanks to everyone, the Comune of Florence, our special visitors, Eugenio Giani, President of the Consigilio of Florence, Mary Ellen Countryman, the American Consul, Scott Lewis, President of the Browning Society and of the Friends of Casa Guidi, Michael Meredith of Eton, former President of the Browning Society, Gerardo Kraft, President of the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church, Edgar Kraft, the Swiss Consul, Sara Milne, Director of the British Institute, Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu, President of the Asociatia 'Agrustic Somnacuni'. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was accorded the same honours as is Dante Alighieri by the City of Florence!<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsrDfsudrtI41DIhGrcQAlcvDAeqWFOM8iAFfRC2nHp3yl0NmquJmd8gTsNCcVJ2rnxRzVSpjt17a78_LQ5UJOJyIRNWVDtXicAw1cjqHk7KjfxVKHeu-e0gOTyx29ShBONBzZ/s1600/DSCN6987.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsrDfsudrtI41DIhGrcQAlcvDAeqWFOM8iAFfRC2nHp3yl0NmquJmd8gTsNCcVJ2rnxRzVSpjt17a78_LQ5UJOJyIRNWVDtXicAw1cjqHk7KjfxVKHeu-e0gOTyx29ShBONBzZ/s320/DSCN6987.JPG" /></a></div>Scott Lewis, President of the Browning Society, Dr. and Mrs. Bill (Kay) Turney from Waco, Andrew Sinclair from London, and others, at the tomb of EBB<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh21grOoPa8TsdFMxE1zpS5dNa55ONd02Ij5-t5ptWQZIB1Sl2ZtXsCaSpjp5q6TK9RbzgfJswu3wEx3fHuI-aprugghlc_eAyoCFlp6Mb7DrYspuJgQfjbxg-xoUMPeyPoUg88/s1600/DSCN6988.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh21grOoPa8TsdFMxE1zpS5dNa55ONd02Ij5-t5ptWQZIB1Sl2ZtXsCaSpjp5q6TK9RbzgfJswu3wEx3fHuI-aprugghlc_eAyoCFlp6Mb7DrYspuJgQfjbxg-xoUMPeyPoUg88/s320/DSCN6988.JPG" /></a></div>EBB's tomb by Lord Leighton, newly cleaned by Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7xFzTIbOhBokAz8S05gnnWja-aWR3IrwqaOZBItQuFApnApGYZ5DwI1FmQcQHylvl9Ez1lYSo8M_sqT3EYrwj0HdT7UzPlF0MKZhgrKt8cbwAyCPi_UadWpccjLNCQvytoGAD/s1600/DSCN6989.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7xFzTIbOhBokAz8S05gnnWja-aWR3IrwqaOZBItQuFApnApGYZ5DwI1FmQcQHylvl9Ez1lYSo8M_sqT3EYrwj0HdT7UzPlF0MKZhgrKt8cbwAyCPi_UadWpccjLNCQvytoGAD/s320/DSCN6989.JPG" /></a></div>Gonfalonieri<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY7r2hQq4XxYCPbCxe0YHpQfkD2H_2KVpN9-fhM9sQirrvzWCmJ5GZCY6brrxmIAGVOqjrjJ47_nt-RR-EnGGkPDd761_ydK0RSYuxYp5QZmDHepLz6Wtd1zlLaoGjan7zgBXN/s1600/DSCN6991.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY7r2hQq4XxYCPbCxe0YHpQfkD2H_2KVpN9-fhM9sQirrvzWCmJ5GZCY6brrxmIAGVOqjrjJ47_nt-RR-EnGGkPDd761_ydK0RSYuxYp5QZmDHepLz6Wtd1zlLaoGjan7zgBXN/s320/DSCN6991.JPG" /></a></div>JBH, Eugenio Giani, Presidente of Florence's Consigilio, and Gonfalonieri<br />
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The great wreath of the City of Florence was laid at her tomb to the fanfare of trumpets by the Gonfalonieri, two smaller wreaths by the Browning Society with white roses, by the Friends of Casa Guidi with white lilies, all of which replicated the wreaths at her funeral 150 years ago. The many guests could browse the offerings of the Book Fair to raise funds for the restoration of Odoardo Fantacchiotti's statue of 'La Speranza', enjoy the refreshments offered by the Swiss Church, and view the exhibition of books associated with EBB and her circle of friends, particularly of those who attended her funeral, the Hiram Powers family, the William Wetmore Story family, Kate Field, Isa Blagden, Robert Lytton, the Cottrells, etc.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy_0_IT0FjRaf_QSDC-oArXPgOp4laKvUbovdSN9eAHSEFEja-mWwburYzPpj77QV10ekPQQHTh4CdkBeGbv_dNPIkd5R3OgDbk2_MIZgWoKDEwNH3Iekqvrul0jVIbPCBvbr0/s1600/DSCN6992.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy_0_IT0FjRaf_QSDC-oArXPgOp4laKvUbovdSN9eAHSEFEja-mWwburYzPpj77QV10ekPQQHTh4CdkBeGbv_dNPIkd5R3OgDbk2_MIZgWoKDEwNH3Iekqvrul0jVIbPCBvbr0/s320/DSCN6992.JPG" /></a></div>Gonfalonieri<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioxWOZWTQgWXUTUrIUZ0v96dRjhzLb030CVkPW4-bR6L1AJf1vkVotXpmGUxHW5PjaLtBRRWEFas0iZ184RhtCtlm4lY0aROipxb8X8rqHog5DUdBQLbr586sYGhdYmC4ELEEO/s1600/DSCN6994.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioxWOZWTQgWXUTUrIUZ0v96dRjhzLb030CVkPW4-bR6L1AJf1vkVotXpmGUxHW5PjaLtBRRWEFas0iZ184RhtCtlm4lY0aROipxb8X8rqHog5DUdBQLbr586sYGhdYmC4ELEEO/s320/DSCN6994.JPG" /></a></div>Gonfalonieri<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdLoIrXacPLWj-41CorftEit6Sn7CuP6IHEhbs8VbiledM6YZB9g92ufdvfYeGbhyphenhyphenEzhOldmXQEQTpbZGcXhyphenhyphen9MiJbLvVWmNarvI_K69RdM_VOoWCJ_R3Wz0DySG-KIW0EQVXf/s1600/DSCN6995.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdLoIrXacPLWj-41CorftEit6Sn7CuP6IHEhbs8VbiledM6YZB9g92ufdvfYeGbhyphenhyphenEzhOldmXQEQTpbZGcXhyphenhyphen9MiJbLvVWmNarvI_K69RdM_VOoWCJ_R3Wz0DySG-KIW0EQVXf/s320/DSCN6995.JPG" /></a></div>Katerine Gaja<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8KbRnC_LA3xpB4SSmTKnCByJ7f0PDQM5l9jwFhuP4hNv8C3DoXxm1dLQUoVvMfaFmDYbKvSnh-sIS1h2_JhJ4CL-BmAX7hk5RQ3WtF10Ui81erKTnbypCTw7tEPqlhl4tYVKy/s1600/DSCN6997.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8KbRnC_LA3xpB4SSmTKnCByJ7f0PDQM5l9jwFhuP4hNv8C3DoXxm1dLQUoVvMfaFmDYbKvSnh-sIS1h2_JhJ4CL-BmAX7hk5RQ3WtF10Ui81erKTnbypCTw7tEPqlhl4tYVKy/s320/DSCN6997.JPG" /></a></div>Mark Roberts, Katerine Gaja<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4CX19ZfDgJw51aeQlFr6JXjnV1RswPbZ1a8pfdU3ka8DNtcnNUSISxYPrYlreydhVxmxsfxZPbzPjis8Y-np8cQn3dagTby5-4NG33T9CNoaPMn_-FOLDvxfzY1Na28irOOsU/s1600/DSCN6998.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4CX19ZfDgJw51aeQlFr6JXjnV1RswPbZ1a8pfdU3ka8DNtcnNUSISxYPrYlreydhVxmxsfxZPbzPjis8Y-np8cQn3dagTby5-4NG33T9CNoaPMn_-FOLDvxfzY1Na28irOOsU/s320/DSCN6998.JPG" /></a></div>JBH and Eugenio Giani, Presidente del Consiglio di Firenze<br />
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I gave two guided tours, the first in English, the second in Italian, in which I spoke of our anti-slavery Abolitionists, how Frances Trollope wrote the first anti-slavery novel, Richard Hildreth, the second, both buried with us, Harriet Beecher Stowe copying them with <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i>, which was immediately translated into Romanian and that this freed the Roma from their slavery which lasted from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, longer than were Blacks enslaved in the Americas, and how it is the Romanian Roma who have restored this Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery, where English, Swiss, Americans, Russians, Romanians, Poles, Hungarians, Scandinavians and many others, Protestant, Orthodox and now Catholic, lie peacefully side by side. A vision of the future.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzUgfayFhuOdQAhpQ6dZhT4sWmGiQe0UXiMQHED9W-DxbwtmmYN8hH8uW7Nv3edAzr5PPTP7izPHXqW_S5vCkK8Nujp2XOJZgaM-95Lc_1_YXzahAcHII6wPv-WLcaqwbgjcuj/s1600/DSCN7000.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzUgfayFhuOdQAhpQ6dZhT4sWmGiQe0UXiMQHED9W-DxbwtmmYN8hH8uW7Nv3edAzr5PPTP7izPHXqW_S5vCkK8Nujp2XOJZgaM-95Lc_1_YXzahAcHII6wPv-WLcaqwbgjcuj/s320/DSCN7000.JPG" /></a></div>Gonfalonieri at EBB's Tomb. In the background to the left top one can see how filthy the beautiful statue by Odoardo Fantacchiotti of 'Hope', 'Speranza', now is. Click on photo to enlarge. CNR came that very afternoon to start work on her restoration and cleaning.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwONJoZBqqf2RdVZsWLY5DvwNzUGrAutxCqR22aPjoBojmLDn_ztjZ8aV7pmvANShveVgXOrMvTOzBxjA_0AmrJoOloqpSv5nvNMFix_2LekZbwXQKJktS3NHuMo6FhFYrxMDL/s1600/DSCN7002.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwONJoZBqqf2RdVZsWLY5DvwNzUGrAutxCqR22aPjoBojmLDn_ztjZ8aV7pmvANShveVgXOrMvTOzBxjA_0AmrJoOloqpSv5nvNMFix_2LekZbwXQKJktS3NHuMo6FhFYrxMDL/s320/DSCN7002.JPG" /></a></div>JBH, Eugenio Giani<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7BWVDXb0OuGD6vzfj6-8cphJODz6IdWTJ8NY0m6tV73E2q7oymi54fZHQLCpPLNnUBbnkf7tsAe_EMitILVGoaWc0f2gTLolWPtfiBn6DKExAVpD81iu7eyvtsjraDov6nGqw/s1600/DSCN7004.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7BWVDXb0OuGD6vzfj6-8cphJODz6IdWTJ8NY0m6tV73E2q7oymi54fZHQLCpPLNnUBbnkf7tsAe_EMitILVGoaWc0f2gTLolWPtfiBn6DKExAVpD81iu7eyvtsjraDov6nGqw/s320/DSCN7004.JPG" /></a></div>Eugenio Giani, JBH<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi89e5Ib7Eleek2CP5GHv_gsL9pM5R-VTC6Oy9c4kEgcMLQALoOJ3f8SaroF4OTevL4FHEmVnFc5Bvb_UQ_0uolpxsfjW0SHCxY7lorC6mEZArE9TCiDce95qxw2NZDD5mhWDNt/s1600/DSCN7006.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi89e5Ib7Eleek2CP5GHv_gsL9pM5R-VTC6Oy9c4kEgcMLQALoOJ3f8SaroF4OTevL4FHEmVnFc5Bvb_UQ_0uolpxsfjW0SHCxY7lorC6mEZArE9TCiDce95qxw2NZDD5mhWDNt/s320/DSCN7006.JPG" /></a></div>Silence at the Tomb, Scott Lewis, JBH, Gerardo Kraft, Dott. Giulio Todescan, Mario Marziale, Leopoldo Stefanutti<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPp-el59d-kuDpZFMijY78GqDrebxdu0UO7t_9L7VMzyDalYmCr3VLQBhubvP6bZxNvgyN6ieTElyTACvv6jhD_5knll-ipZIZthmH3ftVjufw9M2tAIFwqLExd9MZ7oJ_hAEQ/s1600/DSCN7007.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPp-el59d-kuDpZFMijY78GqDrebxdu0UO7t_9L7VMzyDalYmCr3VLQBhubvP6bZxNvgyN6ieTElyTACvv6jhD_5knll-ipZIZthmH3ftVjufw9M2tAIFwqLExd9MZ7oJ_hAEQ/s320/DSCN7007.JPG" /></a></div>Gonfalonieri<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkGdwSTz3Fm-mGQjLSw7smBUFCxm5RMTvxCjtZIu6ecJnsi2dnXEBCZNLP4Cbu7k2WKMkveuGtj_YaRDqrVoUAv91gRvOIrsJZdDiH8tU4e9roMmiktCwcYLd-wa1FzpkP5XiI/s1600/DSCN7008.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkGdwSTz3Fm-mGQjLSw7smBUFCxm5RMTvxCjtZIu6ecJnsi2dnXEBCZNLP4Cbu7k2WKMkveuGtj_YaRDqrVoUAv91gRvOIrsJZdDiH8tU4e9roMmiktCwcYLd-wa1FzpkP5XiI/s320/DSCN7008.JPG" /></a></div>Gonfalonieri with Aurelia Bartholini, Katerine Gaja to the left.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs6oBSinxOutUTWnXkIHO6up6ZJzaQ0LoJPYektzlwtZW-9uS7a0pMbzzvONAXyPOj9DPLGWWdaJCfhC1a7fW17pPPeHgkNZtL_ec1vZ1ma5BtWdwHn4XYQtEvLwAnVAwDzGD1/s1600/DSCN7009.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs6oBSinxOutUTWnXkIHO6up6ZJzaQ0LoJPYektzlwtZW-9uS7a0pMbzzvONAXyPOj9DPLGWWdaJCfhC1a7fW17pPPeHgkNZtL_ec1vZ1ma5BtWdwHn4XYQtEvLwAnVAwDzGD1/s320/DSCN7009.JPG" /></a></div>Marziale, JBH, Giani, Kraft<br />
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I also spoke of the need to raise funds for the restoration of Odoardo Fantacchiotti's very beautiful but now very dirty 'La Speranza', as an allegory for Florence, for Europe, for the world. For this purpose I gave my publications and limited edition productions for the 'Book Fair', which raised €300 of the needed €10,000. Other donations we seek, roses, especially standard roses as there once had been an avenue of these on both sides of the main path, and other plants with non-invasive roots that do well in Florentine sunlight and soil.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYzLlusJ5ilFf3PzUyVVpPLUJX7dXDQYIC5vL50mereqGRhBf_ON1BOQKzk_vd3mLm3S_JpukxzTwU7mcxsQyc-PPP_8LNqdHg-SHxpJXmJxtq6lMa-muI6IE52g6Il2EmC99m/s1600/DSCN7011.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYzLlusJ5ilFf3PzUyVVpPLUJX7dXDQYIC5vL50mereqGRhBf_ON1BOQKzk_vd3mLm3S_JpukxzTwU7mcxsQyc-PPP_8LNqdHg-SHxpJXmJxtq6lMa-muI6IE52g6Il2EmC99m/s320/DSCN7011.JPG" /></a></div>Gonfalonieri, Tomb of Thomas Southwood Smith. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglM6FiqX4eYUdBzc3pSjU1AFGSDpVgWXPnJUTgcNt6YCqpqaO-yMCL5zG_rUckVSxTXG_wVFScLFqaufZ4fzblfRiZaTxrzuXC1Ko3d5EiTRV3UbKaWT6iCBY0Y_v0Gl0igCXo/s1600/DSCN7015.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglM6FiqX4eYUdBzc3pSjU1AFGSDpVgWXPnJUTgcNt6YCqpqaO-yMCL5zG_rUckVSxTXG_wVFScLFqaufZ4fzblfRiZaTxrzuXC1Ko3d5EiTRV3UbKaWT6iCBY0Y_v0Gl0igCXo/s320/DSCN7015.JPG" /></a></div>Book Fair, Grazia Gobbi Sica, Giovanna Innocenti<br />
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We shared Elizabeth Barrett Browning's <i>Casa Guidi Windows</i> in English and Italian, for I found on the Web in a Roman bookshop an 1851 translation into Italian which we have now republished it with facing page, English and Italian, in the same way we publish her <i>Sonnets from the Portuguese</i>, William Morris type, handbound with our marbled paper.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghlM3vsI0s2V0az-YWvAuIaD2bpHuul67pMbJMu_OUvYQJjb4s3hGjmX1WDnntAWwFU9gkN6cl1J5FUTadCiy1qU15Z2b4zkvcxT3y7VIoodnPrOlYSJhPa7yzGjwwa5VJIShg/s1600/DSCN7024.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghlM3vsI0s2V0az-YWvAuIaD2bpHuul67pMbJMu_OUvYQJjb4s3hGjmX1WDnntAWwFU9gkN6cl1J5FUTadCiy1qU15Z2b4zkvcxT3y7VIoodnPrOlYSJhPa7yzGjwwa5VJIShg/s320/DSCN7024.JPG" /></a></div>Gonfalonieri have gone off for a cooling drink, leaving their gear behind them<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglmoFjjZ9Em81TDBGaCKCW8DVfYjwV9AgzXUxqJTskden7OYuci8uPVG4Ro7WIROTMGV0yhXo73fsHssL5b1BxdYEs3HGPZAM737Jx6TDBnKN_a1xlQ9SEAtEr4eTx6h5s5iVT/s1600/DSCN7031.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglmoFjjZ9Em81TDBGaCKCW8DVfYjwV9AgzXUxqJTskden7OYuci8uPVG4Ro7WIROTMGV0yhXo73fsHssL5b1BxdYEs3HGPZAM737Jx6TDBnKN_a1xlQ9SEAtEr4eTx6h5s5iVT/s320/DSCN7031.JPG" /></a></div>Mark Roberts, Scott Lewis<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2p0-1WNNhtivomuhMlNsyauGopJGPY0jPbtKqLbuFbbSOF8CwejnfjLAaToJ0CUglfXzu4_BBFXE521X7uIrlhLW80Z3v95c-vy3wVOe1xK4Wk93v5zvJZhigEpC9R_1L5c2q/s1600/DSCN7032.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2p0-1WNNhtivomuhMlNsyauGopJGPY0jPbtKqLbuFbbSOF8CwejnfjLAaToJ0CUglfXzu4_BBFXE521X7uIrlhLW80Z3v95c-vy3wVOe1xK4Wk93v5zvJZhigEpC9R_1L5c2q/s320/DSCN7032.JPG" /></a></div>Marchesa Antonia Lanza D'Ajeta, right<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG9SZiLco6lM3IgS96irHHqYhO6XkktQ-4u9coxK9E0kyaiQBy8G1JsCZP1QsnyJTd4KKlGF2heLOXm5D-1AUidJm86aahxvl1JTpVknSC6s5bzj4_eHryzVse2JGD3LDWJ5W-/s1600/DSCN7033.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG9SZiLco6lM3IgS96irHHqYhO6XkktQ-4u9coxK9E0kyaiQBy8G1JsCZP1QsnyJTd4KKlGF2heLOXm5D-1AUidJm86aahxvl1JTpVknSC6s5bzj4_eHryzVse2JGD3LDWJ5W-/s320/DSCN7033.JPG" /></a></div>Michael Meredith of Eton College, right<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQVhM9M9udITTEDn0BTokDDka9oVSSBC46i6Nj0xKymdNLen28QqSNnn68H70ew_FGTLZCTgRuNuSVxmgCKUtp_jlmNHqOBpdpg54NcTpn-t6U85uz_gQKbasaoqBS9OAUpxKq/s1600/DSCN7036.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQVhM9M9udITTEDn0BTokDDka9oVSSBC46i6Nj0xKymdNLen28QqSNnn68H70ew_FGTLZCTgRuNuSVxmgCKUtp_jlmNHqOBpdpg54NcTpn-t6U85uz_gQKbasaoqBS9OAUpxKq/s320/DSCN7036.JPG" /></a></div>Michael Meredith, Dr. and Mrs. Bill (Kay) Turney, Elena Capolino between them, Andrew Sinclair, Scott Lewis<br />
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Photographs, courtesy of Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu, President, Asociatia 'Agrustic Somnacuni - Inel de Aur'<br />
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If you wish to donate to the Aureo Anello Association for the restoration of the 'English' Cemetery and its gardening you can do so by a cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through the PayPal 'Donate' button below, which can also be used for the CDs, for the hand-bound limited edition books or for the sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's <a href="http://www.florin.ms/claspedhands.html">'Clasped Hands'</a> or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at <a href="http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html">http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html</a>), or some or all of these.<br />
<a href="http://www.significantcemeteries.net/"><img src="http://www.florin.ms/ASCE_logo_piccolo.jpg" height="100" width="220"/></a><br />
Sincerely,<br />
Julia Bolton Holloway<br />
Custodian, 'English' Cemetery<br />
President, Aureo Anello<br />
<img src="http://www.florin.ms/rbebbdupre.jpg" height="300" width="370"><br />
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<input name="lc" value="US" type="hidden"></form>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-56245638706263147392011-06-05T14:58:00.021+02:002011-06-06T05:44:04.367+02:00AND ANOTHER CELEBRATION<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnqE0mfjRz-8ady8Lbh2jvseIH-8zWJ-xJoDWZcXkc_hW22hzz2nH8iWenwO0SNs1bH0BuLkWShy2FNrx7DCFhRHTLp1NnHPdmE8eYR-cmoAwoIpQcZiBZJ0UqMOlHxAduhiY0/s1600/ebbtomb7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnqE0mfjRz-8ady8Lbh2jvseIH-8zWJ-xJoDWZcXkc_hW22hzz2nH8iWenwO0SNs1bH0BuLkWShy2FNrx7DCFhRHTLp1NnHPdmE8eYR-cmoAwoIpQcZiBZJ0UqMOlHxAduhiY0/s320/ebbtomb7.jpg" /></a></div>On June 29, 2011, the 150th anniversary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's death on 29 June 1861, we shall gather together in Florence's 'English' Cemetery to celebrate her poetry and her use of her art against injustice, against slavery, and against the oppression of nations, of women, of children. At the same time it is the 150th anniversary of the Unity of Italy, of Italy's rebirth as a nation, formerly ground under the heels of Austria, Spain, France, and the Pope. EBB wrote to her friend Isa Blagden in a letter found by Thomas Adolphus Trollope of her 'passion for essential truth (as apprehended) and a necessity for speaking it out at all risks, inconvenient to personal peace'. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXFheSdNarsmyI83HkW0bu5OQZqhLeW_jua0NVDkGvI7LO4Eje0orOdxhS7S1WzwR9e1BvcAXTAwDQozW7DNJiPCggYxsPtIS6vweFhdt1MwhVlM46ORy_WOJl9njM6tUa0Odv/s1600/cg12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="215" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXFheSdNarsmyI83HkW0bu5OQZqhLeW_jua0NVDkGvI7LO4Eje0orOdxhS7S1WzwR9e1BvcAXTAwDQozW7DNJiPCggYxsPtIS6vweFhdt1MwhVlM46ORy_WOJl9njM6tUa0Odv/s320/cg12.jpg" /></a></div>EBB died at Casa Guidi while mourning the 6 June 1861 death of Camillo Benso Cavour, the architect of Italy's Unity, and, Robert tells us, speaking of the red, white and green colours of the Italian and Hungarian flags. The portraits of both EBB and Cavour had been painted by Michele Gordigiani in his studio across the street from EBB's tomb, designed by Frederic Lord Leighton with the broken slave shackle on the harp of Exodus.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeJ22RGMb9eJi896MZlevjUZ4wOcWWDbS4csCFMkJw8xsgTkhBoxXpF7Xjac2zjNso504IgM-dWyPdKMJMukScn9p6m6WjBKk-4MEAe42kYJUlhhErQ0yhrWhuzkpT3n1Uo4ET/s1600/ebbgordigiani2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="200" width="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeJ22RGMb9eJi896MZlevjUZ4wOcWWDbS4csCFMkJw8xsgTkhBoxXpF7Xjac2zjNso504IgM-dWyPdKMJMukScn9p6m6WjBKk-4MEAe42kYJUlhhErQ0yhrWhuzkpT3n1Uo4ET/s200/ebbgordigiani2.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN0dMxnORmazh5Gpa0w4MpM-8ZRF0964XcYaoFAwmwNaSrcMfTBuKsHKVHU-3Z3KUA5GhkV9m0LEwUAyTTMGb6DgfF9vGYFutVdyMqXxsLiKqI9Mt9m7Yml8gJj8HyGzP0KOH2/s1600/Cavour+%25282%2529.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="300" width="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN0dMxnORmazh5Gpa0w4MpM-8ZRF0964XcYaoFAwmwNaSrcMfTBuKsHKVHU-3Z3KUA5GhkV9m0LEwUAyTTMGb6DgfF9vGYFutVdyMqXxsLiKqI9Mt9m7Yml8gJj8HyGzP0KOH2/s320/Cavour+%25282%2529.JPG" /></a></div>First at 10.00 a.m., there will be a laying of laurel wreaths at the tomb, then at 11.00 a.m. a gathering of women poets from across Italy will pay tribute to her. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ5DUqn1pPWWUGyPmoUDeAn5QtS2EaovRSjSsi1kaEgiqhzORT6TF3ENdxzDo70qLoR8rZy6f49kVJWGHuB9VA38xB7IHBwaRpVqiOvSFi3OJZUzQ2ORh54rabPnANZiMEbSRv/s1600/laurelontomb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ5DUqn1pPWWUGyPmoUDeAn5QtS2EaovRSjSsi1kaEgiqhzORT6TF3ENdxzDo70qLoR8rZy6f49kVJWGHuB9VA38xB7IHBwaRpVqiOvSFi3OJZUzQ2ORh54rabPnANZiMEbSRv/s320/laurelontomb.jpg" /></a></div>Present will be members of the British Institute, the Browning Society, the Friends of Casa Guidi, and the Armstrong-Browning Library of Baylor University, Texas. All are welcome to this event celebrating Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her friends past, present and future, and her love of Italy which forged a golden ring, an 'Aureo Anello' between Italy and the English-speaking world.<br />
It was actually on 1 July 2011 that she was buried here, Robert, their son Pen, Isa Blagden, the Storys, the Powers, the Trollopes, Kate Field and Robert Lytton (the poet Owen Meredith who became Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India and who wrote <i>Lucile</i> about Isa, while Isa wrote <i>Agnes Tremorne</i> about him), being present. They forgot to send a carriage for Walter Savage Landor. The Anglican funeral service she did not want (she had Pen baptized in the Swiss church which still owns the so-called 'English' Cemetery) was described as being very badly done. Lord Leighton then designed the tomb but it was much altered by the Italian sculptor Francesco Giovanozzi to Leighton's fury, <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJZiYSkeZtyj65y709NBAvqA_CsTwSx69Qr3njB9gsFDcHXa3cnfj1a8uEirN0tHUX0RUy4mOJJm983qcldQVxxCnHTSC7y_MEW17ANdHF3ieeGVQUfTSE1QHTIxJPn6gW6pAo/s1600/DSCN5303.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJZiYSkeZtyj65y709NBAvqA_CsTwSx69Qr3njB9gsFDcHXa3cnfj1a8uEirN0tHUX0RUy4mOJJm983qcldQVxxCnHTSC7y_MEW17ANdHF3ieeGVQUfTSE1QHTIxJPn6gW6pAo/s320/DSCN5303.JPG" /></a></div>We shall share Elizabeth Barrett Browning's <i>Casa Guidi Windows</i> in English and Italian, for I found on the Web in a Roman bookshop an 1851 translation into Italian which we have now republished it with facing page, English and Italian, in the same way we publish her <i>Sonnets from the Portuguese</i>, William Morris type, handbound with our marbled paper.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnqE0mfjRz-8ady8Lbh2jvseIH-8zWJ-xJoDWZcXkc_hW22hzz2nH8iWenwO0SNs1bH0BuLkWShy2FNrx7DCFhRHTLp1NnHPdmE8eYR-cmoAwoIpQcZiBZJ0UqMOlHxAduhiY0/s1600/ebbtomb7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnqE0mfjRz-8ady8Lbh2jvseIH-8zWJ-xJoDWZcXkc_hW22hzz2nH8iWenwO0SNs1bH0BuLkWShy2FNrx7DCFhRHTLp1NnHPdmE8eYR-cmoAwoIpQcZiBZJ0UqMOlHxAduhiY0/s320/ebbtomb7.jpg" /></a></div>If you wish to donate to the Aureo Anello Association for the restoration of the 'English' Cemetery and its gardening you can do so by a cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through the PayPal 'Donate' button below, which can also be used for the CDs, for the hand-bound limited edition books or for the sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's <a href="http://www.florin.ms/claspedhands.html">'Clasped Hands'</a> or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at <a href="http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html">http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html</a>), or some or all of these.<br />
<a href="http://www.significantcemeteries.net/"><img src="http://www.florin.ms/ASCE_logo_piccolo.jpg" height="100" width="220"/></a><br />
Sincerely,<br />
Julia Bolton Holloway<br />
Custodian, 'English' Cemetery<br />
President, Aureo Anello<br />
<img src="http://www.florin.ms/rbebbdupre.jpg" height="300" width="370"><br />
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<input name="lc" value="US" type="hidden"></form>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-89622295187340709192011-04-15T14:09:00.011+02:002011-04-15T14:33:39.633+02:00YOU ARE INVITED TO A CELEBRATIONOF FLORENCE'S ENGLISH CEMETERY, SATURDAY 23 APRIL, AT 4:00 P.M.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJZiYSkeZtyj65y709NBAvqA_CsTwSx69Qr3njB9gsFDcHXa3cnfj1a8uEirN0tHUX0RUy4mOJJm983qcldQVxxCnHTSC7y_MEW17ANdHF3ieeGVQUfTSE1QHTIxJPn6gW6pAo/s1600/DSCN5303.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJZiYSkeZtyj65y709NBAvqA_CsTwSx69Qr3njB9gsFDcHXa3cnfj1a8uEirN0tHUX0RUy4mOJJm983qcldQVxxCnHTSC7y_MEW17ANdHF3ieeGVQUfTSE1QHTIxJPn6gW6pAo/s320/DSCN5303.JPG" /></a></div>We shall share the beauty of the irises, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's <i>Casa Guidi Windows</i> in English and Italian, and cucumber sandwiches. We are inviting all the Consuls and all the Assessors. <br />
For <i>CGW</i> I found on the Web in a Roman bookshop an 1851 translation into Italian which shall be arriving here next week, and plan to republish it with facing page, English and Italian, in the same way we already publish her <i>Sonnets from the Portuguese</i>, William Morris type, handbound with our marbled paper.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwTI6HzZ2GWpK4CJviXwXO9yq4k3Q-9I16DUOIABZqavGS0_Cg4o-1G-WfubclysHF3787Guhk6O8k-JnpnLLSvRacb9CIp7RqV1CXLze_RYyjw1gRlbnREdIkQm5Z5456IsJW/s1600/DSCN6252.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwTI6HzZ2GWpK4CJviXwXO9yq4k3Q-9I16DUOIABZqavGS0_Cg4o-1G-WfubclysHF3787Guhk6O8k-JnpnLLSvRacb9CIp7RqV1CXLze_RYyjw1gRlbnREdIkQm5Z5456IsJW/s320/DSCN6252.JPG" /></a></div>In this way we shall be celebrating the Resurrection, the Renaissance, the Risorgimento, and also the splendid work restoring the garden and the tombs carried out by Romanian Roma families whom we teach the Alphabet.<br />
This Spring is particularly lovely with the newly cleaned tombs and first the daffodils<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7i-mpZrx_pn0m-TVElRuq0s2j6eL59M9L8KQ_6SUiy48f8edg0GirTe8Nrjy9ht2B2R0ORgXqhBnLBEfAmyo4FWSjZ7dXuwmVVClGQExeoJUfHQaMTtdfG2F6JKgIDBhV7Oqc/s1600/DSCN6235.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7i-mpZrx_pn0m-TVElRuq0s2j6eL59M9L8KQ_6SUiy48f8edg0GirTe8Nrjy9ht2B2R0ORgXqhBnLBEfAmyo4FWSjZ7dXuwmVVClGQExeoJUfHQaMTtdfG2F6JKgIDBhV7Oqc/s320/DSCN6235.JPG" /></a></div>then the irises<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzZPeFkDR3gPVVfZ-7lUGVVZjlZJ00kIyS7AN1PW9HG8A6s2rO7wDIPgK5MHp3fxMe08rr8dffYi4uEivGThoLCQh0R3l3P8ixOLKfAvhqq2RqMHMka_YmVaq5neIWCmaC6fSU/s1600/DSCN5320.JPG" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzZPeFkDR3gPVVfZ-7lUGVVZjlZJ00kIyS7AN1PW9HG8A6s2rO7wDIPgK5MHp3fxMe08rr8dffYi4uEivGThoLCQh0R3l3P8ixOLKfAvhqq2RqMHMka_YmVaq5neIWCmaC6fSU/s320/DSCN5320.JPG" /></a></div>If you wish to donate to the Aureo Anello Association for the restoration of the 'English' Cemetery and its gardening you can do so by a cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through the PayPal 'Donate' button below, which can also be used for the CDs, for the hand-bound limited edition books or for the sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's <a href="http://www.florin.ms/claspedhands.html">'Clasped Hands'</a> or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at <a href="http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html">http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html</a>), or some or all of these.<br />
<a href="http://www.significantcemeteries.net/"><img src="http://www.florin.ms/ASCE_logo_piccolo.jpg" height="100" width="220"/></a><br />
Sincerely,<br />
Julia Bolton Holloway<br />
Custodian, 'English' Cemetery<br />
President, Aureo Anello<br />
<img src="http://www.florin.ms/rbebbdupre.jpg" height="300" width="370"><br />
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<input name="lc" value="US" type="hidden"></form>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-63260486052029157472010-12-19T16:16:00.003+01:002010-12-19T16:30:27.469+01:00FROM GRAVES TO CRADLESIn the midst of this great snow storm have been preparing the <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQMGhpmvxo8jyxPgbgamrthdUUGJ_rSuPYIlWWeunlrHJZAdumFbEtIP0U6yawtq1eUeoslaUM3NhBCQy5AaOl6Z51ICbeUGfq_6BHEOi2qK1koD9EVxv6uVwcI749SGIxav3t/s1600/DSCN6095.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQMGhpmvxo8jyxPgbgamrthdUUGJ_rSuPYIlWWeunlrHJZAdumFbEtIP0U6yawtq1eUeoslaUM3NhBCQy5AaOl6Z51ICbeUGfq_6BHEOi2qK1koD9EVxv6uVwcI749SGIxav3t/s320/DSCN6095.JPG" /></a></div>fifteen minute invited presentation to the European Economic and Social Committee, 14 January. You can see it at <a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/Brussels.ppt">http://www.ringofgold.eu/Brussels.ppt</a> and <a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/Brussels.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/Brussels.html</a>. It's titled 'From Graves to Cradles' and is on Roma training, education and integration, our splendid gardeners and restorers of this 'English' Cemetery.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWaoixbiHAfEFqt-pao_8VJBUvqlS9Cc7Ojh6hTi871yS9lZmTnXRSSl9-c13OfA78hB9HetO3k39lneEFnyb9j3AEPqCBTTo8PrSxTSO87VntFjv6wobTwUDEBGpUOfiIdXFS/s1600/DSCN6096.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWaoixbiHAfEFqt-pao_8VJBUvqlS9Cc7Ojh6hTi871yS9lZmTnXRSSl9-c13OfA78hB9HetO3k39lneEFnyb9j3AEPqCBTTo8PrSxTSO87VntFjv6wobTwUDEBGpUOfiIdXFS/s320/DSCN6096.JPG" /></a></div>A blessed Christmas from Florence whose Santa Maria del Fiore Duomo is no longer of red brick but seems like Michelangelo's St Peter's Dome of white Carrara marble.<br />
<br />
If you wish to donate to the Aureo Anello Association for the restoration of the 'English' Cemetery and its gardening you can do so by a cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through the Pay Pal 'Donate' button below, which can also be used for the CDs, for the hand-bound limited edition books or for the sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's <a href="http://www.florin.ms/claspedhands.html">'Clasped Hands'</a> or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at <a href="http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html">http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html</a>), or some or all of these.<br />
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<a href="http://www.significantcemeteries.net/"><img src="http://www.florin.ms/ASCE_logo_piccolo.jpg" height="100" width="220"/></a><br />
<br />
Sincerely,<br />
Julia Bolton Holloway<br />
Custodian, 'English' Cemetery<br />
President, Aureo AnelloJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-68380881435377363272010-12-03T22:08:00.001+01:002010-12-03T22:09:33.066+01:00SCRIPTURAL INSCRIPTIONS IN FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH' CEMETERYWe say the Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery is an archive in marble. It is also the Bible incised in stone. Passages in Hebrew, Greek, Russian, Rumantsch, French, German and English, generally being the King James Bible in English, the Lutheran Bible in German, the Calvinist Bible in French. In this time period Italian Catholics were forbidden the Bible in the vernacular, that only changing with Vatican II. Some of our burials, such as that of Rosa Madiai, are of persons imprisoned for their use of the Bible in Italian in the nineteenth century. The German Biblical passages are often those set to music by Johann Sebastian Bach. The great central column, surmounted by the San Giovanni Cross of lilies and roses set up by Pietro Bazzanti in honour of the visit of the King of Prussia, states in French 'Je suis la Résurrection et la vie, Celui qui croit en moi vivra, Quand même il seroit mort. St Jean XI.25. Fréderic Guillaume, Roi de Prussia, MDCCCLVIII'.<br />
<br />
//=How many times a particular scriptural verse is used on the various tombs<br />
<br />
Genesis 24.31 Blessed of the Lord /<br />
<br />
Numbers 6.24-26 The Lord bless thee and keep thee, The Lord make his face shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace /<br />
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II Samuel 10.12 It is the Lord. Let him do that which seemeth him good /, 12.23, I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me /, in Italian /<br />
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Job 1.21, The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, Blessed be the name of the Lord /////////, in Italian ///, in French /, 3.17 There the weary be at rest /, 19.25, I know that my Redeemer liveth //, Ich weiss dass mein erloeser lebet, in German /, 23.11 Meis pei s'ha artignu vta seis fastizis, eu ha salva sia via, e non sun giunghi da quella, in Rumantsch /, 29.11 When the ear heard her, then it blessed her, and when the eye saw her it gave witness to her /, 30.16 in Italian /<br />
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Psalms 3.4 I cried unto the Lord and he heard me /, 5.1 /, 16.11 In Thy presence is fullness of joy, at Thy right hand are pleasures evermore /, 23.1 The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want, He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still water /, Il Signore è mio pastore, nulla mi mancherà, in Italian /, 26.4, 31.5 Into Thy hand I commit my spirit, Thou hast redemmed me, O Lord God of Truth /, 34.19 Le juste a des maux en grand nombre, mais l'Eternel le delivre de tous /, 34.41 I sought the Lord and he heard me /, 36.9 With Thee is the fountain of life, In Thy light shall we see light /, 38.15 For in Thee, O Lord, do I hope, Thou wilt hear, O Lord, My God /, 49.15 God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave /, 62.5 My soul, wait thou only upon God, in Italian //, 62.7 Quoiqu'il en soit il est mon rocher, ma deliverance e ma haute retrait, je ne serait point ebranle /, 73.26 My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever /, 116.5 L'eternel est pitoyable et notre Dieu fait misericorde, in French, 116.15 Precious in the sight of the Lord, is the death of his saints /, in Italian /, 117.2 For his mercy endures forever, in French /, 120.1 I cried unto the Lord and he heard me /, 121.7 The Lord shall keep thee from all evil, Yea it is even He that shall keep thy soul /, 126.5 They that sow in tears shall reap in joy /, 130.5, in French /, 145.2, I will bless Thy holy name, O Giod, forever and ever /, 172.2 He giveth his beloved sleep /<br />
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Proverbs 31.28 Her children arise up and call her blessed //<br />
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Song of Solomon 8.6-7 Love is strong as death; Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it<br />
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Isaiah 32.17 And the work of righteousness shall be peace and the effect of righteousness quietness, assurance for ever /, 40.11 He shall gather the lambs with his arms and carry them in his bosom //, 43.1 Ne crains point car je t'ai rachete, in French, 43.2 When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and also the floods they shall not overflow thee /, 60.20 Deine sonne wird, nicht mehr untergehen noch dein mond den schein verlieren denn der Herr wird dein ewiges licht, in German /, 60.24 We must, through much tribulation, enter the Kingdom of God /<br />
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Jeremiah 31.3 The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying Yea I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee /<br />
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Daniel 7.14, Thine is the Power and the Glory /<br />
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Malachi 3.17 And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels.<br />
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Matthew 5.5 Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth /, 5.6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, in French /, 5.7 Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy/, 5.8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God ////////, in German /, 5.9 Selig sind die Reines Herzens sind denn sie werden Gott shauen, in German /, in French /, in Italian /, 6.10 Thy will be done //////, 6.13 Thine is the Power and the Glory /, 9.13 But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sarifice: for I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance /, 9.24 in French /, She is not dead but sleepeth ///////, in French /, in Italian /, 11.26 Even so Father for it seemed good in Thy sight //, 11.28 Come unto me all ye that are heavily laden //, in French //, in German /, 12.43 Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father /, 14.27 It is I, be not afraid /, in French /, 18.2 Jesus called a little child unto him /, 19.14 Suffer little children /, in Italian /, Of such is the kingdom of heaven ///, 25.13, Watch therefore for ye know neither the day not the hour wherein the Son of man cometh /, Veillez donc car vous ne savez ne le jour ne l'heure ou le fils de l'homme viendra, in French //, 25.21 Well done, thou good and faithful servant //, 25.24 Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you /, 26.42 Thy will be done /////, 27.63 Resurgam, in Latin /<br />
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Mark 5.39 in French /, She is not dead but sleepeth ////////, in French /, in Italian /, 10.14 Suffer the little children, in Italian //, 10.50 And he, casting away his garment, rose and came to Jesus /,<br />
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Luke 1.46 L'anima mia magnifica il Signore e lo spirito mio festeggia in Dio mio salvatore /, 8.52 She is not dead but sleepeth /////////, in French //, in Italian /, 11.2 Thy will be done /////, 18.16 Suffer the little children come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of God //, in Italian /, 20.36 Neither can they die anymore, for they are equal unto the angels and are the children of God being the children of the Resurrection /, 23.50 He was a good man and a just /<br />
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John 5.24 is passed from death unto life /, 6.37 He that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out /, 10.28 I give them eternal life /, 11.23 Thy brother shall rise again /, 11.25-26 I am the Resurrection and the Life - saith the Lord - He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live /, in Italian //, in French ///, 11.35 Jesus wept /, 13.7 Vous ne savez maintenant ce ve je fais mais vous la saurez apres, in French /, 14.2 Nella casa del Padre mio vi sono molte stanza, /, 14.3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself, that where I am there may ye be also /, 14.6 I am the way, the truth and the life /, in Italian /, 14.27 My peace I give unto you /, 17.11 & 22 That they may be one / 27.3 Haec est vita aeterna ut te cognoscant solum verum Deum et quem tu misisti Jesum Christum, in Latin /,<br />
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Romans 6.23 The gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord /, 11.33 O profondeur des richesses et de la sagesse et de la connoissance de Dieu que ses jugements sont inpenetrables et que ses voies son incomprehensible, in French /,12.10 [Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another]<br />
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I Cor 15.19 If in his life only we have hope in Christ we are of all men most miserable /, 15.44 It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body /, 15.53 This corruption must put on incorruption //, 15.56 Oh Death, where is thy sting, Oh grave where is thy victory? //, 15.57 Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory ///<br />
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II Cor 1.3 Blessed be God even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ theFather of mercies and the God of all comfort who comforteth them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted /, 12.9 My strength is made perfect in weakness /<br />
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Ephesians 2.4 Charitatem dilexit, in Latin /, 2.8 Vous êtes sauvés par grace, par la foi et cela ne vient pas de vous, c'est un don de Dieu, in French /, 2.13 But now in Christ Jesus who sometime were far off /<br />
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Galatians 5.22 The fruit of the Spirit /, 6.14 in Italian /<br />
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Philippians 1.21 To me to die is gain /, Car Christ est ma vie, et la mort m'est un gain, in French //<br />
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Colossians 3.3-4 We are dead and our life is hid with Christ in God /<br />
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I Thessalonians 4.13 But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not even as others which have no hoped for if we believe that Jesus dioed and rose again even so /, 4.14 Them also which sleep in Jesus, will God bring with him /////, in French /<br />
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II Timothy 4.8 Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord the righteous judge shall give me at that day, and not to me only but unto all them that also that love his appearing /, 4.11-12 J'ai combattu le bon combat j'ai fini ma course, j'ai gardé la foi,. Au reste, la couronne de justice m'est reservée, in French //<br />
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Titus 2.13 Looking for the blessed hope /<br />
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Philemon 16 Not now as a servant but above a servant a brother beloved /<br />
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Hebrews 4.9 There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God /, 6.19 Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast /, 12.2 Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith //, 13.5 Fear not, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee /, 13.8 Gesu Cristo è l'istesso ieri, oggi, ed in eterno, in Italian /, 13.14 Nous n'avons point ici bas de cité permanente mais nous cherchons celle qui est a venir, in French /<br />
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I Peter 4.12 Beloved think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you /, 4.13 But rejoice inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that when his glory shall be revealed ye may be glad also with exceeding joy /, 5.7 Umiliatevi gettando sopra lui tutta la vostra sollecitudine perciocché egli ha cura di voi, in Italian /<br />
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James 1.22 But be ye doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves /<br />
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I John 1.7 The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin /, 2.17 in Italian /, 4.10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us /, 4.16 God is Love /, He that dwelleth in Love, dwelleth in God and God in him /, 4.18 Perfect love casteth out fear /<br />
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Revelation/Apocalypse 1.5-6 Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever /, 7.14 These are they which come out of the great tribulation /, 7.17 L'agneau qui est au milieu du trone les paitra et les conduira aux sources d'eaux vives et Dieu essuiera toute larme de leurs yeux /, 14.13 Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours and their works do follow them /////////////, in German /, in Italian /, in French //, 22.5 And there shall be no night there /Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-38687757713504945882010-11-20T16:13:00.002+01:002010-11-30T16:25:23.984+01:00A BARREL ORGAN IN PIAZZA BECCARIAI so wanted to share this hauntingly beautiful Romany music with everyone. It is played on a barrel organ in Piazza Beccaria in Florence. I have finally succeeded with bicycle, laptop and microphone in rcording it. And here it is<br />
<a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/gypsy.mp3">http://www.ringofgold.eu/gypsy.mp3</a>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-73732939624737333642010-11-10T20:36:00.003+01:002010-11-10T21:04:54.656+01:00A THOUSAND DAFFODILSIn the post came a thousand daffodils, sent by an English Garden Tour organizer. And this morning we have planted all of them in Florence's Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery. Some on graves, some on the little lawns between the graves. Breteanu, Mihai, Gheorghi and I braved thunder showers and worked together, raking leaves, planting bulbs. Roma work best in groups like this, the young twins Mihai and Gheorghi (who are now such good alphabet students, this Sunday even rapidly learning the computer keyboard), working with the older Breteanu and instinctively doing everything right, with great energy and joy. When I pay Breteanu for his garden work he takes the euro bills and rubs his beard with them with such a twinkle in his eye. It was a glorious day. And will be a glorious Spring in Florence.<br />
This is part of our 'From Graves to Cradles' project with Roma, its 'work/study' aspect. And everyone who visits exclaims about how well-maintained the English Cemetery now is. People remember it as formerly abandoned, put to weed killer, grey, broken, ugly. And I explain it is the work of the Rom that has now made it so beautiful. I so wish my Italian friends would take on this splendid team of workers, a gardener and his two boys. They can do anything. And so well.<br />
You can find out more about our Roma project at http://www.ringofgold.eu and more about the 'English' Cemetery at http://www.florin.ms. We are now nominated for UNESCO's Memory of the World Register and we are also included in the Council of Europe's Cultural Cemetery Route through ASCE, Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe. Google UNESCO Memory of the World and ASCE to find us!<br />
<br />
If you wish to donate to the Aureo Anello Association for the restoration of the 'English' Cemetery and its gardening you can do so by a cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through the Pay Pal 'Donate' button below, which can also be used for the CDs, for the hand-bound limited edition books or for the sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's <a href="http://www.florin.ms/claspedhands.html">'Clasped Hands'</a> or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at <a href="http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html">http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html</a>), or some or all of these.<br />
<img src="http://www.florin.ms/rbebbdupre.jpg" height="300" width="370"><br />
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<a href="http://www.significantcemeteries.net/"><img src="http://www.florin.ms/ASCE_logo_piccolo.jpg" height="100" width="220"/></a><br />
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Sincerely,<br />
Julia Bolton Holloway<br />
Aureo Anello Association for the Library and Cemetery<br />
Piazzale Donatello, 38<br />
50132 FIRENZE, ITALYJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-74968237417431413402010-10-25T05:59:00.002+02:002010-10-25T06:23:04.487+02:00LEARNING TO WRITE, LEARNING TO READLEARNING TO WRITE, LEARNING TO READ<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
Explosion! A sixteen-year-old who could not even write his name is now joying in copying the Latin on the plaques in the Santissima Annunziata, the English on the plaques in the Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery. Our Alphabetization School works! He read out to me the other day a poster on 'Santa Umilta'. I was in tears for she is the saint for whom I have named my Umilta website. Illiterate, she dictated marvellous sermons of most profound theology to her nuns. Yesterday he was reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning's stanza on Lily Cottrell. EBB, in <i>Aurora Leigh</i>, has a heroine, Marian Erle, teach herself to read and write out of books thrown away in the rubbish.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
Mihai is from Romania, a Roma, a gypsy, his family too poor for them to afford his schooling, who beg in the streets, their miserable shacks in Osmannoro bulldozed by the police, and who are forced to sleep at night in the open in the streets in groups of no more than three.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
They come each Sunday after Mass, sitting under the great column and cross at the centre of the Cemetery, learning their letters and how to write their names, teaching each other in Romanes, the letters being the Romanian ones, having painted laptop blackboards for white chalk out of left-over library shelving. They get sandwiches of blessed bread and ground chicken livers and apples and water and used clothing. Sometimes as many as twelve of them, all ages, both genders. It's so easy to do and yet no church, no government seems to see this is a need for beggars in the street to rise up out of their poverty. It costs so little. It can achieve so much.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/><br />
We are using the ideas of Lancaster, Montessori, Piaget, Freire and Don Lorenzo Milani. They work! When I ask them which language they are happiest in they say Romanes. It is from Sanskrit, from India, it is their language, in the home, in the family. Excellent linguists we find classes being in a mixture of Romanes, Romanian, Italian and English. And now Latin, too! With laughter and with self-worth.<br />
<img src="http://www.umilta.net/treebook.gif" height="100" width="100"/>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-40453595332008261792010-10-14T11:46:00.006+02:002010-10-14T12:01:34.519+02:00TERENCE THROUGH TIMEHomo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.<br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.umilta.net/terence2.jpg" style="height: 300px; width: 200px;" /><br />
Terence was a freed slave from Africa, his full name Terentius Publius Afer, who wrote the most wonderful plays in which women, slaves and sons come out on top, in such pure Latin that he gave Cicero the concept of 'Humanitas', our 'Humanities'. The above line, meaning 'I am a man; therefore I consider nothing of humankind alien to me', was placed by Montaigne on his study ceiling in Bordeaux. I have placed an essay on the playwright, http://www.umilta.net/GodsPlenty.html, on the web site on Terence, http://www.umilta.net/terence.html. Look also at http://www.umilta.net/tormentors.html which gives the Latin text of his <i>Heautontimuremos</i> with miniatures and woodblock engravings of the scenes, as well as medieval plays written by women and men influenced by him.<br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.umilta.net/self2.jpg" style="height: 350px; width: 275px;" /><br />
Terence's Theatre<br />
This is fitting for this library in a cemetery where we have a black slave from Nubia, Nadezhda, who came to Florence at 14, being baptized in a Russian Orthodox family, and also, with hers, the tombs of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frances Trollope, Richard Hildreth, Hiram Powers, who wrote and sculpted against slavery.<br />
Even our Roma, who restore this Cemetery, were slaves from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, only being freed when Harriet Beecher Stowe's <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> was translated into Romanian. And she was copying the anti-slavery novels already published by Frances Trollope, <i>Jonathan Jefferson Whitelaw</i>, and Richard Hidlreth, <i>The White Slave</i>.<br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.ringofgold.eu/Shatram.jpg" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
A slave village (Shatra) in Romania, 1850s<br />
We no longer need to sign the UNESCO Petition which has been delivered to Paris for the UNESCO Memory of the World Register's nomination. But we would appreciate any donation for the restoration and maintenance of this beautiful place, so filled with the world's memories. In particular are sought donations towards our alphabetization school for our skilled, but illiterate, Roma workers.<br />
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<a href="http://www.significantcemeteries.net/"><img src="http://www.florin.ms/ASCE_logo_piccolo.jpg" height="100" width="220"/></a>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-21309877348779340552010-09-11T08:43:00.012+02:002010-09-11T09:32:54.331+02:00NARCISSI FROM SISSINGHURST<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/DSCN5302.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
The irises which are Florence's purple lily<br />
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This title sounds almost like a line from an Edith Sitwell poem! It announces a gift to us of narcissi thalia from the Sissinghurst Castle garden and we are very grateful. In the Spring I shall post photographs of these elegant flowers amongst our tombs. As a child growing up in Sussex I went once, on a birthday, to Sissinghurst Castle. And learned of Vita Sackville-West's work in creating it, the great lime tree walk, so much else. Then my mother gave me a copy of her poem, <i>The Land</i>, when I was in exile in Mendocino County and I wrote to Vita of that nostalgia, she replying with commenting on the beauty of the Sequoia Redwoods. I treasured Virginia Woolf's <i>Orlando</i>, the Julia Margaret Cameron photographs, the various novels I acquired by Vita. My last is a copy printed by the Hogarth Press of Virginia Woolf's <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>. On my office door at Princeton I used to have a picture of Vita in her book-lined tower room at Sissinghurst. Thus, especially with books and tombs, we link our memories, the past for the future.<br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/DSCN5320.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
For the garden of Florence's 'English' Cemetery is created from gifts from so many, bulbs in the Spring, roses, lavendar and pomegranates, these last by our poets' graves, for the Summer, plumbago for late Summer, papyri all year round except when engulfed in snow. We invite you, too, to contribute with plants with non-invasive roots. And we joy, too, in the wild poppiesthat returned after we stopped the dreadful weedkilling chemicals used in the past.<br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/DSCN5309.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
And now all our tombs lacking their letters in lead have been repaired, thanks to the careful, painstaking work by Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu and Cristi Mihai, Roma from Romania. The Roma are also our excellent gardeners. Already they had conserved all our Victorian cast and wrought ironwork with scraping away all the rust and applying two coats of anti-rust, two coats of gray enamel. They are skilled in everything except that schooling is too costly for them in Romania so many lack the alphabet. Therefore we hold alphabet school on Sundays after Mass under the great cross in the centre of the Cemetery. In this photograph you can see Daniel painting the letters on the later Landor tombs while Lupascu Copalea and Breateanu Bancuta look on, Breateanu thus learning his letters, Lupascu, who had some schooling under Communism, being one of our teachers. School is held in the Romany language with the Romanian alphabet. The Roma tell me they are happiest in their ancient Sanskrit home and family language and learn best in it. But they are brilliant linguists, quickly learning also Italian and English. Thus our school, run by them, uses ideas of Madame Montesorri, Don Lorenzo Milani and Paulo Friere. What a gift it could be if churches taught the beggars at their doors the alphabet! Charity a school.<br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/Landora2.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
Breteanu Bancuta Lupascu Copalea Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu at the Landor Tombs<br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/BancutaLupascu.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
Breateanu Bancuta Julia Holloway Lupascu Copalea<br />
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We no longer need to sign the UNESCO Petition which has been delivered to Paris for the UNESCO Memory of the World Register's nomination. But we would appreciate any donation for the restoration and maintenance of this beautiful place, so filled with the world's memories.<br />
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<a href="http://www.significantcemeteries.net/"><img src="http://www.florin.ms/ASCE_logo_piccolo.jpg" height="100" width="220"/></a>Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-91545352376105397332010-08-07T20:08:00.010+02:002010-09-11T19:20:29.323+02:00FROM ANOTHER BLOGA landmark en passant (Part II)<br />
Sunday, June 6, 2010 - 6:18 PM | posted by Joelle Edwards<br />
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More than 120 years after its 1877 closure, the ‘English Cemetery’ of Florence had fallen into a derelict state. Tombstones were unstable and cypresses were falling.<br />
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Permission for a restoration project was officially granted in 1997, when the city of Florence also approved 500 new loculi (burial plots) for ashes or small caskets of bones. The cemetery re-opened, albeit in a state of disrepair.<br />
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Since 2000, Julia Bolton Holloway, a renowned scholar and custodian of Florence’s English Cemetery, has fought to keep the gates open and restore the original charm of a place described in the nineteenth century as ‘a most beautiful garden.’ Over the past 10 years, she has supported the site through difficult times, rescuing it from ruin and threats of permanent closure. Founding the Aureo Anello Association, she launched a campaign to save the cemetery, and with the support of worldwide admirers of the cemetery, the Friends of the Cemetery was born, and members set to work on a long-overdue restoration.<br />
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<img alt="" src="http://www.i-florence.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/julia2.jpg" style="height: 275px; width: 320px;" /><br />
Reading - in the rain - inscriptions about water from the Bible that Holman Hunt sculpted on his wife's tomb. [This tomb now carefully cleaned.]<br />
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One of Holloway’s first challenges was to convince the Swiss owners that keeping the cemetery open would be economically viable, so she began to gather requests to purchase lots. She also paid for handrails at the main entrance staircase and for the restoration of several tombs. Because she could not personally support the restoration, she began to seek donations. To do that, raising awareness is paramount.<br />
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Julia at English Cemetery in Florence...To put the cemetery ‘on the map,’ Holloway has used not only her contagious enthusiasm for the site and her powers of persuasion, but also her skills as a scholar. In 2005, she created a Wikipedia entry and an Internet blog to support the Emergency Appeal for restoration of the Cemetery. The oversight committee is impressive: in addition to film director Franco Zeffirelli (Tea with Mussolini), members include the Brontë Society, Browning Society, Dylan Thomas Society of Great Britain, Trollope Society, Gabinetto Vieusseux Centro Romantico, Regione Toscana, British Consul General and Gerardo Kraft, president of the Swiss Reformed Evangelical Church (which bought the land for the cemetery in 1827)<br />
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The projects on Holloway’s to-do list include repairing tombstones; preserving the nineteenth-century ironwork and gates; creating a park facility; stabilising the bases of tombs; repairing the north wall; laying new pathways to enable visitors to reach more graves safely; and replanting the gardens with shallow-rooted native and non-invasive plants.<br />
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[Of that list the following now are done: many tombstones conserved; all the ironwork conserved; all the lead letters that had gone missing now replaced; bases of tombs stabilized except for three; new pathways created; the garden replanted - though we could do with donations of more non-invasive root plants like bulbs, lavender, etc. JBH]<br />
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To continue to raise awareness about the cemetery, Holloway has invited groups to stage events there. On May 23, for example, a group of second-year theatre students from the Tedavi Production Company performed E. L. Masters’ Spoon River Anthology amidst the graves, reciting epitaph monologues as the public walked between them. All donations went to the Emergency Appeal. <br />
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CIMITERO DEGLI INGLESI E MEDIATECA FIORETTA MAZZEI<br />
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Piazzale Donatello 38, Florence<br />
Weekdays only: Monday, 9-noon;<br />
Tuesday to Friday, 3pm-6pm (summer) 2pm- 5pm (winter)<br />
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The effort to save the ‘Overseas Poets Corner,’ as poet laureate Andrew Motion once called it, includes not only Hollway’s tireless work but also the contributions of private donors, along with the cemetery’s earnings as a burial site. Some friends adopt a tomb and pay to maintain its garden. No gift is too small, Holloway notes. (Contribute to the restoration of the English Cemetery with the PayPal link on the Aureo Anello Association website: http://www.florin.ms/aureoanello.html.)<br />
In addition to monetary donations, Holloway, requests plants: roses, plumbago, daffodil bulbs and any English flowers with non-invasive roots.<br />
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See also the following:<br />
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Cemetery website and register:<br />
http://www.florin.ms/cemetery.html<br />
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Wikipedia site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Cemetery,_Florence<br />
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Library website: http://www.florin.ms/biblioteca.html <br />
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Cemetery blog for latest news: http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com<br />
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See Part I of the article in I-Florence.com:<br />
http://www.i-florence.com/artsculturemuseums/a-landmark-en-passant/<br />
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See also Part I published in: TheFlorentine.net<br />
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(Article by Joëlle Edwards, Florence, London)<br />
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Joëlle Edwards is an English event and wedding planner, working in exclusive venues across Italy. She recently moved to Florence from London after having lived and worked in Switzerland, Palermo and Barcelona. She’d like to sing like Fiorella Mannoia, write like Andrea Camilleri, dance like Ginger Rogers and cook like zia Anna Maria! You can reach her at ciao@joellemarie.co.uk.Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-9638189202540680572010-08-07T19:59:00.000+02:002010-08-07T19:59:21.539+02:00NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKSThe New York Review of Books<br />
Visiting Elizabeth Barrett Browning<br />
December 18, 2008<br />
by Robert F. Ober Jr.<br />
E-mail Single Page Share More by Robert F. Ober Jr.<br />
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To the Editors:<br />
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Readers might be interested to know that Florence’s English cemetery, where Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried, gladly welcomes visitors. While the cemetery could benefit from an infusion of funds (many tombs, some of which date from shortly after its opening in 1828, have weathered poorly), an Anglican nun, Julia Bolton Holloway, unselfishly cares for its grounds and continues to collect, in its gatehouse, books relating to the notables—including Americans—buried there. (Ms. Holloway is an EBB scholar, having edited, with her late father, the 1995 Penguin Classics edition of the poet’s works.) The cemetery is somewhat off the touristic track (non-Catholics could not be buried within Florence’s now-vanished walls), but is still a mere quarter-hour ride from the Duomo, at Piazzale Donatello, 38. More information can be found at www.florin.ms or directly from Ms. Holloway: holloway.julia@tiscali.it.<br />
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Robert F. Ober Jr.<br />
Sharon, ConnecticutJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-45111289161247629802010-08-06T17:22:00.013+02:002010-08-26T16:52:07.991+02:00AN OPEN LETTER TO WYCLEF JEAN<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/romwave.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 205px; height: 136px;" src="http://www.ringofgold.eu/romwave.gif" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />
Although Wyclef Jean was not allowed to run for President of Haiti he had the right idea, on the need for literacy for his people.<br />
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HAITI AND ROMANIA: SLAVERY AND FREEDOM<br />
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<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.florin.ms/slaveshackle.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 205px; height: 136px;" src="http://www.florin.ms/slaveshackle.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />
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Haiti and Romania seem far apart yet are not. One is black, the other white. But in Romania, as in Haiti, much of the population were enslaved, in Romania these being the Roma, the 'gypsies' who had come from India a thousand years ago with their ancestral skills. The duration of enslavement of the Roma to nobles and monasteries was from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century when Uncle Tom's Cabin was translated into Romanian. In both countries the slaves, even when freed, were denied decent housing, work with dignity, education. The two far-apart countries run a very close parallel to each other.<br />
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<http://www.ringofgold.eu/Shatram.jpg><br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.ringofgold.eu/Shatram.jpg" style="height: 310px; width: 380px;" /><br />
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These are suggestions for Wyclef Jean, learned from the Roma of Romania begging in the streets of Florence.<br />
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I. The most important unit is the family.<br />
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II. Be sure that each family can have land to build on and on which to grow food.<br />
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III. Immediately import tents, wood house kits, and other earthquake-proof building materials not available within the country for Haitian families. Create work building these as well as Buckminster Fuller domes for schools and hospitals.<br />
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IV. Make sure that each family can conserve water with drainpipes and cisterns.<br />
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V. China now fabricates inexpensive solar kits that can run a light and recharge telephones and even a small laptop. Give each family independence from centralized power.<br />
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VI. Pay the older more infirm members of families who do know how to read and write to teach all those who do not.<br />
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VII. Have the families create their textbooks, publishing these on the Web with their drawings that can be downloaded for use. Have these textbooks share information on how to build houses, how to conserve water, how to grow food, how to prevent illness. Have teaching be in their dialect paired with globally dominant languages using colour-coded bilingual/multilingual texts. See <a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/Romany.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/Romany.html</a>, <a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/roofs.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/roofs.html</a>, <a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/panourisolare.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/panourisolare.html</a>, <a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/doctorvisit.html">http://www.ringofgold.eu/doctorvisit.html</a><br />
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VIII. In the midst of the earthquake, despite their poverty, Haitians were beautifully dressed. Encourage local dressmakers to produce clothing in cottage industries so they can care, at the same time, for the children, rather than working in factories, 50% being for fellow Haitians, 50% for export.<br />
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I & II are true for Haiti and the Roma.<br />
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III, IV, V, VI, VIII are needful for Haiti and for the Roma.<br />
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Always combine work and study. Education, especially of women, is the cheapest and best investment a nation can make towards its development and well-being. At the same time the education in the home of building, farming, sewing and other skills needs equal respect and is of equal value to the formal education acquired in schools.<br />
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<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/romwave.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 205px; height: 136px;" src="http://www.ringofgold.eu/romwave.gif" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />
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Our project for the Roma in Romania, submitted to the 'Decade of Roma Inclusion' of the Open Society Institute in Budapest, is called 'Home Building, Home Schooling,' and is suggested as the foundation for obtaining work in the European Union of which the Romanian Roma are citizens. It uses the concepts of Pestalozzi, Montessori, Fanon, Freire and Milani. Switzerland was a poor country which became rich through educating its citizens.Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-86854982319538537552010-05-23T06:04:00.021+02:002010-05-23T13:05:10.739+02:00AN INTENSE WEEK<http://www.florin.ms/fasces1.jpg><br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/fasces1.jpg" style="height: 350px; width: 380px;" /><br />
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It has been an intense week. Already on the preceding Wednesday, 12 May, had been a UNESCO conference on Traditional Knowledge. At which the mayors of the local comunes were speaking of the need to repair Tuscany's dry walls, her terraces, many destroyed in the heavy rains of the 1966 Flood, and of needing money for this. But no one knows any longer how to build dry walls or wants to work that hard. And I suggested the Roma, who have rebuilt our dry walls expertly, the whole family working together, the women holding babies in their arms telling the men where to place the stones, the brothers and husbands throwing the stones to each other and catching them, and putting them in place, and the very long wall they built in two hours having held the hill now for nine years.<br />
Then Thursday through Saturday the European Union's Commission's European Social Fund meeting at the Ospedale degli Innocenti on Social Exclusion and Education. Again I got to speak of the Roma from Romania and the 'English' Cemetery and how excellent their work is. And how important it is to give them literacy. To my amazement one Commission member, Irini Pari, placed me on her <a href="http://www.eesc.europa.eu/organisation/vicepresidents/pari/blog/template_archives_cat.asp?cat=19">blog.http://www.eesc.europa.eu/organisation/vicepresidents/pari/blog/template_archives_cat.asp?cat=19</a><br />
And on Friday at 3:30 p.m. was the UNESCO Memory of the World Exhibition at Santa Croce. So I was madly cycling between the two and there I met Joie Springer, who will be coming here today to see the 'English' Cemetery. And one of the Memory of the World treasures was the 1840 Waitangi Treaty with the New Zealand Maori chiefs and the white settlers. Now Peter Neville and his wife came to this 'English' Cemetery in a pouring rainstorm and Peter, who is Maori, recited his genealogy back to the signer of the 1840 Waitangi Treaty and to the Maori settler from Polynesia!<br />
<a href="http://www.umilta.net/Maori1.mp3">http://www.umilta.net/Maori1.mp3</a><br />
Then, Saturday afternoon, was the awarding of prizes by the Arciconfraternita della Misericordia in photography and poetry. I didn't expect my photographs to win because they are too controversial though absolutely the theme of diversity. One was called Osmannoro Poverty, the other Osmannoro Bellezza. Since the time they were taken and submitted the police had bulldozed Margarita's shack at <a href="http://www.ringofgold.eu/Osmannoro.html">Osmannoro</a> built from materials no one else wanted and she and her family, including Printsu below, were having to sleep in the streets in groups of no more than three. And it was the bitterest winter we have experienced in years.<br />
Margarita is to the left and she is our excellent gardener. She also sewed her skirt herself. When she smiles she is beautiful.<br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.ringofgold.eu/Osmannoro1.jpg" style="height: 275px; width: 350px;" /><br />
Povertà<br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.ringofgold.eu/Osmannoro2.jpg" style="height: 350px; width: 275px;" /><br />
Bellezza<br />
Now the Misericordia has a most beautiful but abandoned cemetery next door to ours. I am suggesting to them our workers. They could restore the splendid nineteenth funerary carriages in black and white. Our cemeteries with that of San Miniato a Monte could become together Florence's Père Lachaise.<br />
We seek funds to pay these people to garden, and do other work restoring the 'English' Cemetery so they can repair their roofs, school their children, learn the alphabet. They already have wonderful skills as blacksmiths, stonemasons, carpenters, gardeners.<br />
The Roma babies are wrapped up in <i>fasces</i> like those on the Ospedale degli Innocenti and almost never cry, from feeling so secure, so loved. This is Printsu whose parents are working here to find the money for his hospital care in Romania. He is anemic from lack of milk. The stress caused his mother not to have enough. His parents, who are all of eighteen, are sleeping under the loggia of the Innocenti at night. I have been teaching them to write their names and the alphabet so they can become members of our association and work in the Cemetery. They go home on Tuesday to be with their baby.<br />
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<img alt="" src="http://www.ringofgold.eu/Printsu.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 350px;" />Julia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13137004.post-39620508064159577342010-04-29T15:05:00.013+02:002010-04-29T15:55:07.792+02:00<span style="color: #3333ff;"><b>SLIDE SHOW OF IRISES</b></span><br />
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<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/DSCN5303.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
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This morning was so beautiful I got out the humungous antiquarian digital camera to photograph it all and have made a slide show for you of our glorious irises in bloom.<br />
These are Florence's lilies. Then a young artist was inspired to paint them. So I photographed him, too, painting them.<br />
You can find all this, in more detail, with more photographs and which are larger, at <a href="http://www.florin.ms/irises.ppt">http://www.florin.ms/irises.ppt</a>.<br />
After the irises will be roses and lavender and plumbago. The irises are thanks to Nicholas Dakin-Elliot, Head Gardener of New York University's Villa La Pietra.<br />
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<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/DSCN5302.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/DSCN5309.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/DSCN5311.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/DSCN5314.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/DSCN5317.JPG" style="height: 380px; width: 275px;" /><br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/DSCN5320.JPG" style="height: 275px; width: 380px;" /><br />
<img alt="" src="http://www.florin.ms/DSCN5325.JPG" style="height: 380px; width: 275px;" /><br />
If you wish to donate to the Aureo Anello Association for the restoration of the 'English' Cemetery and its gardening you can do so by a cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through the Pay Pal 'Donate' button below, which can also be used for the CDs, for the hand-bound limited edition books or for the sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's <a href="http://www.florin.ms/claspedhands.html">'Clasped Hands'</a> or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at <a href="http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html">http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html</a>), or some or all of these.<br />
<img src="http://www.florin.ms/rbebbdupre.jpg" height="300" width="370"><br />
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<a href="http://www.significantcemeteries.net/"><img src="http://www.florin.ms/ASCE_logo_piccolo.jpg" height="100" width="220"/></a><br />
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Sincerely,<br />
Julia Bolton Holloway<br />
Aureo Anello Association for the Library and Cemetery<br />
Piazzale Donatello, 38<br />
50132 FIRENZE, ITALYJulia Bolton Hollowayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17815712145337889572noreply@blogger.com