Logging the forests near Rome: We know only the "overstory"

 

Above, at the foot of Monte Cavo (north side), practically on top of the via Sacra, 2019

Italians - like people everywhere - have been cutting down forests for centuries, if not millenia. As hikers, we have our own irritations with logging (described below). More important to us is the ecological damage of continually cutting down an essential natural resource. Italy is not exactly the Rainforest, but it has been a land of trees for centuries, and now it isn't so much. 

Besides reading about the disastrous burning of the Brazilian Rainforest, we've read other recent pieces that have brought to the fore the destruction of this natural resource. One we recommend is Richard Power's "The Overstory," a 2018 award-winning novel that fictionalizes Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Her thesis, illustrated in Powers' book and in a recent New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Social Life of Forests," is that trees communicate underground, and therefore have an "understory." What we see and live in is only the "overstory." 

The cutting of old growth trees - and any forest trying to establish itself - becomes a tragedy to Simard, both the real professor and the novel's central character. 

Quaresima Legnami is a timber- and wood-sales company;
Facebook page here. "Legnami" meaning "timber."

It's difficult to hike in the forests closest to Rome and not feel the  pain of this tragedy. At the top of this post is a photo of a not-very-old forest we saw being mostly denuded the last time we hiked Monte Cavo in the Colli Albani outside Rome. We were on the 2,000 year-old via Sacra when the path dumped us out into this horrific (to us) scene. A bulldozer was in action, and the operator got out and tried to wave us away from the destruction - as if he didn't want us to see what they were doing. The Colli Albani are rightly well-known for their timber, especially the area between Monte Cavo and Velletri (the "Velletri ridge"), where there are plenty of designated hiking and biking trails.

You can see the bulldozer on the right, back, in the photo above, and closer in this photo below:

The guy in the cab of this bulldozer is the one who got out to let us know we were unwanted.     

And here's where we ended up - from via Sacra (left) to these lovely bushes (below, right). My guess is - though I can't prove it - that the company bulldozed right over the via Sacra. (We featured a couple of these photos in a 2019 post on our favorite hike in the Colli Albani, complete with lunch spot.)

One can argue that the loggers are at least leaving a lot of trees standing - to form a new forest in a few years. Even someone as uneducated as I am in these matters can raise several questions. One is that the loggers are cutting timber that already is not very old. The second is that they are not providing essential bio-diversity (according to the writings cited above); and third, they don't tend to the trees left standing, which can become endangered. Evidence of that is these remaining trees that we saw in a nearby area from an earlier cutting: they are overgrown with vines that eventually will kill them (photo below).

2017, Colli Albani

One can also argue that, because logging is a centuries-old practice, it should continue. We still have plenty of forests in which to walk. Right is a photo of Monte Cavo from 2016 (couldn't resist what we like to call the "fauna") that shows trunks growing out of one space - in other words, from a tree that had been cut down earlier.

And, logging in Italy also takes us back to the carbonari - the carbon-workers, who logged trees to burn them and turn them into (then) valuable carbon.  We wrote about this in our post on Mussolini's bunker on Monte Soratte, about 25 miles (40+ kilometers) north of Rome. Left is our photo of a mock-up of a charcoal kiln on a "didactic" side trail we took on Monte Soratte. It
explained the "carbonari."  The practice apparently dates back 3,000 years, and is active in a few spots in Italy even today (see here for a nostalgic view and here for amazing photojournalism - scroll down for the photos).

I'm not in fact interested in the nostalgia, per se. I'm interested in what we humans in the 21st century - having learned a lot in the past 50 years - are doing to the planet. Our photos above of logged areas and logging are from just a couple of the times we've encountered vast expanses of totally logged areas of the once-gorgeous woods near Rome. We hope there's some effort to control this practice.

(A postscript below with some photos of my life with trees and logging. My Dad took me backpacking in the Cascades in Washington State, among old growth forests. I didn't know how lucky I was. He grew up at the foot of those mountains, in the small town of Snoqualmie - photo below of him with his two best friends and business partners in those mountains, clearly surrounded by those trees. My paternal grandfather worked for Weyerhaeuser outside of Snoqualmie, and had his own, private sawmill [photo below]. An uncle on my Mom's side [my Italian side], also photo below, grew up in a valley near those mountains, and was a lumberjack in these forests.)

Dianne

Dale Bennett (the tall one in back) with Joe Proctor and Bill Norstrom, on their way to Deep
Lake, 1949.

My Grandma and Grandpa Bennett, me, and my Dad, at
my Grandpa's private sawmill (looks like a lot of logging
had taken place behind this spot).

Dino Andrealli and Dianne (woodhouse
for the family farmhouse behind);
he later became a lumberjack,
 a hazardous occupation that
ruined his health.

Sanford Biggers and the American Academy in Rome: Destruction and Creation

Sanford Biggers' art is astounding in its variety and materiality. We were fortunate to see several of his quilt works, and to talk with him, at the American Academy in Rome's Open Studios  in 2018.

Biggers and his art were profiled recently in a full-page New York Times Sunday feature.  He has shows coming up in the Bronx, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. Biggers' art has ranged from his use of vintage quilts to create new art to his BAM series that deals with the killing of blacks by police (which he says he can't work on or watch at this time - "There's a point where there's no longer any detachment from these things happening").

The quilts were his primary focus when he was a Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts at the Academy. We took photos of five that were on the walls of his studio there.

Fascinated as we were with his work, I was also troubled by his cutting apart, or covering over parts of, vintage quilts. It reminded me of Ai Weiwei breaking a Han Dynasty vase. Of course, in that case the vase was worth $1 million, and breaking it was Ai's point. (Here's the video if you want to re-live it.)

In response to my questions, Biggers seemed untroubled by what some may think of as destruction of these objects, objects that he and others value. As he said to the NYT reporter, commenting on the seminal "Quilts of Gee's Bend" show he saw at the Whitney Museum in 2002,  "There was color, modulation, rhythm, and all these compositional things. But seeing them in these beautiful textile works made by a woman's hands, it was touching on sculpture, touching on the body, touching on politics."  (I was surprised the NYT didn't ask this question.)

A portion of Maude Bennett's quilt made for
Dianne from material used to make Dianne dresses.

I may be somewhat protective of "the quilt," because my grandmother was a quilter. She made me quilts, many from scraps of fabric she had after making me dresses.  So, as a girl, I had the echoes of my dresses in the quilt on my bed. (See photo left.)  And, of course, she's no longer here (she died in 1984 at age 98), but her quilts are still with our family.

Biggers said he saw himself, in contrast to destroying, as perpetuating the life of some of these quilts, making them more long-lasting and visible than not. One of his quilt projects projects "codes" from the Underground Railroad onto the quilts. And he also sees his quilts projects as more an art of process than of object. He said he sits with the quilts for months or years, and then when he starts working on one, "it's led by what the material is going to give back."

A Rome influence in Biggers art appears in busts he is making in bronze and marble, with artisans in Italy, combining African sculptural traits with Greco-Roman ones.

Biggers and a guest in his studio at the Academy.

As the Open Studio times were drawing to a close, Biggers and his wife and then infant daughter were enjoying the outdoor music and sculpture "unveiling" in the Academy's front courtyard. 

In a corner of the studio - an artwork or
the tools of his trade? Hard to tell with
Biggers (but I still didn't touch it).

The Open Studios - which our friend Dana Prescott (now Executive Director of Civitella Ranieri international cultural center in Umbria) began when she was Associate Director at the Academy - have been an annual ritual and we hope one that will start again post-Covid. They are a benefit the Academy - which itself benefits from Rome  (one might even say the experience is "priceless") - can give back to Romans.

Dianne

L'Aquila: A lesson in Italy's failure to rebuild after the 2009 earthquake.

Post-earthquake reconstruction?  Six years later, this is L'Aquila.

The most recent devastating earthquake in Italy hit in the Marche province on October 26, followed by aftershocks. An August 24 quake not far away killed almost 300 people. 

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is promising complete restoration.  We are - sadly - skeptical.  As a poignant piece of evidence, we give you L'Aquila, where a 2009 earthquake in this large, historic center in the Abruzzo region that neighbors Marche, resulted in 309 deaths.

We had been in L'Aquila many years ago.  This classic medieval city, capital of the Abruzzo province, is less than 75 miles from Rome, but 75 miles that can seem like centuries, and that took several days to cover in Margaret Fuller's time.  The city sits at the foot of the Gran Sasso mountains we intended to (and did) climb; they reach over 10,000 feet, the highest Italian mountains south of the Alps.

Last year, 6 years after the quake, we decided to see what had been accomplished after the earthquake.  We had heard of the slowness of the rebuilding, mafia involvement, scandals, and the like.  But nothing prepared us for the ghost town L'Aquila still was - 6 years later.  The photo above of one street is, unfortunately, typical of most of the streets of L'Aquila. Buildings shored up, at best, but unreconstructed and uninhabitable.

A closer view of the cracking produced by the 2009 earthquake.

Here one can see efforts to protect the older, classic building windows and doors.
Again, this is the best the 'reconstruction' seems to offer.

Businesses stopped in their tracks.  And not re-opened, of course.  This was a
unisex hair salon.

We'll get back to the destruction.  But we must take a couple sentences to describe the highly unusual setting in which - without planning on our part - we found L'Aquila in May 2015: it was the annual national 3-day "raduno" or "adunata" - a gathering of the Italian Army's Alpini units - gatherings that attract several hundred thousand men and a few women.  And this year, in an attempt to bring life and attention to the devastated city, they were meeting in L'Aquila, even though there were only a handful of rooms available to them in the city itself.  Many took 1-2 hour long train rides into L'Aquila daily; others set up tents and slept in vans. 

The Alpini were formed as a northern mountain unit of the Italian army.  One finds Alpini almost everywhere in Italy these days.  They still are a significant branch of the army.  And, since my family is from the north (15 km south of the Swiss border), all the men belonged to the Alpini (see a photo of my great-grandfather below).  The Alpini would recognize L'Aquila, and its location in the Gran Sasso, as part of the mountain regions that Alpini love.

Our first shot of the Alpini, recognizable by a black feather in their caps
(officers get a white feather) was of them being tourists.  Here they are at L'Aquila's
famed 13th century "Fountain of the 99 Spouts" (Fontana delle 99 Cannelle)

The poster for the 2015 Adunata.  Note the emphasis on the mountains and the black feathers.

Here's how the Alpini managed their gathering in L'Aquila - they brought in their own pop-up restaurants and beer tents;
this one set up right next to the scaffolded building.

The Alpini gathered in St. Peter's Square at their 1929 adunata.
One of the empty L'Aquila buildings had a small exhibit of prior Alpini "adunate,"
which is where we found this, among many other photos and artifacts.

The Alpini here were singing a traditional song.  To the left is the hotel in
 which we stayed many years ago.  This is in a newer part of the city, 
where there was less devastation because of better building practices.
  The Gran Sasso can be seen in back.

Back to the destruction.  

The sign scrawled on this wall says "L'Aquila  will be arise (be reborn) from the Mafia."

It's not clear these buildings will be rebuilt.

The blocked-off streets are in the "red zone," where one cannot even walk.

This banner in the main square says:
"One finds a red zone everywhere and the issue is a national one."

Outside an obviously newer but poorly built "Students' House," photos
of some of the more than 100 "angels" who died there in the earthquake.
 Arrests followed the collapse of the building.

Housing built for displaced residents - but not near any work.  From the train,
we saw these on the outskirts of Paganica, about 15 km from L'Aquila.  

A view of L'Aquila from a distance.  The cranes are there, but where are the workers and the work?  Snow-capped (in May)
Gran Sasso in the distance.

Elizabeth Povoledo wrote about L'Aquila in the New York Times a few weeks ago. Remarkably, her photos don't look any different from ours of 2015.

There were a few signs of hope.

A bar on the central square, run by the Fratelli Nuria, was open. It was
 not simply an Alpini pop-up. Signs announced it as the first business
 to reopen after the quake. The family also made its own, excellent torrone  
(which we bought and ate). You can see a couple Alpini among the patrons.

This surprising restored house, with a woman watering her plants, was the lone
exception we saw.

Our hotel receptionist rode with us on the train from L'Aquila to Paganica where many people were housed (photo above).  She told us that 6 years later her house was not habitable but that she had to continue paying her mortgage, and continue living in Paganica, about 15 km away.   We wrote last December about a church, built into rock, in Paganica.

And below is Giovanni Mambretti, my Italian grandmother's father, standing at left, with his Alpini.

We hope to visit L'Aquila again, and that we will see significant progress the next time.  Should you wish to visit L'Aquila, our hotel was ideal.  It was in a newer building, below the city (you do have to walk up and down hills a lot in L'Aquila), and in 2015 it was fully open, including the excellent restaurant serving Abruzzi specialties.  It's the Hotel "99 Cannelle", because it's across the street from that famous fountain.

Dianne

Poems for Everyone - A New Book Inspired by Piero della Francesca

The Rome connection here exists, but first we want to celebrate our long-time Italian friend, Dana Prescott’s new book, Feathers from the Angel’s Wing: Poems Inspired by the Paintings of Piero della Francesca. 

This gorgeous book was a labor of love for Dana, who lives at what must be the epicenter of the largest number of paintings in the world by this ever more-prized 15th-century, early Renaissance artist.  That location gave her the obsession (and yes, it is that) that led to the book.  As the New York Times complained a few years ago Piero ”took more commissions in Sansepolcro than anywhere else, and his greatest works remain in its vicinity — a source of great frustration for Piero obsessives outside of Europe, who must visit a series of small villages to see his frescoes and altarpieces.”  Though the Frick Museum in New York City now has acquired 4 Pieros and mounted a show in 2013 that the Times called “ravishing.”  The word applies equally to the emotion emanating from the poets Prescott has culled in this meaty book.

Madonna del Parto - is she opening her dress? pointing
to her rounded belly?  Are the angels opening or closing
the draperies?  Note the pomegranate design on the
curtain - a symbol of fertility.

The writers Prescott includes range from the established and revered (long after his death) Pier Paolo Pasolini to the American rock star/writer/poet Patti Smith.  But those two aren’t the alpha and the omega here.  Among the poems that touched me most are two that were read at a book launch in Rome in June.  Both of these poems were inspired by my favorite Piero, the Madonna del Parto (The Pregnant Madonna), which remains in Sansepolcro, where it is treasured as a good omen for pregnant women.  Moira Egan’s “Gravid,” composed of 2 9 line stanzas, each line of 9 syllables, includes the sentence:  “I said no to nature, then nature turned and said no to me.”  Contrasted with Egan’s “grief and guilt come in colors, dull red, queasy green,” is Mongolian poet G. Mend-Ooyo’s, “The Pregnant Madonna.” That poem takes us lyrically “Between the trees, grains thread their way across the fields….Each of the seeds is its own world.”  Mend-Ooyo, who grew up in a nomadic family, still has the nomad’s sense of the power of the earth. 

In her work as executive director of Civitella Ranieri, the international cultural center near Sansepolcro, Dana nurtures many translators.  Perhaps because of this background, she gives tribute to the many translators at work in her book as well, their bios given equal status with the poets.

I would be remiss in not pointing out the quality of this hardbound book – the paper, the colors, the reproductions.  It’s a beautiful gift to someone in your life. [At amazon.com, Powell’s and amazon.it.]

St. Luke, in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome

And, finally, the Rome connection to Piero is fragmentary and lost, both literally.  There are a few heavily damaged fragments of an unfinished ceiling work in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore.  Piero also painted frescoes on the walls of Pope Pius II’s rooms in the Vatican.  By order of Pope Julius II, they were painted over – by Raphael.

Dianne

MAXXI: the Francesco Vezzoli Performance

We enjoyed Elisabetta Provoledo's July 22 article in the New York Times, describing the efforts of MAXXI, Rome's splashy, new, Zaha Hadid-designed museum of contemporary art, to attract Roman audiences while building an international reputation. 








It hasn't been easy, especially when state money is tight, the museum's collections are thin, and the

On her cell phone

young staff would prefer to play with their cell phones rather than to assist curious or lost patrons or hand out the earphones like they were supposed to do for a video exhibit (photo at right). 

One technique that MAXXI is trying is to mount hip exhibits that plug into Italy's fashion industry.  Last year, for example, the museum arranged with Zegna, an apparel company, to commission an exhibit by artists Lucy and Jorge Orta that conveniently used Zegna fabrics. 

And more recently, MAXXI mounted a visually stunning exhibit by Francesco Vezzoli, who was able to deploy his star power to bring in $525,000 at a fundraising dinner, in a city where fundraising on that level is virtually unknown. 

Vezzoli: Postmodern to a fault

Vezzoli (b. 1971, lives in Milan) has exhibited at the New Museum in New York City and the Tate Modern in London.  He's a painter and performance artist, and his sumptuous MAXXI presentation utilizes both talents.  Vezzoli plays with Hollywood and film, exploring contemporary ideas and experiences of fame and celebrity.

On the day before the Vezzoli exhibit opened, we were the beneficiaries of those cellphone-devoted museum attendants, whom we found huddled together for a chat, while only a few feet away we gingerly slipped past a velvet rope and found ourselves alone--well, for a while there was this Asian guy who had also sneaked in--with Vezzoli's as yet unseen exhibit. 

Very special.
Thanks, MAXXI, for the private showing.
Dianne and Bill




Not sure what he had in mind here, but this is how you raise money



Bizarre juxtaposition of ancient and modern...that's Lauren Bacall

New York City, or Rome? A Response to Michael Kimmelman

A portion of New York City's "grid"

We thoroughly enjoyed Michael Kimmelman's celebration of New York City's "grid" design in the January 3, 2012 New York Times.  He's one of our favorites.  Mr. (following NYT practice) Kimmelman, in reviewing a current exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, describes the grid as "in many ways the defining feature of the city," a "boon to private development" and, "almost despite itself, a creative template."  For Mr. Kimmelman, the city's grid suggests the sort of "aggressive and socially responsible leadership" that we so badly need in today's difficult times.  (Be patient, dear reader, we'll get to Rome).

While acknowledging that the grid was in a way "heartless" and even "monotonous," he remains convinced that it was a positive development: it proved responsive to the city's changing compass orientation; profitable for property owners; ecologically beneficial; conducive to sociability and building variety; "oddly beautiful"; and--a virtue that Mr. Kimmelman gives special weight and attention--made the city instantly comfortable and knowable, even for strangers. 

A model of the Roman Forum

Inevitably, perhaps, the world's other great cities, notably Paris and Rome, must enter the argument.  Rome does so twice.  Mr. Kimmelman argues that "grid plans went back to ancient Greece and Rome."  We can't speak for Greece, but the little we've seen on ancient Rome suggests that the early city, built in part on hills that flaunted the sort of strict, unrelenting grid on which New York City was based, could have served as the basis for Gotham's design.  Although the Roman Forum is constructed within a rectangle, the buildings on the Palatine Hill are set at an angle to it.

A portion of a c. 1910 Rome map.  At lower left,
on the right side of the river, a grid-based
Testaccio, waiting to be developed, and above it,
the Aventine, in a similar state

Beyond the Centro Storico, outlying sections of Rome, including Prati, Testaccio, and a part of the Aventine, used the grid, but these were not laid out until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Mr. Kimmelman's reference to "Rome" is likely to the grid system widely used to build towns outside the capital but within the burgeoning Roman empire. 

Rome appears in a second context, in an interesting and revealing comparison to New York.  "In the same way," Mr. Kimmelman writes, "that tourists who come to New York can easily grasp the layout and, as such, feel they immediately possess the city, outsiders who move here become New Yorkers simply by saying so.  By contrast, an American can live for half a century in Rome or Hamburg or Copenhagen or Tokyo but never become Italian or German or Danish or Japanese.  Anybody can become a New Yorker.  The city, like its grid, exists to be adopted and made one's own." 

There's some hyperbole here--"half a century"?--and the argument that a feeling of belonging can be traced to the grid, rather than to the city's (and the nation's) function as a cultural melting pot seems forced, to say the least.  We could make the case, too, that New York City's most creative folks have preferred the old city, below the grid, and especially Greenwich Village: Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jackson Pollock  Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Eugene O'Neill, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jane Jacobs, and [fill in the blank].

In one sense, though, we couldn't agree more.  Rome is a much more complex city than New York and much more difficult to learn.  It's full of curves and unusual angles, of piazzas, square and round and oval, that surge with energy, of parts that fit oddly and subtly into a whole that remains an intricate puzzle, replete with mystery.  It has hills (more than 7, actually) and a river, one that runs through the center of the city and whose twists and turns and bridges contribute to a sense of organic complexity.  Rome's cityscape--its imprint, its pattern--could never be described as "heartless" or "monotonous" or damned by the faint praise of "oddly beautiful."  That's why we can visit year after year and each time feel a kind of rebirth, as if we were seeing, and knowing, the city anew.  That's why being on a scooter is Rome is a pleasure and a thrill, no matter how often we do it.  And that's why  we wrote--why we felt compelled to write--Rome the Second Time.  You're interesting enough, New York City, but you're no Rome.
Bill
from Dianne: for another of Bill's "exchanges" with Kimmelman, see his post on MAXXI, Italy's 21st century art gallery - designed by Zaha Hadid -  in Rome.