Lake Garda

Marostica

This year is the chess match, there is a nice dispaly of time period living in the lower castel to visit

7 Hills of Roma

The Seven Hills of Rome mark the traditional boundaries of the city. It was on these seven hills – Aventine, Caelian, Capitoline, Esquiline, Palatine, Quirinal, and Viminal – that the first settlements of Rome began and these seven hills were the ones protected within the Servian Walls. The foundations, gates, and ruins of these 4th century-BC walls can still be seen in some parts of the city. Subsequent builds of fortifications in Rome, such as the Aurelian Walls (3rd century AD) and the Leonine City (9th century AD) included other hills (Janiculum, Vatican, Pincian), but the original Seven Hills are the ones in bold above and included within the red border in the map to the right.

Earthquakes in Italy

I just saw that northern Italy has suffered yet another earthquake,. A 2.1 magnitude earthquake hit the near the Belluno area in the Veneto Region. This is the latest in a series of earthquakes to hit the region over the past few weeks.

So what is going on here?

Sandwiched between the Alps and the Africa plate, Italy has always been a hotspot for seismic activity. The map above, sourced from Piedmont Properties via Daily Kos, shows the earthquake zones in Italy – basically the entire peninsula. The legend indicates that the strongest quakes, the Category I tremors, are common in a few pockets in Sicily, Basilicata, Puglia, Campania, Lazio, Abruzzo, and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The lower-grade Category III quakes show up mostly in southern Italy. But the large portion of the country lies in a Category II quake zone. As you’ll see, almost the entirety of Emilia-Romagna lies in a quake zone.

Besides natural plate movements, Daily Kos also seems to point to fracking as a possible cause of the latest seismic phenomenon. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, “is a [mining] technique used to release petroleum, natural gas, or other substances for extraction.” Daily Kos links to a number of articles about the latest drilling/fracking/gas exploration projects in the Po River Valley.

VENICE 56TH BIENNALE

Venice, May 6 - The 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice - the Venice Biennale - opens its doors to the public from Saturday through November 22 with the theme All the World's Futures. World-class artists and 89 countries are set to participate in the edition curated by acclaimed Nigerian art critic Okwui Enwezor and chaired by Paolo Baratta. "The world before us today exhibits deep divisions and wounds, pronounced inequalities and uncertainties as to the future," said Baratta. "Despite the great progress made in knowledge and technology, we are currently negotiating an 'age of anxiety'," Baratta added. "Our aim is to investigate how the tensions of the outside world act on the sensitivities and the vital and expressive energies of artists, on their desires and their inner song,". 

Eighty-nine of the 136 artists to show have never before exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and will pose questions, doubts and responses through a multidisciplinary chorus of performances, installations, paintings, drawings, videos, sculptures, and graphic art. Five countries will be participating for the first time: Grenada, Mauritius, Mongolia, Mozambique, and Seychelles. The international art exhibition will open to the public at Venice's Giardini della Biennale and the Arsenale. 

Meanwhile, the city is also celebrating the life work of the late American painter and sculptor Cy Twombly (1928-2011) in a major retrospective in Ca' Pesaro. The show, called Paradise, spans 60 years of Twombly's production and hangs from the halls of the Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna and in the Spazio Dom Perignon. The exhibit explores the recurring themes of Twombly's creative research behind his scribble-like compositions and graffiti-likes, including such themes as sexual exuberance. It also explores a vision of a pastoral harmony with nature and one in which body and mind are harmoniously unified, at times through the use of words, phrases and poems. Twombly experimented with composing in the dark, painting with his left hand, and increasing the extension of the brush by fixing it on long sticks - strategies that obscured his artistic training and control of technical means, critics have said.