by Jon Lackman | 24 February 2006 | Conferences, News, Renaissance
Our Ross Finocchio writes: “Talk of Italian festivals warmed the damp chill of Boston on Thursday afternoon. The ‘Celebration in the Arts of Italy’ session took as its theme the Renaissance public processions that transformed their urban setting. The triumph of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1536, for example, was also ‘a triumph of urban planning’ in Rome, according to speaker David Karmon, who showed how the excavation of ancient monuments along the imperial parade route shaped the city’s landscape in ways we still experience. Maria Ruvoldt discussed the processions in Florence for the wedding of Charles’ daughter Giovanna of Austria to Francesco de’ Medici in 1565, focussing on the ‘Triumph of Dreams’ parade, conceived by the eccentric bridegroom, that included a large ‘Chariot of Sleep’ pulled through town by six live bears.
The session’s final presentation documented a modern and more modest counterpart to all that Renaissance pomp, and less than half the audience stuck around to see it. Artist Blaise Tobia shared a slideshow of photographs from the Santissimo Crocifisso festival held every seven years in the ‘poor little Sicilian town’ of Calatafimi. Begun in the mid-17th century, the festival retains many of its old traditions, like the practice of throwing bread, candy, and chick peas to the crowds lining the parade route. Tobia has a personal connection to Calatafimi – his family’s ancestral home – and spoke of the long memory of its 5000 or so inhabitants: ‘My father left in 1932. I went for the first time in 1989 and people told me that I look just like him.’”
