For much of my youth I grew up largely unaware of the events of the Holocaust which led to the murder of six million Jewish people – two thirds of their total population in Europe – and the near extermination of many other minorities in that continent.

How come I grew up in this blissful ignorance? My mum had been brought up in fascist Italy. She must have been aware of Mussolini’s racialist laws brought in at the end of thirties in sympathy with Hitler’s own Draconian race legislation. Although they were gentiles a member of her family had married a Jewish artist and there was no trace of any discrimination based on race. Indeed, to be ordered to discriminate against Jews as a result of the dictator’s new racial laws came as an absolute shock for most Italians.

When my mother married and moved to the UK her professional role drew her to a Czech refugee doctor’s family who had escaped by the skin of their teeth from the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp. They became friends for life.

So I had grown up in a family setting which was certainly not ignorant of the Shoah. The problem, I think was, that few persons, if any, wanted to talk about it. It was just too catastrophic, so incredibly upsetting especially for those who had lost most, if not all, their family through the inhumanity of a psychopathic belief system.

This was the situation with so many others who had survived six years of the worst massacre in the history of mankind. People just did not want.to have to remember these things. Surely the way forwards was to rebuild a new Europe where peace and plenty would predominate?

At my primary school there was an appeal for children war refugees. Huge swathes of population displaced by redrawn national boundaries were migrating across the wrecked continent: Poles displaced by white Russians, Germans displaced by Poles, Italians displaced by Slavs among them. But there was nothing to explain to us schoolkids why this should be so. Certainly we never had any refugees among our own classmates.

The book that taught me first about the extent of the Shoah was William Shirer’s massive ‘The rise and fall of the Third Reich’. Many other books have followed since that one, in particular Primo Levi’s ‘Se questo è un uomo.’.

In the summer of 2001 my Honda Transalp bike and I found ourselves near that most splendid of Polish cities: Cracow. Meeting up with a group of bikers at a campsite a little way outside the city I compared notes and one of the bikers said “we’re quite near Oświęcim”.

That name, translated into German is Auschwitz, and, as any sentient human knows, it is the site of one of the most horrible killing machines in the history of (in)humanity. Indeed it was the date of the entry of the Red Army into that death camp which now been adopted as the day for Holocaust remembrance.

The following day I visited both Auschwitz and Birkenau. I climbed up into the entrance watchtower made famous in the film “Schindler’s List”. No-one else was there. I looked out onto to the vast flatness of the camp – most of the barracks had vanished but their foundations remained to show how huge the camp had been. In the far right-hand corner I could make out the mangled ruins of the crematorium blown up by the camp officials when they abandoned it in the face of the Russian army’s advance. Strange feelings of desolation, utter emptiness, and complete annihilation assaulted me. I had to get out and rushed down the stairs silently screaming.

Yet so many never got out….

Afterwards I went for a walk around the camp perimeter. A family was picnicking near the interminable stretch of barbed wire fence. I walked into a little wood.

AUSCHWITZ 2001

Ash pond reflects clouds

silence by the little wood

a stork takes to flight.

Twisted iron bars

concrete minds

rusty furnaces:

Resurrection’s castle

Is a heap of crumbling concrete

Anybody who’s been there will understand these lines. If I explained them here I’d just start weeping.

Today Holocaust memorial Day is known as the “giornata della memoria” in Italy – a day dedicated to remembering the victims of the holocaust (and of all other mass crimes against humanity).
In our part of the world, the Mediavalle and the Garfagnana areas of Lucca province, the Todt organization built bunkers, casements, tunnels and anti-tank walls to halt the allied advance up the Italian peninsula. In the Serchio valley and the surrounding mountains around three thousand people are estimated to have worked in the service of Todt for a period of twelve months. The Todt organization had its administrative headquarters in the Santini palace building at Borgo a Mozzano, now the town’s public library.

Many workers were Italian army deserters from the armistice of 8th September 1943 since they were promised they would not be deported to German concentration camps if they worked on building the Gothic line defences. Others were forced labourers, captured during raids and subsequently detained for transportation to Auschwitz at the local concentration camp at Socciglia near Anchiano.

Today that area is an industrial estate and also the place where the Sagra del Bacalà (Norwegian cod festival) takes place at the beginning of May each year to commemorate a happier event, that of the twinning of nearby Anchiano with Aalesund in Norway – not forgetting, too, that Norway was also subject to the Nazi scourge and has its own victims to mourn.

On the alternative route to Lucca from Bagni di Lucca a commemoration stone, dedicated to the majority of those victims who never returned, has been erected on the site of the camp.

I have come across concentration camps before even Auschwitz. In 1997 we passed by another one near Munich where it all started:

DACHAU

The land of lemon groves and honeyed saints

is left behind with the alpine high road;

before us the plains of the north unfold

round a little town with its smiling square

embraced by pink and white baroque mansions.

Yet we are hushed as the road guides along

a tall fence of heavy wood and barbed wire.

Watchtowers punctuate it at intervals

scowling at us like cerberean hounds

salivating for fresh escapee meat.

It was not easy to get here. One’s mind

had to reach the decision and then none

would understand pleas for directions:

You want the town centre? No, I don’t know

a death-camp, but there’s the war museum.

A wide and empty parade-ground stretches

within: this place was planned for officers.

To one side a memorial shrine is manned

by a Turk and his family. They smile

inviting us to the chamber of horrors.

Treated as untouchables in a land

which once saw its own stock as master-race

and poked fun at the seraglio’s secrets

a few years after the imperial city

was almost raped by janissary troops.

So it was here that the rail tracks stopped

for huddled masses of weeping mothers

separated from their crying children

and husbands impotent before their spouse

as the armed greatcoats shoved them to one side.

And this was the new life falsely promised,

the fresh start in a different settlement

with hope of work: from dental surgery

to assistant in medical research.

Job-creation in the third empire style.

Sent to be purified in shower blocks

which released that most powerful human

disinfectant of all: death, agonised

death in the excrement of shock of those

waves that came before and those that followed.

Who climbed over the centre of the roof

to release the crystals of zyklon-B?

Did they apply for the post or draw lots

or merely obey orders which must be

obeyed? I ask but know there’s no answer.

No answer from the razed foundations where

babylonian wails pierced the benighted world.

No answer from the photos of shaven heads,

staring eyes with the look of the dead while

moth wings burn in a lamp’s human shade.

Crescent moon rises on spectral towers

as the casino fills with babbling punters

while coffee and cakes are served in the square

and snapshots are exchanged of summer days

in a land of lemon and orange groves.

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” said Winston Churchill (or was it the philosopher Santayana) famously. Whatever one’s political persuasion, neglect of “il giorno della memoria” is neglect of one’s most essential humanity.

It’s somewhat different today from the times when what happened during those terrible years was virtually taboo. The institution of an international Holocaust memorial Day in 2005 has done much to bring those events to people’s attention. Monuments, plaques, museums, educational centres and exhibitions have also played their essential parts. It’s now no longer taboo to talk about the previously virtually unmentionable but instead use the subject of the Holocaust as a teaching example of what we must never allow to happen again on our Planet.

Sadly, however, this year for the first time since those horrific events that took place in Europe over seventy five years ago we are witnessing a new wave of tyranny and intolerance towards fellow humans. I refer of course to the Russian invasion of Ukraine which has been an independent Republic ever since the collapse of the old Soviet Union in 1990. Unlike the ignorance in which the allies were kept for too long of the atrocities of the Nazis – and in particular the ‘final solution’ – we know first-hand what is the going on in the east today: the new breed of concentration camps set up by the Russian army and, in particular, by the Wagner group of mercenaries, the unbearable tortures of living in a place where a missile could kill you in your own flat the next second, and where it is only the memories of a past and happy family life have any power of making you see through this infernal horror.

The barbarities perpetrated against the civilian population of the Ukraine, the systematic destruction of that country’s infrastructure, the immeasurable damage done to the psyche of new generations in the country, which we knew in happier times when we visited it in 2004, would have been unimaginable just a year ago.

We must not let them pass – even if to do so we have to invoke the irony of German tanks entering the conflict to liberate Ukraine and remember that eighty years ago tanks from the same country were used in an attempt to annex eastern Europe into the most diabolical system known since the Mongol invasions.

Will there ever, ever come a time when these tanks or indeed any system of warfare will be considered unimaginably obsolete for the positive future of our Planet?

It’s strange how terms of disparagement have come to define entire art movements. It was the case once when to call a painting an impressionist or a futurist or even a cubist work was considered a sort of belittlement. So it was too with that wonderful Italian school of painters which started flourishing towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the so-called ‘macchiaioli’. That word derives from the Italian word ‘macchia’ for stain which is hardly a flattering description.  However it does describe what early art critics felt about a school of painters which placed the reality of what was represented on canvas before any adherence to the then prevalent canons of academic art where strict draughtsmanship and the drawing of the subjects’ contours was considered de rigeur before any paint was actually applied. For the Macchiaioli artists were true rebels against the rules of the bourgeoise salon and their creations were certainly not welcome in upper-class households.  There is frequently made a description of this glorious artistic movement as being an Italian version of French-style impressionism. True, both movements drew their inspiration from fresh air, nature and the quality of light. Both movements notoriously also found themselves rejected by the establishment of their age and, sadly, too many painters died in penurious circumstances. However, the differences between these two artistic rebels are just as important. I would rank the following as the most important: 1. Historically. The Macchiaioli began to flourish well before the French impressionists, (although they did admit to being influenced by the latter’s  Barbizon school). By the 1850’s there was a panoply of Italian macchiaioli whereas the French impressionists only really took off from the 1870’s and the famous scandal of the Salon des Refuses. 2. Technically. The Macchiaioli painters would prepare the sketches for their subjects en plein air, in the field but their canvas were invariably painted in their studios unlike the French school who invariably finished their paintings in natural surroundings. 3.Chromatically. The Italians avoided the more extreme colour tones of the French. No pinky-blue shadows for them! The colours in their creations are far closer to the landscape realities they saw. In this respect their paintings are, indeed, more stain-like. 4. Subject-selection. Interestingly the Italians avoided still-lives. Both nations, however, loved  rural scenes, domestic interiors and seascapes. However, befittingly, as they lived in stirring times when Italy finally became one nation, the Macchiaioli branched into depiction of important national events both historical and contemporary. Giovanni Fattori’s vivid panoramas of military manoeuvres during the Italian wars of independence stick in the mind’s eye for also showing the pity, the waste of human life (several painters lost their lives during these campaigns) together with the undoubted heroics of actions in the field.  Of course, the company of painters subscribing  to the Macchiaioli movement were varied enough in their approaches although they all shared common anti-academic ideals. Although many of them met up in coffee-bars, like Florence’s ‘Michelagniolo’, to exchange ideas there were distinct schools within the movement. For me one of the most attractive was that set who gravitated to the shoreline of Castiglioncello south of Livorno to find their muse. Indeed, it is in this region that the word ‘macchia’ obtains a second and more complimentary meaning. For ‘macchia’ also means Mediterranean coastal vegetation which can range from scrubland to monumental avenues of umbrella pines. Those oxen from the Maremma, often depicted in these landscapes, are truly magnificent beasts! Critically the macchiaioli as part of an important artistic movement has steadily grown in stature in recent years. No longer are they regarded as second-rate relations of the French impressionists but rather as a creative surge of vital importance for the whole development of western art. Some artists clearly stand out for the supreme quality of their inspiration and technical prowess: Fattori and Signorini in particular. But all adherents of this phase are worth looking at….if one can find their work on public view. And that’s why this lovely exhibition at Pisa’s Palazzo Blu is so valuable. For a large number of pictures have vanished into private collections or been inherited by local patrician families. I have been privileged to view previous Macchiaioli exhibitions in other Italian galleries – most notably in Florence’s museo Bardini – but the Pisa one for me is the most outstanding to date combining some of the finest creations of the ‘stainists’ with an appropriate context which sets them clearly sandwiched between the stultified academic post-classical allegories of the earlier years of the nineteenth century and the newly emerging anti-conformist and often politically inebriated movements of twentieth century Italian art

Recently two Italian news items have marked the end of important eras in the country’s history. The first is the arrest of mafia godfather Matteo Messina Denaro after thirty years either ‘on the run’ or ‘under protection’ (pick your own explanation). Undoubtedly, as PM Meloni emphasised, the Mafia is not yet done, as it is now fed by association with international criminality, but its Corleone branch, made famous by the film starring Marlon Brando, has been irremediably damaged.

The second news item, also connected with the film world, concerns the death, aged 95, of cinematic icon, Gina Lollobrigida, described as the world’s most beautiful woman. Gina (Orig. Luigia), born in a working class family in the monastery town of Subiaco, was a consummate actress starring in some classic fifties and sixties neo-realist films and continuing to a distinguished career in journalism and photo-reportage despite her sometimes tormented personal life.

Some world cities are irrevocably connected with famous feature films: Salzburg and ‘The Sound of Music’, Venice and ‘Don’t Look Now’ with Julie Christie and ‘Roman Holiday’ starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. But what about Lucca? Is it associated with any memorable movie? Yes it is, starting with “La Provinciale” filmed in 1952 by Mario Soldati and featuring a fabulous Gina Lollobrigida with Gabriele Ferzetti.

‘La Provinciale’, presented at the 6th Cannes Film Festival where it won an award, is based on the short novel of the same name by Alberto Moravia, published in 1937. It’s a tortuous love story set in the streets of Lucca’s historic centre and concerns Gemma, the beautiful daughter of a landlady who falls in love with Paolo, the heir of a Count whom she has known since she was a child.  When Gemma discovers that the young man turns out to be her brother through her mother’s illicit love affair she agrees to marry Franco, a rather boring professor whom she isn’t particularly attracted to. Furthermore, in the provincial town (Lucca, strangely, is never mentioned by name in the movie) where she lives with her husband, Gemma becomes friends with Countess Elvira, a shady and rather intrusive character who eventually meets the debacle she deserves.

The shots of Lucca street scenes are not many but they are all immediately recognizable to lovers of this stunning city. They range from those opening images shot in a mansion in Via Filzi,

to the classic villa Torrigiani at Camigliano

to the evening when Gina and her lover lean perilously over the city’s famous walls,

to the Via dei Fossi with its steeply-stepped houses and the animated evening promenade in Via Fillungo. 

Gina Lollobrigida also sets her eyes on the Carli Jewellery shop window with its characteristic carved shutters, there to this day.   (The same goldsmith Giuseppe had collaborated for some scenes together with his friend the antiques dealer Bruno Vangelisti). There are memorable shots too of the passageway leading into the Piazza dell’anfiteatro

and the sweet little liberty-style shopping precinct belonging to Pierini.

After ‘La Provinciale’ other Lucca-set films were made including “Giovani mariti” (1957) by Mauro Bolognini, “Frenesia dell’estate” (1963) by Luigi Zampa, “Per le antiche scale” by Bolognini, “L’innocente” (1976) by Luchino Visconti.

Gina Lollobrigida was also one of the ladies of Viareggio’s famous carnival running this February.  Her bond with the Lucchesia remained strong and continued to her triumphant return to Viareggio and the Bersagliera Carnival in the winter of 2000 for which she obtained a record TV audience figure. La Lollo’s love for Lucca was truly genuine and it was one which was fully reciprocated by the inhabitants in the city’s tree-lined walls.

Incidentally, I’m sure that any new feature film made with Lucca as its location would no longer term the city as ‘provincial’ nor would it fail to mention it by name!

Italy is invariably reckoned to have half of the world’s cultural heritage within its borders. This would include everything from palaeochristian rock engravings to Grecian temples, Etruscan cities, Roman amphitheatres, Byzantine basilicas, mountain fortresses, renaissance palaces, palladian villas, rococò hunting lodges and neo-classical pleasances….and we haven’t even started on the ever-unfolding heritage of industrial archaeology, stile liberty mansions and rationalist thirties architecture.

That’s just the buildings record. When the majestic length of Italy’s artistic record is added there is absolutely no doubt that even a fortnight’s journey through the peninsula will reveal more marvels of humankind’s creativity than a year travelling in most other corners of the globe.

Why should Italy have this supreme cornucopia of cultural goodies. Clearly the main reason must be to do with the natural creative virtuosisism of its native people. Undoubtedly there are wonderfully creative people’s elsewhere. I recollect the astonishing Hindu temples of the south Indian Pallava kings, the extraordinary temples of the Khmers and the beautiful ceramics of Middle Eastern mosques, for instance.

Perhaps more monuments of past ages in Italy have survived unscathed. But how could this be so? Of all European countries Italy has the newest geology underlying its surface; hardly a year goes past in our part, for example, without some major disaster afflicting the landscape. It could be a large-scale landslide or an earth-tremor or a river bursting its banks for the umpteenth time. So the earth’s surface is hardly kind to the treasures which have been built upon it. Since we’ve decided to live here two entire cities (l’Aquila, Amatrice) and several borghi (villages)have been in large part levelled by mammoth earthquakes. If it’s not earthquakes then mini-tsunamis, avalanches and the collapse of entire mountains (such as occurred in the dolomites) have done their worse.

(Santa Trinità bridge Florence after it was blown up by the Germans).

And if natural forces have not wreaked enough vengeance upon even the finest of man’s endeavours then man himself has done his worst in a seemingly endless sequence of wars and guerillas. From the plundering of the imperial capital of Rome by the Huns and Goths to the sack of the same city by Teutonic forces to Napoleonic pillage to perhaps the worst conflict to date of all, the 1943-5 civil war which among its worst casualties destroyed the Mantegna frescoes of Padua’s Eremitani church and obliterated the art once decorating Pisa’s camposanto walls.

So how is it that so much still survives in the gorgeous country inhabited by the italic peoples?
It could, of course, be just a fluke but I recognize three main causes:

1. Building material.
   Parts of Italy were as heavily bombed as Germany in the last war. However, what chance do attractive half-timbered wattle-and-daub buildings have against bombs when compared with granitic stone walls and marble precincts? Italy’s historical buildings are made with far longer lasting material than that used in many other countries. What chances do those fabulous mud edifices of Yemen have against even the smallest of terrorist bombs? Moreover if a palazzo gets hit and walls fall down it’s still possible to reconstruct it using the salvaged material. A famous example of this is Florence’s Ponte San Trinita blown up by Jerry in 1944 but rebuilt ‘come e dove era’ (‘how and where it was’) reclaiming the stones thrown into the Arno by the explosion.
3. Historical and Religious devotion.
   Italians are particularly devoted to the ‘centri storici’ of their towns. For most of them those words striking terror into conservationist: re-development and renewal have no place. The town centre must remain the same from its mediaeval city palace to the local bar.True, Florence suffered the effects of these misguided words in the nineteenth century when its centre was either ‘rinnovato da squallore’ (renewed from squallor) or ‘sventrato’ (disembowelled) – depending on one’s point of view. However, I doubt if even the most philistine citizen could have tolerated the ghastly things done to the Victorian architecture of the great English industrial cities. To this day I remain shocked at the horrific transmogrifications of even the sedatest of English country towns by the hands of the town planners and urban ‘architects’. Pick your own sickening example. I do not have to go further than Peterborough or Guildford. Slough eat your heart out!
4. 
   As for all those myriads of religious buildings including churches, chapels, abbeys, cathedrals, convents and monasteries although the number of practicing Roman Catholics has greatly diminished in the last fifty years, especially since the rise of secularism, the abandonment of Catholicism as the state religion and the decline of rural population, no Italian would gladly see the demolition of their old parish church and its replacement with a concrete multi-purpose ,ecumenical centre’ a third of the size and a millionth of the interest of the former building. Worst if that church were converted into a bar, billiard hall, temple or mosque (as often happens in countries like Brexitania).That’s why even in the remotest corners of Tuscan hills and forests we can come across a chapel which, although it might be open for religious service only once a year, is still lovingly bedecked with flowers and prayers by the local populace.
6. International cooperation.
7. At least there is an international community of artistic people who appreciate the unique aesthetics of Italy. The country’s miraculously preserved cultural heritage is not just a national asset, it’s a world asset. Hence international funds go into saving Venice as they went into saving Florence after that city’s disastrous 1966 flood. Long may this cooperation continue and long may the world’s fine arts departments have their presence in a country which has given so largely their raison d’etre.
8. 
   Italy is indeed the mirror into which a world may look and say ‘these are some of the most precious objects mankind has created. May these beautiful things be offered to the supreme creator as tokens both of enduring apologies and everlasting thanks.’

Do you get the feeling that we’ll never quite get back to the informal intimacy in our social relationships such as they existed before the COVID pandemic? Or is it just a feeling I have.

It’s a year since regulations regarding social distancing and green passes have been largely done away with in our Italian part of the world. The wearing of masks is now not even compulsory in public transport (although it is often mandatory in other settings like hospitals and clinics). Yet many people do continue to wear theirs in public indoor venues such as theatres and cinemas.

More generally, however, a certain degree of social distancing remains. I don’t see unaffected public embracing and kissing in our piazzas and bars as I used to. Even shaking hands seems to have gone a little out of favour. The fact is that COVID has irremediably altered our social perception as nothing else has done since – if those around can still remember – World War Two.

Is it just me or has it become more difficult to cultivate friendships post-pandemic? And let us not forget that attitudes towards coronavirus and, in particular, towards vaccinations split our social fabric. Are we still friendly towards those persons who refused to wear masks at the height of the ghastly pandemic? Do we avoid those who refused that fourth vaccination – or even any vaccination at all?

There are life changing occurrences throughout our individual earthly existences. Some may be highly personal – loss of those closest to us or cataclysmic health problems for example. Yet with this COVID business we have all suffered those losses. For instance I still have to come across someone who has not lost a dear one to the insatiable monster of that plague.

What is worse is when to the personal losses we have endured thanks the pandemic are added the national loss of an amicable and constructive relationship between the UK and the association it once formed part of, the EU and, most awful of all the loss of a sense of peace with neighbours beyond and a menacing presage of a nine-thirties war clouds atmosphere descended upon a largely optimistic continent.

It is truly turned in many instances into a giant deserted beach littered with the flotsam and jetsam of a gargantuan storm, a place where indeed ignorant armies clash by night.

My wife Sandra’s maiden name is Cipriani. Among her ancestors is Giovanni Battista Cipriani who is considered to be among the finest Italian decorative artists. Working in the elegantly sophisticated milieu of eighteenth century English aristocratic life not only did Cipriani produce drawings engraved by Bartolozzi, he contributed to the interior decoration of palaces and country houses and painted the magnificent state carriages for Royalty and for the City’s Lord Mayor, now to be admired in the Museum of London.

Some years ago I gave a talk on this neglected but extremely fine artist to the audience of the Università della terza età at Bagni di Lucca. (See https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2017/04/06/my-wifes-illustrious-ancestor/). The following is extracted from this talk.

Giovanni Battista Cipriani was born in 1727 in Florence and died in 1785 in London United Kingdom. He received his first art lessons from Ignazio Hugford, a Florentine painter of English origins born in Pisa. (Incidentally, the surname Cipriani derives from ‘Cipria’ meaning talcum powder. It is well-known that some of the best make-up artists were also painters through their skills in enhancing the female appearance.) 

From 1750 to 1753 Cipriani was in Rome and there he met the architect Sir William Chambers and the sculptor Joseph Wilton whom he accompanied to England in August 1755. Having already painted two pictures at the Abbey of San Michele Pelago in Pistoia, Cipriani had already become well known and on his arrival in England was commissioned by Lord Tilney, Duke of Richmond and other nobles. When his friend Sir William Chambers designed the Albany in London for Lord Holland, Cipriani painted the ceiling. He also painted part of a ceiling at Buckingham Palace and a room with poetic themes at Standlynch (Trafalgar Park) in Wiltshire.  Among his masterpieces, are his decorations in Somerset House which was also built by his friend Chambers. Cipriani not only was in charge of London’s superb palace’s interior decoration but also its sculptural details. Somerset house’s apartments designed by Sir William Chambers (1750) for the imposing palace the original home of the Royal Academy owe much to the grace and brushstrokes of Cipriani.  The central panel of the library ceiling was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, but the four niches in the bays, which represent Allegory, Fable, Nature and History, are the work of Cipriani.

It was natural that Cipriani devoted himself to the decoration of the apartments of the Royal Academy of which he had been one of the founders (1768) and from which he had obtained the diploma. 

Giovanni Battista Cipriani was used extensively by publishers, for whom he did pen and ink drawings (His friend Bartolozzi engraved most of them. Drawings by him can be seen in both the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum and now, for reasons which will become clear later in a place very near us!)

Cipriani bequeathed his self-portrait in pastels to the Uffizi and another self-portrait, drawn, is kept in the cabinet of drawings and prints of the Uffizi.  Cipriani is depicted in the large painting by the German painter Johann Zoffany, together with the other founders of the Royal Academy.  A pastel by him representing Cleopatra is in the City Museum and Art Gallery, Plymouth.  A thousand other drawings, including drawings, pastels and watercolours, were in the artist’s house at the time of his death: they were all sold at auction in 1786, like his paintings. So his works were dispersed and today are found in public and private collections.

Our Christmas presents tend to be very practical ones. They consist largely of food and clothing. They are also invariably presented to us courtesy of our cats as the labels show! This year, however, I wanted to give Sandra something a little more poetical. As she is of artistic bent how about a work of by her illustrious ancestor Giovanni Battista Cipriani? I might not be able to afford a full-scale canvas but perhaps a drawing might be within my means if I could find one. 

By chance scouring the internet I came across the very item I wished to wrap up as a Christmas present. It was on an auction site and its details were as follows:

Description

Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727-1785), Lovers. Ink and wash on paper 12 x 20 cm

Bears a collection name (bottom left) inscribed Cipriani (on the reverse). 

Provenance: Collection of Prof. J. Leski (Professor of Astrology, University of Cracovia), according to a declaration from the Administration of the Museum of the Princes of Lubomirski, Lwow, 1923.

Family of Elena Parys Feldberg by descent to the present owner.

Note: with the name of the collection (bottom left), inscribed “Cipriani” and  additional inscriptions (on the reverse).

With regard to the details associated with the drawing: Prof J. Leski was, in fact a professor of astronomy, not astrology, and indeed developed the astronomy department in the University of Cracow, a city which at that time was part form the Hapsburg Empire. Lubomirski is a Polish princely family and lived in a beautiful palace in the city of Lvov which was then part of Galicia, a province in the Hapsburg Empire and is now in the Ukraine and has changed its name to Lviv. This city is a UNESCO world heritage site and I pray that it may not suffer too much in the senseless struggle now being raged in that martyred land.

Here is the Lubomirski palace which dates from the 1760’s and which most poignantly in view of what is now being suffered by that European country is where Yaroslav Stetsko proclaimed Ukraine‘s independence several days after Nazi Germany‘s invasion of the Soviet Union.

I found the Cipriani drawing charming and so I put in my bid. It was successful and the little Cipriani drawing started its long journey from the Middle East towards our Italian mountain eyrie.

But what was the last provenance of the drawing and in particular its owners, the family of Elena Parys Feldberg? I did my little bit of research and found out the following:

José Moskovits (03/27/1926-11/30/2014) was born on March 27, 1926 in Mezöcsát, Hungary. As a teenage boy, José Moskovits was sent to a Nazi forced labour battalion. His mother and four siblings perished in Auschwitz, his father in Buchenwald. Mr. Moskovits was able to flee and joined the Jewish resistance in Budapest. After the liberation by the Red Army in January 1945, he became a leader in the youth movement “Dror Habonim.” Together with other activists he organized a successful illegal transport to the British mandate of Palestine of 500 Jewish orphans whose parents had been murdered during the Holocaust.

In 1945, Mr. Moskovits met his later wife Halina (Elena) Parys Feldberg, a native of Radomsk in Poland and survivor of several concentration camps. All of her family had been murdered in Treblinka. Another illegal transport of refugees that José Moskovits organized in 1947 was intercepted by the British and Mr. Moskovits was sent to a holding camp on Cyprus. A few months later José Moskovits was able to settle in Palestine. In 1948 he fought as a volunteer in the Golani Brigade during the War of Independence. He was wounded and in 1949 he was honourably discharged. In 1953, Halina Feldberg and José Moskovits married in Asunción, Paraguay where they had emigrated. Their marriage would last over sixty years until Mrs. Moskovits’ death in April 2014.

In 1955, Mr. and Mrs. Moskovits settled in Argentina. In 1958, José Moskovits opened his law office in Buenos Aires to assist Holocaust survivors with their reparation claims against the German government. Eventually, his law office would assist thousands of survivors all over South America. He maintained contact with Simon Wiesenthal and assisted in the identification of Nazi war criminals hiding in South America, and allegedly also played a role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann by setting up safe houses for the Israeli agents. In the 1960s, Mr. Moskovits moved his law practice into larger and more modern premises at Uriburu 272 PB no. 2 in Buenos Aires where he practiced law until the office was disbanded in 2012.

From 1967 to 1976, Mr. Moskovits was the President of Sherit Hapleita, the Argentine Association of Jewish Survivors of Nazi Persecution. In that capacity he raised awareness of the Holocaust in Argentina, organized survivor reunions and commemorations, participated in international Holocaust events and conferences, and held demonstrations in support of the State of Israel. At the height of Argentina’s so-called Dirty War, from 1976 to 1984, Mr. Moskovits was forced to move to Israel from where he continued to represent his survivor clients. Starting in 1976 until his death in 2014, Mr. Moskovits remained the lifelong honorary President of Argentina’s survivor organization. José Moskovits passed away on November 30, 2014 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

So there we are. I am truly happy that I now have two authentic Cipriani within the boundaries of our household: Antonia Alexandra Cipriani and Giovanni Battista Cipriani!

Here they are!

It’s now three days since 2023 started. Is it going to be any different from 2022? As in all these things we did not expect certain things to happen in the year just past. We did not expect the most pointless of wars to be started in a European country. We did not expect the end of a less glorious Elizabethan age with the death of the only monarch most of us have known. Deaths of people that have meant a lot to so many continued right to the end of that year, Pele and Ratzinger among them.

The new year began for us in climatological gloom. Unlike last year’s start which heralded almost three months of sunlit days with hardly a drop of rain this year we have been smothered in mist and drizzle. Certainly the temperatures have been above the mean for this time of year but oh for a drop of warm Mediterranean sunshine and a bit less mud on our boar-infested forest slopes!

What delights and horrors will 2023 bring us and, in particular, us two? I only hope one thing, that the ghastly invasion of a sovereign nation by a power still enmeshed in vain glories of a tartar-like conquest will cease. Vain hope clearly …or is it?

Almost as vain I presume as the UK seeing sense and approaching closer ties with the EU after it so crazily decided to ditch the union which had helped to save it from economic collapse in the nineteen seventies. Almost fifty years have passed since that promising time. Will we ever get back to becoming a great European nation again instead of being a periferal nuisance I wonder?

In this respect, looking at the assembly halls of European national parliaments with their ample semi -circular banks of seats in which the subtlest of political persuasions are able to find voice through correct proportional representation and then observing the cramped ping-pong style chamber without proper desks or electronic voting systems in which a now highly superannuated ‘mother of parliaments’ is conducting its business in a setting which fails to admit even the faintest attempt at workable coalitions through that feudal fptp voting system I am strongly of the opinion that British parliamentary reform would be greatly accelerated by the closing down of the Palace of Westminster from further political manoeuvres and its conversion into a museum of political evolution and democracy. The MPs could then be moved to a decent purpose-built parliamentary assembly building – rather on the lines of the Scottish parliament – a place where each MP has their own guaranteed place to sit with a desk for their papers and with a continuum between left and right, encouraging collaboration between factions and with the proper representation of smaller parties finally given a place in the national assembly thanks to a long overdue system of proportional representation.

If there was a parliamentary reform act in 1832 followed by two further ones in just one century then why are we still bogged down by latter-day rotten boroughs?

Meanwhile the steamy mists of our valley pour over the brown slopes of the hills. Deep in the undergrowth wildlife is surviving what for them is a pleasingly mild start to January. Perhaps some quadrupeds may be hibernating while others are invading parts of our own land digging up desperately mauled lawns in search of tasty tubers and bulbs.

In the meantime we in our Appennine cot dream eagerly of rays of warm sunshine and the first budding crocuses, those cheerful harbingers of the delights mother nature has in store for us in a world where hope and promise are ever more difficult to discern.