Culturissima Blogissima

Knowing French makes you more intelligent (allegedly)!

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:14:00 +0000

Irregular verbs, unlikely agreements between words, arbitrary genders - every grammarian says the same thing: French is a difficult language to master. But what if this very complexity accounts for the success of French-speaking mathematicians?

French is a "dreadfully difficult and complicated language, full of knots", so says the writer Claude Duneton in his column in Figaro Littéraire. Look at all "its irregular verbs, its participles that don't agree, its out-of-control adjectives, its singular plurals and its old-fashioned tenses" - not to mention its totally arbitrary genders. Why is "table" feminine and "desk" masculine, and why is it la rose but le lily?

Even grammarians complain about how difficult French is. Claude Duneton, who takes delight in opposing this widely held view, puts forward what he calls a "perfectly gratuitous hypothesis": "What if this very subtlety and these niceties were one of the secret strengths of French? What if the French language encouraged the development of a mathematical way of thinking?" That would help to explain a great mystery: that "French mathematicians and mathematicians who speak French are at the head of world research".

This article, translated by Culturissima's Dr David Winter, first appeared in the literature section of the French daily newspaper, Le Figaro.

Harraga and Hittistes III

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 05:04:00 +0000

The coast of Annaba in Algeria, from where
harraga try to reach France or Spain.

AnAnd even worse (see Harraga and Hittistes II).

Today's El Watan (an Algerian newspaper published in French) reports:

Des harraga âgés de 10 ans en Espagne

Several harraga (African immigrants who try to smuggle themselves into Europe by boat) were intercepted earlier this week by the Spanish authorities as they tried to flee across the Mediterranean on "un petit bateau pneumatique" - that is, a small rubber dinghy. This time, it was neither a woman nor a grandfather who was fleeing to the West for a "better life"... but five boys aged 10 and one aged 16.

The children were found on board alone, with no adults accompanying them

"There are children starving in Africa. Eat your peas"

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 10:11:00 +0000

A very quick post to an interesting blog on Africa that has just been published in the Harvard Business Review. Jonathan Berman's article challenges the stereotypes that so many of us have about the continent and makes refreshing reading for Culturissima, as so much of our work and so many of our clients are based in countries such as Libya, Algeria and Tunisia.

More to follow!

Two very useful English words that don't exist in French...

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:08:00 +0000

Delphine Autret, a Meribel-based translator, has emailed Culturissima the following humorous take on why English language is littered with so many French words... we particularly enjoyed the last paragraph.

It shouldn't be forgotten, though, that there are a fair few English phrases in contemporary French. Not so long ago, Libération's front page showed a life-size (okay, j'exagère) photo of Nicolas Sarkozy under the title "Président Bling-Bling", and it's impossible to read an article on London in the French press without stumbling across the phrase "so British" (invariably written as "so british").

And, most important of all perhaps, "happy hour" in French is just that - though it sounds much more continental as "'appy 'our", bien sûr.

With thanks to the TGV magazine and the author of the article, David Lowe.

A modern-day Odysseus?

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 15:15:00 +0000

Crunching tyres, parched rock, dusty shingle, nothing except a bland horizon for countless miles.

I'm at the head of a convoy of half a dozen four-by-four vehicules heading south into the furthest reaches of the Sahara, far beyond the Tuareg outpost of Tamanrasset and south, always south, towards Niger and beyond. Back and forth, back and forth, I'm slowly being rocked to sleep by the mesmerising heat, my head lolling, when Beni does something stupid.

He turns off the engine.

Then he winds up the window. All the windows.

"Beni, are you mad? It’s boiling in here! We're going to suffocate".

Then, for the first time in six hours of traversing the desert, Beni punches the pause button on his Khaled tape. And for the first time in six years of knowing him, Beni is afraid.

Out of the emptiness there stumbles towards us, shoeless, hatless, everythingless, a man of twenty, maybe twenty-five, with the roundest, deepest, most beautiful - and most desperate - eyes I have ever seen. We haven’t glimpsed anyone or anything, no life, no movement, no nothing - since we abandoned the road over a day and a half ago. And now there's a man standing in front of our jeep.

I rub my eyes. The man falls over.

The man levers himself up off the sand, stumbles towards the jeep and leans his head against the window. He pulls his neck back an inch or two. There's a little thud, a little thud, a little thud as he taps the window with his forehead.

A blabber of voices in the car - Arabic, Tuareg, French, Italian. Fierce, silent gesturing. No one knows what to do.

The man whispers something. He whispers something in the clearest, cut-glass English - the television announcer's English of my youth:

"Terribly sorry, but would you have a drop or two of water to spare?"

The man - we never asked his name - was Nigerian. He had already walked half-way across his homeland, then over the entirety of Niger and into Algeria. His goal? Algiers, then a boat to France and a new life, quite possibly in London. But he had hurt his foot - we dressed the wound - and his friend had left him two days earlier.

"He just left you? How could he just leave you?"

"What else was he supposed to do? I am able only to hobble".

"Is he going to come back to get you?"

"We made a promise, when we left Abuja, that we would only ever go in one direction. North".

We gave him enough food to kill a hungry man and enough water to kill a thirsty man.

And then we left him.

First, though, we put him under the shade of a mean bush. "Tell him," Beni entreated me: "Tell him, if you move in the next three hours, before the sun sets, you will die. Tell him to keep the ridge to his left, always to his left and he will get to Tam. And tell him this, please, tell him: may Allah be with you".

And then we got back into our jeeps and drove deeper into the desert.

Beni asks me why I'm so so sad. "You think he's a modern-day Odysseus wandering over land and sea, don't you? But if he gets to London he'll just be one more economic migrant - or, worse still - just another bloody illegal immigrant. Remember, it was the same for me when I was living there, I know what you English are like".

Fear of the Outsider

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 14:08:00 +0000

Fear of the Outsider: Part One

One of the most compelling themes of New England literature – and a recurrent motif of the region’s films, too – is “outsider-phobia”.

Fear of the outsider or stranger, one might reasonably argue, is part of the literary landscape the world over (in Europe, of course, one immediately thinks of Meursault in Camus’ L’Etranger).

Nowhere, however, is suspicion – even hatred – of the foreign object more prevalent than in the literary tradition of New England.

Most of us will be familiar with Arthur Millar’s Crucible, that vivid dramatisation of the Salem witch-hunts of 1692, in which it is a thrice-fold outsider – a woman, a slave, a West Indian (Tituba) - who is held responsible for introducing the dark art of witch-craft into the god-fearing community of New Englanders.

For many people of a certain generation, a rather less elevated example might spring more readily to mind: Jaws. The mythical great shark - just like Salem’s sorceresses – is that most frightening of things, the uninvited guest, the destructive interloper, the trespasser and transgressor apparently bent on destroying a society's orderly existence.

My argument is a simple one: that the theme of the hostile outsider in the literature of New England is a reflection of a historical reality: the early settlers from the Old World were indeed threatened on all sides.

At the same time, the motif of the menacing intruder also reflects a psychicreality: fear of the outsider, alarm at the very otherness of the other, has haunted the American unconscious since… well, since the nation had an unconscious.

One might even be tempted to argue that anxiety about the intruder is so deeply rooted in the American psyche that it shapes the way the modern United States views much of the world…

This is an adapted version of a lecture given by Dr David Winter on behalf of the Association for Cultural Exchange in New England.

It’s magnifical!

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 07:57:00 +0000

Further proof, if proof were needed, of two self-evident facts from the world of translation, namely:

i. translators are a waste of money because anyone can translate;

ii. every French man or woman that the Good Lord has so graciously bequeathed to us speaks perfect English.

Or maybe not...

A couple of weeks ago the French President, Mr Netherlands, decided to show off his English skills in a congratulatory letter to the recently re-elected President Obama.

The sentiment was laudable and the French impeccable.

Then the moment came for Monsieur Hollande to try his hand at the “language of Shakespeare” – nothing too daring, just a single – handwritten - word, as the President signed off with:

Friendly, François Hollande.

Wasn’t there anyone in the entire République Française who could have suggested that perhaps the best way to translate the conventional French “amicalement” might have been “Kind regards”?

We – even professional translators – all make mistakes from time to time, and Hollande is in the finest company. Who could forget President Sarkozy, apologising for the poor weather when Hilary Clinton was visiting Paris, offering a heartfelt: “Sorry for the time”?

Or, impressed by the splendours of London, Sarkozy whispering to the Queen: “It’s magnifical!”.

With thanks to http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/presidentielle-us-2012/20121107.OBS8426/le-mot-en-trop-de-francois-hollande-a-barack-obama.html

Walid the blasphemer

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 22:30:00 +0000

Walid the blasphemer embarrasses Palestine

For months he was one of the most detested internet users in the Muslim world. His Facebook page, which went by the name Ana Allah ("I am God"), was full of blasphemous sallies and barefaced arguments in favour of apostasy. But when the mystery poster was arrested at the start of the month, to general surprise he turned out to be a shy young barber from Qalqilya, a small town in the West Bank.

Walid Husayin, 26, who is now being held in a cell belonging to the Palestinian Moukhabarat (secret service), led a double life hidden from his entire family. During the day Walid worked in his father's barber shop, to all intents and purposes a committed Muslim. His friends knew him as an unassuming young man, disappointed not to have found a job in computing, which he had studied at university. But whenever he had the opportunity, Walid would escape to an internet café situated well outside the town centre to write his incendiary posts. In one posting he claimed that Mohammed was a backward Bedouin; in another he declared that he was God and ordered his devotees to drink whisky and smoke hashish.

As well as having a Facebook page, Walid’s blog, which appeared under the pseudonym Walid Al Husseini, has received almost 100,000 visitors since going live last November. To anyone accusing him of playing into the hands of the Christian West, the young barber replied that "all religions are a mass of myth and nonsense that fly in the face of reason" and that "they compete to see which is the most stupid".

The anger of the inhabitants of Qalqilya

This outburst of free-thinking in a medium as uncontrollable as the internet ended up worrying the Sunni religious authorities both in Saudi Arabia and at the University of Al Azhar in Egypt. An investigation was mounted. In the end it was the owner of the internet café in Qalqilya who alerted police, intrigued by his unusual customer who would spend up to seven hours without a break in front of his screen.

The news of Walid's arrest was like a bomb going off in Qalqilya, a conservative town that elected a mayor from Hamas in 2005. Since the announcement the population has been fuming against the apostate blogger whom it describes at best as "mentally ill" and at worst as an "infidel". The strength of this emotion is one of the reasons cited by the Palestine authorities to justify Walid’s imprisonment. "If he left prison today, I couldn’t guarantee his safety", claims the chief of police. The other reason is an article in Jordan's penal code, still in force in the West Bank, which punishes any religious slur with between one and three years in prison.

Will the Palestinian Authority go as far as a trial that would run the risk of making the "barber of Qalqilya" a martyr in the cause of freedom of expression? Nothing could be less certain. Local rumour suggests that if Walid disowns his writings he could be set free. Another option would be to send him abroad to give tempers a chance to die down. In God's hands, anything is possible.

The above article first appeared in Le Monde, November 30, 2010, and was translated from the French by Culturissima's managing director, Dr David Winter, on behalf of a British media company. The original text can be found here.

Why head for the Med when you can spend August in Paris?

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 19:10:00 +0000

Paris' last remaining vineyard, Montmartre

Contrary to popular belief, not all of Paris closes down during the month of August. What does happen, though, is that as soon as July nears its end thousands and thousands of Parisians flee the city for their second homes in the country or on the coast. And, let’s be honest, what could be more pleasurable than Paris without Parisians?

The city's residents, both young and old, are noticeably friendlier, more “cool” and “zen” as the French themselves put it, during August. Sure, some of the cafés and restaurants (and seemingly all of the boulangeries) pull down their shutters for the month, but just as many stay open. And though the main tourist sites – the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré Coeur, Paris Plage – still teem with foreign visitors, the morning streets are deserted.

Le Lapin Agile, Montmartre

Even here in the heart of Montmartre it’s possible to walk up rue Lepic without having to sharpen one’s elbows in readiness for the fray. Lepic is one of Paris’ most characterful streets: cobbled and winding, it starts its journey at Place Blanche (just next to the Moulin Rouge) before clinging to the side of Paris’ highest hill almost as far as the Sacré Coeur. Lepic is closed to traffic on Sundays – the ideal time to test one’s mountain-biking skills – but it is the annual procession in honour of the Free Republic of Montmartre that reveals the most about the inhabitants of the hill.

View of the Sacré Coeur from
the Culturissma Paris office

Every October the self-proclaimed president of the Free Republic of Montmartre comes to the hill to address his fellow citizens, many of whom - like the President himself - are slightly sozzled after a few bottles of red wine. Typically, the chef d’état is escorted up rue Lepic by a bevy of scantily clad (male) trumpeters on motorised skate-boards (I kid you not). The president himself, who arrives at the bottom of the hill in an open-top limousine, then anoints the fawning crowds from his lofty perch atop a camel. And who says the French don’t have a sense of humour?

Van Gogh lived on Lepic with his brother Théo, and Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec had studios nearby. The windmill known as the Moulin de la Galette – immortalised by both Renoir and Van Gogh – can still be seen and, if one looks closely, it’s still possible to make out the remains of one of France’s earliest observatories.

One Christmas Eve over a hundred years ago a young Parisian by the name of Louis had a bet with his friends that would change the French landscape for ever: he wagered that he could climb all the way to the top of Lepic in a new vehicle he had designed, the first ever driven by a gearbox. Louis won his bet – and his surname was soon to become famous throughout France and cross the world: Renault.

The view from Culturissima's office this evening

What did the Romans ever do for Tunisia? Bulla Regia, that's what!

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:10:00 +0000

Detail of an underground mosaic, Bulla Regia

If you’ve just climbed to the top of the Roman amphitheatre at El Djem or are fresh from wandering across the seemingly endless ruins of Dougga, then your first feeling on arriving at Bulla Regia is likely to be one of disappointment.

It’s true, the theatre at Bulla Regia is impressive and the Memmian baths are immense. But, but... well, the Roman remains elsewhere in Tunisia are so outstanding that dusty old Bulla doesn’t quite seem to match up. So, why not push on back to the coast for a quick dip in the Med?

Because, if you do, then you’ll miss one of the most unique ancient sites anywhere in the world. If I had to make a choice between visiting, say, the Colosseum in Rome, England’s Stonehenge or Tunisia’s Bulla Regia, then it’s Bulla that’s going to win hands down every time.

Because, if you take a closer look, you’ll discover a site that is, quite simply, mesmerising.

And, if that chap with the bucket of water and a dirty sponge proposes to show you the way, even though you shouldn’t really be encouraging him, take him up on his offer.

Which way should you go?

Any way, just so long as it’s down, down, down!

Detail of an underground mosaic, Bulla Regia

For the delights of Bulla Regia are hidden from view, because this is a city where many of the houses were constructed underground. But these aren’t caves hewn out of the rock - unlike at nearby Matmata, which until recently housed several Troglodyte dwellers. No, these are "proper" Roman villas.

Imagine the type of upper-class Roman house that you might have seen in Rome or at Pompeii, then simply transfer it lock, stock and barrel underground - complete with columns and kitchens (you can still see the soot deposits from the ovens), fountains and pools, bedrooms and dining rooms. And, perhaps most amazing of all, carpets of mosaics - some of the Roman world’s most beautiful, most captivating chefs d'oeuvre.

Detail of an underground mosaic, Bulla Regia

And this is where the man with the bucket comes in handy (although, as I’ve already said, he shouldn’t really be doing this). Bulla Regia is dusty, and dust greys out the colours of the underground mosaics and erases their outlines.

So what does our man do for a dinar or two? He dampens the mosaics with his bucket and sponge - and, hey presto, as you can see from the photos, the mosaics then shine and glisten as though they were laid yesterday rather than 2,000 or so years ago.

Postscript

For reasons that we have never understood, Bulla Regia is not inscribed on UNESCO’s world heritage list; for Tunisian sites that have been awarded this status, see the UNESCO website.

A covenant with death

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 22:08:00 +0000

For the greater part of the past decade Culturissima has been commissioned to write and research in the fields of the fine arts and architecture, music and the theatre, as well as archaeology and the natural world.

More recently, however, I've been asked to broaden my portfolio, to embrace the history of the First and Second World Wars, with one of my most recent pieces appearing by the title of The Battle of The Atlantic and British Bunkers! The First World War still resonates deeply in the British psyche and I've just finished writing a description on the Somme for a high-brow British tour company, and here's a taste:

The detonating of the mine at Hawthorn Ridge on the morning of July 1, 1916 marked the advent of the darkest day in the history of the British Army, a covenant with death that saw 58,000 British troops killed or wounded before nightfall. By the time the Somme offensive came to an end four and half months later, the lives of more than a million men - British, Commonwealth, French and German - were shattered. As well as treading lightly over the physical relics of the Somme battlefields - the trenches, shell holes and mine craters - our course will echo to the music of the Great War, from the 1914 recruiting refrain "Oh, we don't want to lose you but we think you ought to go" to Ivor Novello's Keep the Home-Fires Burning:

They were summoned from the hill-side;
They were called in from the glen,
And the Country found them ready
At the stirring call for men.

Britain’s most daring engineer

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:25:00 +0000

Culturissima has just finished a short - very short! - biography of Britain’s most daring engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859), for a Cambridge-based travel specialist. Here is a sneak preview of the highlights of the long-weekend tour that we have put together:

Brunel is often thought of as a Bristol man, but many overlook the fact that he spent virtually his entire life in London. We will admire Brunel’s achievements in these two great cities, travelling from east to west on the great man’s own railway.

Brunel’s first project, aged just 19, was the Thames Tunnel, where he worked with his father on what was first dubbed “the Eighth Wonder of the World” and later – with no little wit and equal cruelty – “the Great Bore”. We will enjoy a privileged visit to the Brunel Museum, lodged in the tunnel’s engine-house, and descend into the underground entrance hall, a grand amphitheatre over half the size of the dome of St Paul’s. A few hundred yards along the Thames lies the launch site of the Great Eastern, where Brunel’s meteoric career came to an end at the untimely age of 53.

In 1828 Brunel was dragged, more dead than alive, from the chamber of the Thames Tunnel and sent to Clifton to convalesce. Here he won a competition to design a bridge across the Avon Gorge which, together with Bristol docks and Temple Meads railway station, still bears unmistakable witness to Brunel’s creativity and ingenuity. We will also climb aboard the Great Britain, Brunel’s famous iron ship, and visit the Brunel Institute to view the collection of papers and memorabilia bequeathed by Brunel’s grand-daughter.

Dog-faced creatures and creatures without heads

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:06:00 +0000

An adapted version of this article, written by Culturissima's managing director, Dr David Winter, was first published in History Today Magazine.

He bites

Few countries have had such a profound impact on anyone at Culturissima as Libya. Tripoli, where I'm sipping a mint tea in a semi-derelict café just off Green Square, isn't a particular favourite - too many cars, too many bureaucrats, too many nondescript blocks of offices - but the rest of the country... it's just fabulous.

Swimming in the Sahara

The most striking aspect of Libya, besides its vastness (it takes nearly a whole day, for example, simply to drive along the Mediterranean across the Gulf of Sirte), is the friendliness and openness of the people, their kindness and their readiness to smile and engage in conversation. “Dog-faced” they’re not.

I find myself here for three reasons: first, since I was a child I have loved North Africa, and Algeria in particular. Trouble is, it’s a bit too dangerous to go to Algeria at the moment (at the time this article was written, May 2008) , so Libya – in spite of its reputation! – seemed a good second choice. I guess that’s another one of the reasons why I’m here: no one has a good word to say about the country… so why not come and see for myself?

And finally, as a lapsed Classicist who spent nearly half of his life studying Greek and Latin, how could I refuse the offer to accompany a handful of historians to the sites of ancient Libya, in particular those magna opera, Sabratha and Leptis Magna?

He doesn't bite

Ask yourself this: can you think of any country that has been as insidiously daemonised as Libya over the past few decades? In the modern era, Libyans have learnt that, courtesy of Mr Bush's government, they inhabit a land “beyond the Axis of Evil”. Going further back into the annals, most histories of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya begin with Herodotus’ 5th century BC account of a land of “dog-faced creatures and creatures without heads, their eyes in their breasts”.

"Get your head around this", suggests Beni, my London-educated, Tripoli-born colleague: "You wake up one morning, just like any other morning, you're having a fag, you turn the radio on - and wham! - you're informed by the BBC that you're part of the 'axis of evil'. That's worse than learning the tube is on strike as you're munching your bowl of Frosties, I can tell you."

Beni, like his parents and his parents’ parents, has seen it all before, though. From 1922 onwards Mussolini, driven partly by a nostalgia for Italy’s Classical inheritance and partly by a need to house the peninsula's expanding population, embarked on a “civilising” mission to make Libya Italy’s “fourth shore”. Anything ancient Rome could do, Mussolini could do better: a dozen years later a new country with a new name had emerged under Italian rule - “Libya”, an amalgam of the traditionally disparate regions of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan.

Giacometti in the Sahara?

Even though a late entrant in the North African colonial race, Italy managed to leave its mark on Beni's homeland. As the self-styled "protector of Islam", Mussolini let Italian aircraft loose on Libyan horsemen; when that failed, Il Duce savaged the territory with deliberate starvation, sowed the country with concentration camps, deported families en masse, and erected a barbed-wire fence stretching 200 miles along the border with Egypt.

"So you see", suggested Beni, "We Libyans look on your - the West's - mistrust of all things Libyan with a little bit of irony. American and UN sanctions? No worse than the Italians starving my brothers to death. Trying to murder Colonel Gaddafi? The hero of our revolution - Omar al Mukhtar - he was hanged in public in front of 20,000 of loyal followers".

"Does President Reagan really think that we Libyan savages are quivering in our sandals when he rants ‘You can run but you can't hide'? Your friends the Americans can bomb the buggery out of Benghazi if they want - when the Italians were here, they killed one in four of my brothers and sisters".

And he's right, is Beni. When Libya finally came of age as an independent nation in 1951, it was a country on its knees, with an infant mortality rate of 40 per cent and an illiteracy rate of over 90 per cent. The very act of autonomy was riddled with Western caprice: an independent Libya was a way of ensuring that British and American troops could be installed on Libyan territory - although for most Libyans this was preferable to one of the alternatives proposed: that France be granted stewardship of Fezzan and Britain be awarded Cyrenaica. Most astonishingly in view of her history of barbarity, Italy was initially granted Tripolitania.

Anyway, I’m on my way to the south, to the Akakus, where I can forget about Europe's colonial past. The Akakus is a Saharan landscape of soaring dunes and colossal rock formations – rough arches, steep gorges and buttressed mountains. This remote terrain, ineffably beautiful, is studded with thousands of lonely rock carvings - alligators and elephants, giraffes and buffalos (see photos) - that date back as far as 12,000 B.C. Arid and ancient, the Akakus was once the dwelling place of Herodotus’ Garamantes, whilst today the nomadic, indigo-veiled Tuareg still wander across the vast expanses close to the frontier with Algeria and Niger.

So you see, these mythical concoctions mask a tragic reality: Libya is a land whose ineffable beauty - from Leptis to the Sahara - has no need of mythologising.

Turkey eats dirt

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:04:00 +0000

Café Babel, "the first multilingual European current affairs magazine", has just published a translation by Culturissima's David Winter (written by Tania Gisselbrecht) that draws worldwide attention to the rigging of football matches in Turkey.

What on earth has stung Turkey into action? For more than a month now a new broom has been sweeping clean not just the streets of Istanbul but also the country's football and armed forces. But who’s wielding the broom? And what "rubbish" are they trying to get rid of? Worthwhile questions to ask because it’s clear the idea did not come from "Mr Clean".

On July 3 the Turkish judicial authorities disclosed that they are investigating a series of rigged matches involving Turkey's most prestigious football clubs. Official phone tapping has led to search warrants being issued and a succession of highly publicised arrests, police interrogations and detentions. The tally to date, based on 19 matches that have allegedly been rigged, stands at almost 80 arrests with 31 people held in custody.

With football being a veritable religion for Turks, it is not hard to imagine the shock waves that the announcement has set off. There are even rumours that the government stalled before deciding to reveal the details of a scandal that could have had an influence on June's general election. Although the league winners Fenerbahçe - whose chairman, Aziz Yıldırım, was arrested on the very day that the investigation officially opened - seem to be at the heart of the storm, the zealous authorities have not spared other big clubs, including Beşiktaş, fifth in the league and winners of the national cup competition, and Trabzonspor.

Fenerbahçe have not been slow in seeing the hand of the "police state" behind the highly unusual investigations – an overtly political accusation levelled by the club's chairman that has generated contradictory and often far-fetched rumours amongst supporters: it is a campaign to replace the chairman with an ally of the government or the real target of the affair is prime minister Erdoğan, a well-known supporter of the Canaries and a member of the club's governing body. It is worth remarking, though, that Erdoğan has welcomed the current "purification process".

So, is it political manoeuvring or a genuine attempt to clean up a sport that only last year was shaken by a murky illegal betting affair? The baffling wait-and-see approach adopted by the Turkish Football Association does not bode well. Apart from deciding to postpone the start of the league season by a month, the association has not taken any action against any of the individuals who have been charged or any of the clubs cited in the dossier. Indeed, several websites specialising in sports news are suggesting that, if it ends up being proven that the association has deliberately dragged its feet, the national team could be excluded from Euro 2012.

In a communiqué released on July 12, UEFA did not rule out the possibility of excluding Turkish clubs from European competition if the Turkish authorities end up by confirming the facts. There was a new twist on August 24 when, to everyone's surprise, the Turkish Football Association announced that it was excluding Fenerbahçe from the Champions League. This decision, which amounted to a tacit acknowledgement of the club's guilt, left many observers feeling sceptical: how could the association, which up till then had used the alleged lack of evidence as an excuse to justify their inaction, suddenly take such a radical measure?

Everything points to the hand of UEFA. After the chief legal counsel for integrity and regulatory affairs made a surprise visit to Istanbul, UEFA laid down a clear ultimatum: if Fenerbahçe did not withdraw from the European competition or if the Turkish Football Association failed to exclude them, then UEFA would mount a disciplinary investigation and sanction the association.

The question to be asked now is: will the other clubs that have been tainted by the scandal also pay the price for UEFA's zero tolerance policy regarding match rigging? Given the scale of the investigations, which are based on a recent law that targets organised crime, supporters are in no doubt that convictions will follow. It remains to be seen whether legal sanctions will only be taken against the individuals charged or whether they will include the clubs as well. If it is only the former, as many football lovers fear, then the show of force will miss its stated object: to wipe out the corruption that is endemic in Turkish football. There again, sweeping things under the carpet always has been an art.

Libya after Gaddafi: Europe’s Iraq?

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:30:00 +0000

Café Babel, "the first multilingual European current affairs magazine", has just published a translation by Culturissima's David Winter that draws timely comparisons between post-Gaddafi Libya and post-Saddam Iraq.

Libya after Gaddafi: Europe’s Iraq?

The post-Gaddafi era is taking shape around the National Transition Council, which is currently in control of Tripoli. Uncertainty about the future is already taking hold though, with fears that Libya could become a new Iraq. This time it is up to Europe to avoid repeating the post-Saddam disaster.

The Iraq experience has left its mark. The triumphalism which was the order of the day amongst US hawks immediately after Saddam Hussein’s fall has this time round been replaced with caution: there is no question of repeating the mistakes of Mesopotamia in the southern Mediterranean. Barack Obama, anxious to avoid being seen as the "worthy" successor to Bush Junior, has hammered home a clear reminder in all his speeches that "Libya is no Iraq".

It is difficult to disagree. Whereas eight years ago the Americans intervened (almost) unilaterally in their rush towards Baghdad, their intervention in Libya has been much more subtle. This time an international coalition - originally European and American and later with the gradual and grudging support of Arab countries, Russia and China - has come into play under the mandate of the United Nations... the same UN that in 2003 could only watch US military action helplessly from the side-lines.

Exit the crudely assembled case about weapons of mass destruction. Exit the arrogance and ignorance of an international community largely opposed to the intervention. Eight years later, Obama has abandoned the Bush way of doing things and the United States has kept a fairly low profile, accounting for "only" 27% of all NATO’s air-strikes. Instead, "old Europe" has more or less taken over.

Their war, their victory

In particular, Great Britain, France and Italy have assumed the burden of intervening and assisting the rebels in order to protect the civilian population in accordance with resolution 1973 of the UN security council. Their operations have been on a larger scale than expected, particularly as concerns aerial intervention and the supply of weapons, to the extent that they have at times been in danger of going beyond the UN framework. Nevertheless, the overall idea has not changed: NATO should not be on the front line.

The determining factor in the fall of Gaddafi was the successive rebellions of tribes

In an article for Slate.fr, Fred Kaplan, former war correspondent of the Boston Globe, writes of the Libyan rebels: "It was their war, and it will soon be their victory, not ours". While the West has supplied the drones, missiles and automatic weapons and has almost certainly trained part of the rebel forces, the determining factor in the fall of the Gaddafi regime was actually the successive rebellions of various tribes. According to Patrick Haimzadeh, a former French diplomat stationed in Libya, it was the actions of the Zintan clan (named after the eponymous town) that brought about Gaddafi’s overthrow.

Libya: a failure in European political policy?

However, France, Great Britain and Italy, having served as a particularly substantial auxiliary force, have run the risk of seeing Tripoli take on the appearance of a second Baghdad. This is not just because Libya is an economic wasteland, but also because the national transition council is an unknown political force. The European countries are going to be obliged to take on the leadership that they have assumed for seven months and avoid making the same mistakes as the United States in Iraq. In particular, they will have to take into account the importance of Libyan tribalism and local realities.

Yet is Europe really ready to meet the political challenge of Libya? Nothing could be less certain. While it is true that London, Paris and Rome have been the most active participants in Libya, the old continent remains divided. Half of NATO's members, including countries such as Poland and Germany, refused to take part in the intervention. "The sad reality", AFP quotes one former European diplomat as saying, "is that the idea of Europe as a political and strategic concept has been entirely missing". Although bitter, this is not necessarily a final assessment. The European union clearly has the chance to bring hoped-for multilateral success that will be based, we can hope, on the interests of the Libyan people rather than multi-national oil companies, as was too often the case in the Iraqi desert. The stakes are high – both for Libya and, beyond her shores, for Europe.

Gabon's growing its own timber

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:50:00 +0000

A report last year estimated that foreign workers held 1,893 of the 8,590 posts in the Gabonese oil industry, with nationals occupying just 17 percent of available executive positions. If Gabon wants to secure its future as one of Africa's leading oil producing nations, then it needs to start “growing its own timber” before it is too late.

More than a generation after oil was first discovered in Gabon in the early 1970s, one issue unites the industry's major players more than any other: the raw materials are just not up to scratch.

But it is not Gabon’s vast supplies of black gold that have been found wanting. Rather, it is a lack of local expertise that is causing concern as the Gabonese government faces up to the fact that there is a national skills shortage at all levels of the oil industry.

In October 2010 President Ali Bongo, responding to pressure from vocal unions such as the ONEP, announced plans to impose a 10 percent cap on foreign oil sector workers and to prioritise local job-seekers over their foreign counterparts.

But for a more sustainable future Gabon has to find a way to grow its own timber. And it is here that foreign oil companies are playing a significant role, their plans to increase the number of skilled local workers based on a simple formula: training, training and more training - not just for new recruits to the sector but also, crucially, for senior management.

Shell Gabon, which first started operating in the country in the 1960s, has been promoting overseas bursaries for Gabonese students for several decades. And in 2010 ENI Gabon, part of the Italian ENI group, launched its "Citizen Programme", in which Masuku University will become a training hub for final-year geology graduates. There is more good news, too: experienced executives from the state oil ministry will soon be able to pursue their professional development at the renowned ENI Corporate University in Milan.

Total has resolved to take training a stage further. Earlier this year the French multinational signed a public-private agreement that will lead to the construction of a National Institute of Petrol and Gas at Port-Gentil. With courses in everything from oil exploration to the commercialisation of hydrocarbons, hopes are high that the institute will generate Gabon's very own oil elite, local men and women who will pass their technical and managerial skills on to the next generation of young Gabonese.

In Paris? Forget haute cuisine - head for le Petit Bleu!

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:32:00 +0000

If you're American and you're on holiday in Paris, you're going to want to sample some of the capital's finest French cuisine, right? Preferably washed down with a bottle of Bordeaux? Maybe in one of those literary cafés that line the Boulevard St German or somewhere along "the most beautiful avenue in the world", the Champs Elysées?

Montmartre, Paris

On the other hand, you could have the best meal you've ever had - and perhaps the cheapest, too - at the tiniest Tunisian restaurant in town, where you're welcomed as a long-lost stranger - and asked to nip across the road to fetch a couple of baguettes before you sit down.

Le Petit Bleu is the kind of place where a first-time tourist wouldn't dream of eating (it's not on the main drag), where a more seasoned visitor would like to eat (but it's a little intimidating), and where the old timer keeps coming back time and again.

The Cruise of the Vanadis

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:17:00 +0000

From the snowy mountains of Massachusetts to the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, Culturissma has always been fascinated by the life and times of the Amercian authoress Edith Wharton.

For many years Culturissima organised cultural tours to the Berkshire Hills, not so very far from Boston, that included visits not only to Wharton's former home, The Mount, but also to Melville's Arrowhead and Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables.

Wharton, America's first woman of letters and a Pulitzer Prize winner to boot, was also an adventurer. In the following abridged extract from The Cruise of the Vanadis, which details Wharton's travels across the Mediterranean, we read about her impressions of Algeria, a country we frequently visit on behalf of www.expertalgeria.com.

On the 17th of February after two weeks of icy fog in Paris, we left Marseilles for Algiers, in the steamer Ville de Madrid. The Gulf of Lions was in its usual disturbed condition, and it was after a very rough passage that we reached Algiers on the following night. The steam-yacht Vanadis, which we had chartered in England for our Mediterranean cruise, lay awaiting us in the harbour, and the gig came alongside the steamer as soon as we anchored.

We had to row ashore first, to pass through the Custom House, in common with all the other passengers; and on setting foot in the sea of mud which covered the landing-place, we were surrounded by the first Arabs we had ever seen - startlingly picturesque in the flashes of lanternlight, with their white burnouses and long white cloaks. A few minutes later we were again in the gig, being rapidly rowed across the wide harbour, under a sky glittering with stars, and our first view of Algiers, stretching its illuminated curve high above the dark waters of the bay, was extremely fine. We were soon alongside the yacht, and presently found ourselves peacefully seated at supper in the brightly lighted saloon, which had been filled with roses and violets in honour of our coming.

Never was town more nobly placed. Backed by the green slopes of the Sahel, the tiers of white houses follow the long curve of the bay, above which they are raised by the high arches of the terrace - like Boulevard de la République, and over the denser roofs of the city lie the scattered villas of Mustapha Supérieur, their horse-shoe windows glancing seaward through groves of orange and palm, their white walls tapestried with crimson bougainvillea. The harbour, crowded with shipping, is bounded on one side by a mole of modern construction, on the other by the jetty which 30,000 Christian captives toiled to build less than 400 years ago. But the reality of Christian slavery in Africa is brought much closer to us by Goethe's description of Prince Palagonia whom he saw, hardly more than 100 years ago, clad in black small-clothes, with silk stockings and silver buckles, begging in the streets of Palermo for money to ransom the Christian captives of Algeria. Even in 1816, 3,000 still remained to be released by Lord Exmouth when he destroyed the fleet of the Algerine pirates.

It seems incredible that such things should have been within the memory of living man, when one walks today through the street of the French quarter, crowded with carriages and tourists, and lined with shops as inviting as those of Nice.

To see the Arab side of Algiers one must go to the market or the mosques, or better still, climb the steep lanes which lead upward from the Parisian arcades of the Rue Bab-Azoun. In these narrow streets, we saw veiled women hurrying along with the peculiar shuffling gait due to those loose slippers of the East, their painted eyes shining through the thin white yashmak; then there were dark doorways in which old Arabs sat squatting over their tailoring or shoe-making; and groups of stalking Bedouins in ragged garments which had once been white, and negroes and Jews and half-clothed children, and all the other fantastic figures which go to make up the pageantry of an eastern street scene. We hired a little phaeton one day, and drove out to Mustapha Supérieur, catching charming glimpses of walled gardens and Mauresque villas, and meeting omnibuses crowded with wild-looking figures, and driven at a headlong pace down the muddy suburban roads.

Mustapha, though quite as pretty as any of the suburbs near Cannes or Nice, lacks the neatness and garden-like look which we associate with the Riviera; but perhaps the general air of slovenliness is atoned for, to many eyes, by the picturesque populace filling the untidy streets. And nowhere in Europe could one see anything so Oriental as the little arcaded café at Mustapha, where white-robed Algerines sit crouched on the terrace, drinking their coffee under a group of plane-trees. We passed the summer palace of the Governor, getting a glimpse of well-kept gardens through the gateways, and then drove through the Vallon de la Femme Sauvage... This wild little ravine led us to the quarter called Mustapha Inférieur, lying near the sea on the lower slope of the Sahel; and here we found the Jardin d'Essail which I was particularly anxious to see.

We walked under avenues of India-rubber trees as large as oaks, and between trellises of tea-roses in bloom, and high clumps of Arundo donax, but a cold wind sweeping through the long alleys made the scene cheerless in spite of this southern vegetation. It was, however, a bad time to visit the Jardin d'Essai, for it had been very cold for some days in Europe, and we heard afterwards that there was snow at Avignon and skating near Marseilles, while we were shivering under the India-rubber trees of Algiers. Perhaps it may have been owing to the exceptional weather that all the more delicate palms such as Lantana borbonica, Phoenix, Cycas revoluta, etc, were sheltered by tents of matting.

On the 22nd of February, at about 3pm, we started for Tunis, but the wind was so high and the sea so rough, that on the following afternoon we put in at Bone. Never was tranquil harbour more welcome, and as soon as we could get pratique [formal permission] we were set ashore and took a walk through the town. It is charmingly situated on a bay surrounded by mountains, and close by lie the ruins of Hippone, the Bishopric of St Augustine. The town itself is clean and pretty, with an arcaded French quarter, as usual, and a square planted with palms, and beds of roses and violets. At the head of this square stands the modern Catholic cathedral, and a little further on a gate in the wall of the town leads into the country. In the Arab quarter we saw many striking figures - children in bright frocks, with broad gold bracelets, women in white burnouses, with black silk yashmaks over their faces, and strangest of all, the Jewesses with silk turbans over their plaited hair (like 17th-century pictures of Judith or Herodias), loose flowing sleeves of embroidered gauze or muslin, and flowered silk dresses with jackets braided with gold.

The afternoon of our arrival we went ashore in the steam-launch, and drove to Hippone. The road lies through a lane overshadowed by high hedges of prickly pear and aloes, behind which we caught glimpses of orange and lemon groves full of fruit. The ruins stand on a hill overgrown with olives and consist of the piers and vaulting of a very old church, covered with a climbing mass of green. Whether it is the church destroyed in the 7th century or a later one, I do not know. Higher up the hill, Catholic ardour is raising the walls and columns of a new cathedral, the crypt of which is already finished and used as a church. Here we met some Sisters of Charity, who showed us the French Orphanage nearby, and after lingering for some time to look at the beautiful view of mountains, plain and sea, we drove back to Bone. This time our road led through the valley behind the town, skirting a stream overhung with cactuses and blooming mimosa. All the trees were in full leaf, and the land was a blaze of young spring green.

Ithaca (In Response To "A Une Passante")

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 14:01:00 +0000

ITHACA

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon — do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy

"Madame Africa" unites Algeria and France

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 08:30:00 +0000

The basilica of Notre Dame d'Afrique, towering above the Mediterranean on the heights of the Bologhine district of Algiers, welcomed a small but unusual crowd on Monday.

Algerian dignitaries, European ambassadors and political leaders from Marseilles found themselves in the same pews as they celebrated the restoration, after three years of work, of the Christian edifice erected in 1872. Until recently a symbol of French colonisation, the basilica is now one of the most visited sites in the Algerian capital.

"It's a chef d'oeuvre" said the delighted archbishop of Algiers, the Jordanian-born Ghaleb Bader, "a chef d'oeuvre that demonstrates the understanding and collaboration that exists between the authorities and the Church as well as between the religions and peoples on the two sides of the Mediterranean".

View from Madame Afrique

Each party has dug deep to finance the 5 million euros necessary for the project. The Algerian state, represented by the minister of religious affairs, the secretary general of the FLN (National Liberation Front) and the préfet of Algiers, has spent 560,000 euros, whilst the city of Marseilles, the département of the Bouches du Rhône and the region of Provence Alpes-Côte d'Azur contributed 360,000 euros each. The European Union was responsible for one million euros and private companies from Algeria and France made up the remainder with smaller donations.

And the result is there for all to see. Weakened by the shock waves of the earthquake that struck Algeria on May 23, 2003, "Madame Africa", as the basilica is called here, has had a facelift. The project was entrusted to the architect Xavier David and the French company Girard, who were responsible for the restoration of Notre Dame de la Garde in Marseilles, which is contemporaneous with its Algerian cousin. Their work has enabled the basilica's pale pink dome and its exterior Hispano-Moresque mosaics to recover their former lustre.

Neither the past nor the present intervened to spoil the day, with the Algerian authorities playing the appeasement card, and no one considered lingering in front of the mosaics dedicated to the monks of Tibehirine in the basilica's right-hand apse. It has been a long time now since other signs of the past have been banished, such as a family ex voto from 1921. Though still clearly visible on the right of the naive, the addition of a small piece of marble means that the ex voto asks Notre Dame de l'Afrique to protect "the whole of Algeria" rather than "French Algeria". In an aside Father Bernard Lebfèvre, the basilica's rector, stressed that: "There are only the visible wounds left, everything else has healed over".

For several days now, at the other end of Algeria, another restoration work has been under way: the renovation of the basilica of St Augustine at Annaba.

The above article originally appeared in French in Le Monde and was abridged and translated by Dr David Winter of Culturissima.

One way ticket, Cambridge to Florence

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Letter from Italy by Philippe Ridet

"Historian, born in England, naturalised Italian" - this simple line from his biography made him in our eyes - how can I put it? - delectable. At a time when thousands of Italians dream of fleeing Rome for London, Milan for Paris and Bari for New York so that they can forget about Palermo and Silvio Berlusconi, there turns out to be a man, an Englishman to boot, who has undertaken the opposite journey. That was well worth an expedition to Florence, where he had set himself up. Was he an eccentric? Someone who liked collecting passports? Did he have a lover? I had to go and find out...

Paul Ginsborg, sixty-five, has the discreet and gentle manners of a professor of contemporary Italian history (he is author of several books on the subject) and the unruffled delivery that makes taking notes easy. At the same time, he has kept an Englishman's taste for Shetland pullovers and a way of dissolving the Italian "r" sound to compensate for his inability to roll it as most foreigners do.

"I was a prof at Cambridge when, in 1992, the University of Florence offered me a chair", he explains in his apartment lined with books, situated two minutes from the Arno. "It was a radical choice but I've never regretted it". He immersed himself in local life in Florence, quickly becoming a key figure in the first people-led anti-Berlusconi movements at the beginning of the decade. A Londoner, he was bowled over by Italy's charms. "I really do think that there is a gentleness in this country, a kindness towards people quite unlike anything in England. Italy isn't haunted by dreams of grandeur and domination. I've felt a greater lightness since I've been here".

So, do the English have a passion for Italy? Ginsborg explains: "The Garibaldi expedition aroused great sympathy on the other side of the Channel and England leant its support. That's how the Society for Italian Studies took shape, which has 200 members in London. The first biography of Garibaldi was written by his nurse, an English woman by the name of Jessie White-Mario".

But why take the plunge and become Italian? "Four years ago I started to think about the idea and I obtained Italian nationality in 2009. It's also a way of me giving something back to Italy". This episode is recounted at the start of a short but brilliant essay which has just been published by Ginsborg, Salviamo l'Italia.* "Most of my friends were dumbstruck by the news of my naturalisation", he writes: "'But what prompted you to do that, and now of all times?' they asked. Some of them rushed to make sure that I had had the good sense to keep my English (sic) nationality. But the most caustic comment is still this one: "'From now on, Paul, you can join in with us when we say: I'm ashamed to be Italian!'"

These friends are going to be disappointed because the "new Italian" does not succumb to disparaging or excessively and unjustly criticising his adopted country. Amongst the plethora of books published to accompany the 150th anniversary of a unified Italy, Ginsborg's (which is steadily heading towards sales of 10,000) is distinguished by its objective, sometimes ironic and always stimulating, approach. Moving back and forth between the Risorgimento era and present-day Italy, Ginsborg tries to identify the essential elements of Italian society over the last 150 years, the rudiments which, in his opinion, would allow Italy to "save itself" and find an original voice that would secure its place in the modern epoch. The historian has identified four elements: Italy's long tradition of self-rule in its cities; the predilection for Europe; the quest for equality; and "the importance of mitezza in its history as a social virtue".

Mitezza? Our bilingual dictionary suggests "kindness" or "gentleness" and we could add "bonhomie" if the word was not over-used and "pacifism" if it did not weigh so heavily. It might seem slightly surprising that such an idea, borrowed from the philosopher Norberto Bobbio, should spring up to support an analysis of contemporary Italy. Kind, the fascists under the command of Mussolini? Kind, the mafiosi? Kind, the men of Rosarno in Calabria who, in December 2009, shot at African immigrants as though they were rabbits? Kind, the politicians always so quick to insult their opponents?

But Paul Ginsborg is far from only being a gentle Englishman who has had his head turned by a political utopia. Although in love with Italy, he knows all about the obstacles and burdens that weigh it down: the Mafia, vote-catching, a Church that has too much power and... the weakness of the left, which drives him to despair. Whilst the country is left hanging following a political crisis of uncertain outcome, the politically committed historian is careful not to strike up the old refrain about the inevitable demise of the Berlusconi era. "Even back in 2005 funeral orations were springing up in the press", he remembers. "Berlusconi is never more ready to fight than when his back is against the wall. Everyone should remain wary".

Today Paul Ginsborg receives twenty-five requests a week to give lectures. At the beginning of the month he organised a conference on "Italy in the Time of Berlusconi" for the upper echelons of the Italian intelligentsia. As a matter of principle he rails: "And to think that it needed an Englishman to organise it!" There is a palpable feeling that the historian bemoans the amount of time taken eaten up by campaigning.

The professor has become a protagonist in a part of history that he only wanted to recount and it is now his turn to be caught up in the tritacarne or meat-mincer of Italian public life: Il Giornale, the daily newspaper belonging to the Berlusconi family, has devoted a vitriolic article to the book written by this son of "perfidious Albion".

* Let's Save Italy, published by Einaudi; no English translation available.

This article first appeared in Le Monde, November 29, 2010 and was translated by Culturissima's managing director, Dr David Winter.

Walid, l’embarrassant blasphémateur palestinien

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 09:08:00 +0000

Ebrahim Hamidi is 18 years old and is going to be hanged

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:16:00 +0000

Normally Culturissima steers clear of overtly political issues; however, as Iran is a country that we have frequently written about in the past, we feel compelled to publish the following letter from Le Monde, penned by the notable French writers Philippe Besson and Gilles Leroy.

Condemned for being gay in Iran

Ebrahim Hamidi is 18 years old and is going to be hanged

After Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, Iran continues to plough its furrow by sentencing to hang a young man suspected of homosexuality. Ebrahim Hamidi is eighteen and is going to die. In his country, Iran, he has been found guilty of an abominable crime, a crime punishable by hanging. Ebrahim Hamidi is alleged to be homosexual. And so he must die. Because, if Tehran's judges are not slow in dedicating to death by stoning a woman accused of adultery, so too they hand over to the executioner a man suspected of sleeping in the same bed as his fellow man.

This way of thinking in itself, so in conflict with the idea of humanity, would be enough to horrify us and leaves us imagining the terror in which Iranian homosexuals live, obliged to be silent, to lie, to deny their identity.

The charges are said to have been fabricated following a mundane quarrel; the accusations made up by three fellow detainees in return for their freedom; Ebrahim's confession extracted under torture. During his trial, the accused did not have the right to any form of legal representation. As for the verdict, it was pronounced by a magistrate who relied on "judge's knowledge", a procedure that allows for subjective judicial rulings when no formal proof exists.

In a spectacular new development during the month of July, the alleged "victim" admitted that he fasley accused Ebrahim Hamidi following pressure from his paretns. One might have thought that this retraction would have led to the quashing of the sentence. Not at all. Ebrahim Hamidi is still guilty, of a "crime" that he has not committed. And is he homosxual or not? It makes no difference. He has to die.

He has to die so that all the "real homosexuals" continue to hide themselves and suffer terror in silence. He has to die so that we understand that Iranian justice is incapable of making a mistake. And he is going to die, if we do not rally on his behalf. If we do not waken people's consciences. If we do not cry high and loud and everywhere that this conviction is intolerable and that it must be overturned.

This article first appeared in Le Monde, August 31 2010; it was translated from the French by Culturissima's managing director, Dr David Winter.

Monet Exhibition in Paris

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:54:00 +0000

This year Richard Thomson took his holidays in June. Difficult to do otherwise, since he's the chief curator of the Claude Monet exhibition that opens in Paris' Grand Palais on September 22nd. With 176 works of art, the exhibition promises to be a major event. And so we might have expected to encounter a worried man.

Is it the result of a breezy disposition or is it the natural Anglo-Saxon discretion of a professor at the University of Edinburgh? The morning we meet, it is as much as he can do to admit that he still has a few small jobs to finish before the fateful day.

To listen to Richard Thomson, everything is being carried out without a hitch and on good terms with the French curators who are helping him. The catalogue? The entries were submitted on time and they are of good quality. The design of the exhibition space? He is relying on the ideas of Hubert Le Gall, with whom plain-speaking is the rule. The hanging of the pictures? The plan was fixed long ago using computer simulations.

Calculated to the nearest tenth of an inch

On this point, however, Mr Thomson admits that his happiness is not complete. He yearns for the time when hanging was not calculated to the nearest tenth of an inch weeks before the arrival of the paintings, when the curator and a few assistants positioned the canvases "by eye", taking them from room to room until the desired effect was achieved. "That's impossible today. Can you imagine, with the cost of insurance? They would think that we were being irresponsible". Each Monet, then, already has its spot reserved.

This is even more the case because the exhibition has been designed to follow a very complex structure: "That's the key feature of my work: to think about the best way of showing a painting, not settling for an ordinary, boring retrospective where the masterpieces come one after another in chronological order from beginning to end. It has been about giving a new image of Monet, about sparking off new debates".

And so begins Thomson's account of how he first thought about the history of the exhibition: "I thought that 1890 should be the pivotal date. Monet was 50 in 1890. He arrives at Giverny. The art dealers are becoming more and more interested in him. And it's the start of his series. There is a before and an after 1890. That's the central idea. The first section comprises French landscapes before this date, the links between their creation and nature: the canvases from Fontainebleau, Normandy, the region around Paris, Vétheuil and two places further away, Belle Ile and the Creuse region. At the end of this part, I wanted a very clear break. There will be two rooms, one devoted to the human form in the years 1870 and 1880, the other to still-lifes. I preferred to do that - rather than scatter figures and still-lifes everywhere - to show that, for Monet, these are important subjects. Then the second section, the years after 1890, begins".

You only need to hear the historian's voice to sense how important it is for him to convince the listener of the appropriateness of his scheme. His explanation is already well-polished. There will be, then, another three subjects, with the themes of repetition, inner nature and adornment. Haystacks and Poplars will appear in the first, Vétheuil and Venice in the second, Giverny and her water-lilies in the last.

Once the order was established, all that remained was the paintings themselves. Everything went well, perhaps even too well. "At the end of 2009, the museums started to reply. All the responses were positive.. In fact, there were too many paintings. Towards Christmas, we knew that we were going to have to make some sacrifices. I had started with the idea of 200 paintings but it became clear that we'd have to go down to 175 so that there would be enough space left for visitors". But how does he explain so many loans? "The American museums have been very forthcoming... New York, Boston... They're used to working with the Orsay and that helped with the negotiations".

No setbacks, then? "Unfortunately, yes. The Marmottan Museum refused to lend, Impression, Rising Sun", the historic work to which Impressionism owes its name. "But it's not too serious. They will be some less well-known paintings whose discovery will to a large extent compensate for its absence. We suggested some exchanges but, clearly, it wasn't possible. In its place you will see a view of the port of Le Havre from 1873, a night scene, an extraordinary one, that has come from a private collection".

Having worked so long on Monet, what has he learned? "That you have actually to go to the places where he painted to be able to understand him". So the museum man got lost in a forest in the Creuse: "I wanted to find the spot where Monet had painted the confluence of two rivers in 1889 - he painted it ten times. Today, there are trees everywhere. I couldn't see the river any longer. Nothing corresponded to the paintings. Monet had gone there at a time when the peasants had stripped the wood for heating and when their herds of goats were grazing on the under-growth. The hills were bare. Today, it's a forest. I finished by finding my bearings thanks to a rock... I started again at Belle Ile so that I could identify the exact viewpoint over the needles of Port Coton. Just at the edge of the cliff, about 50 yards away. That's what organising a Monet exhibition drives you to!"

This article first appeared in Le Monde, August 17 2010; it was translated from the French by Culturissima's managing director, Dr David Winter.

Her body, muscular and almost masculine, bathed in light...

noreply@blogger.com (Culturissima Blogissima) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:39:00 +0000

The Venus de Milo brings a smile to the Louvre

According to legend, Venus - known to the Greeks as Aphrodite - was born from the foam of the sea as she emerged from bathing off the coast of Cyprus. Be that as it may, the goddess of love serves as the model for the canon of beauty, an ideal epitomised in the Louvre's Venus de Milo.

The famous statue has just been restored, which comes as a pleasant surprise to the six million people (out of a total of eight million) who visit the Louvre each year with the stated aim of admiring the Venus de Milo together with the museum's two other jewels, Leonardo de Vinci's Mona Lisa and the Victory of Samothrace. The Venus, sculpted from white marble from Paros circa 120 BC, was found in 1820 by a peasant on the Greek island of Milos in the Cyclades and was given to the Louvre by King Louis XVIII in 1821.

This summer, the statue is radiating good health. Her body, muscular and almost masculine, bathed in the light streaming in from the south-facing windows, has recovered the milky lustre of its origins. So, too, its energy and aura next to the gods and goddesses who surround it, Athena, Apollo, Hermes, Dionysus and others - Roman copies of lost Greek chefs d'oeuvres.

The smile that plays across her left cheek, almost teasing, contrasts sharply with the serious look sketched across her right side. The subtle folds of her toga, which could easily be made of real linen, fall to her hips and reveal a perfect bust.

Positioned in the centre of a carpet of red marble and mounted on a plinth (it is possible to walk all the way around her and view her from all angles), the Venus de Milo, six-and-a-half feet tall, stands sentinel over the 2,000 square feet of former royal apartments as they stretch towards the caryatids gallery. She is the crowning feature of a new museum lay-out devoted to classical Greek and Hellenistic art (450-30 BC) devised by Jean-Luc Martinez (director of the Louvre's department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities) as a three-dimensional walk amongst the works of art.

Where are her arms?

At the head of the world's foremost museum of Greek art, totalling more than 45,000 objects, Jean-Luc Martinez has for the first time put on display works taken from the museum's reserve holdings or dispersed in other departments (ceramics, jewellery, numismatics, furniture). From now on these will be presented by geographic region to showcase the world of the Greek Mediterranean.

As for the Venus de Milo, she has once more found the place that she occupied from 1824 to 1848. Since she first entered the Louvre, she has never ceased to be moved about. In the 1820s, following a controversy, it was decided not to attach the missing arms that had been sculpted for the occasion. Only her nose, left foot and big toe were re-attached.

"Whilst removing the old restoration work we noticed that the surface had been prepared for a marble adjunct that was never finished", indicates Monsieur Martinez. In 2009-2010 a scientific study brought to light the alterations and repairs that have been undertaken over two centuries. It was decided to keep her nose, but not her foot. Fragments of marble are displayed around the goddess, including an outsized hand, which nourish the enigma... her arms are still unaccounted for.

This article first appeared in Le Monde, August 20 2010; it was translated from the French by Culturissima's managing director, Dr David Winter.