The shapes of water and love
The shapes of water and love
BY CIRO CENATIEMPO
The principle of “water rarity” has characterized studies on the technical evolution of humanity. It has drawn a boundary - which dates back two centuries ago - between the first and the following mass availability of the most precious liquid that there is. This attention has returned of current interest, as well as to fashion, although in the meantime a shift in meaning has been introduced: from rarity we have moved on to “scarcity”. The Great Thirst, like the plasticization of the oceans, is the contemporary specter that wanders around the planet, while exploring – have a look - the ice of Mars. A subtle disturbance crosses our awareness, and the broader umbrella of (perhaps) the growing struggle against climate change is not enough to avoid it.
FOUNTAINS AND GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP
We cannot deal with these issues in this issue. But, keeping them in the background, it is through a rapid excursus among some «shapes of water», that we propose to tell further segments of wonder and beauty that characterize the island of Ischia. An island that has stopped the worn out clothes of romantic island life, to enter - richer - to shop in the boutique of global citizenship of tourism and modernity. Just a liberating gesture was enough: to slightly bend the head under a public fountain, simply to drink without fatigue. Fontana is a word that owes a meaningful tribute to antiquity, not to forget: “spread, spread”, finally for everyone. Today we would also say: “without wasting too much ...”. It seems curious, but the mutation took place thanks to those very long hidden risers, the tubes fixed to the depths of the Neapolitan gulf that guarantee - from November, 9, 1958, and it seems who knows when - the water supply to the island without interruption. It was a revolution that definitively linked it to the mainland. Until a few years before, the only really abundant drinking fluid was ... wine: millions of liters were produced and, once, the surplus was used to create the mortar necessary to erect a wall and an arch, up in the hill , in Murupane, the so-called “upper lands” of the Greeks. Since then, the historical and substantial, existential, ethical and aesthetic shift has not, however, affected the aquatic identity imago of Ischia: on this side of the salty sea horizon, it is all too easy to evoke how much variety, in the volcanic island veins, flows from thermal and hyperthermal fluids; or minerals, sweets, between clear, lukewarm and only slightly savory sources that emerge creating oases of vitality, exemplary for beauty and functionality.
PLAYFUL FREEDOM
Beneficial, healthy, healing, medicated, magical, purifying, miraculous? Find the adjectives that attract you the most, to describe the waters - and the localities - that preserve millenary virtues among sunny landscapes, gullies and ravines, secret valleys and magnificent forests. Any definition is fine however, provided that it can make (re) spring a reason for renewed playful freedom, expressed in the cover image of this issue, for me necessary to reconsider and instinctively protect the island as unique and unrepeatable in cultural terms, geographical. It is reminiscent of a Roman marble bas-relief from the first century after Christ, the “Three Nymphs”, preserved in the wonderful Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg (you see it on the page on the right): it arrived in those parts after an adventurous journey that started from the source of Nitrodi, at the center of the Ischian map, and passed through England, including finds, vessels, shipwrecks, collections, up to the antiquarian banker John Lyde-Brown, director of the Bank of England and a member of the London’s Society of Antiquarians who yielded in 1787 his precious pieces to Catherine II the Great of Russia ... It is a votive icon, exotic, even erotic, a promise of “bellessere” timeless. Powerful and enveloping, like the forms of love in water.
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