professor of art history in high school where I studied was a good man. He loved his subject and is saddened to have so little time to teach.
just one hour per week!repeated every time he entered the classroom. In truth, at that time, me and my My companions laughed succeed, because the professor ended up losing, again, at least one quarter of that one hour, to complain about the insensitivity of the Italians towards art.
How I learned to tell him that make him valuable time to so few!
Now I see clearly that face, high forehead that seemed to never end because of baldness at the front of the head, the center of which protruded the other hand, thick, shaggy, white hair in a mo 'brush. For this, you'll hardly remembered more than his real name, it named the "professor Pennellone. And besides, this nickname, which he pretended to ignore, the professor of art history was just "a brush. "
Tall and lanky, he wore the same gray suit, neat as threadbare. He knew by heart all the classical and biblical myths, and liked to tell, and taught us to "be able to see" works of art depicted on our hand, that of Carlo Argan.
In one part of my memory is preserved as a gallery of images. Some, in time, I went to look for in the original.
I traveled to the golden Mycenae to cross the Lions Gate! I thought I heard again the rumbling of wagons and the clatter of horses running in the army of Agamemnon to Troy. On a hot summer Athenian
I scanned the sequence Doric order, dazzled by the light shining on the marble Parian of the Parthenon. A
Florence, in a sweet September of my youth in the Brancacci Chapel of Carmine Church, the "professor Pennellone" seemed to tell me Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise Masaccio of .
Dear Professor! you are still grateful!
I owe the memory of a Benedictine basilica, a church, in fact, a little 'Byzantine and a bit' Romanesque Sant'Angelo in Formis , in the village, on a gentle slope, not far from Capua .
Over the years, more There are times I visited. But, inevitably, every time I found the entrance blocked for different reasons. Until, when I went there last year on a Sunday in August, finally, the gate was open access to the abbey. I crossed, holding my breath.
my footsteps echo on the ancient paving lane and across a tuff collected from ancient buildings connected by an arc.
I raise my head. With the eyes of the vertical stalk sober and solid cuboid of the independent tower that rises to my right to proclaim the church that I see in passing. I turn to the left. The heart begins to smile. In front of the church with a rectangular square, paved with pebbles and irregular bordered on two sides of cypress trees towering in the blue heron in the sky, greets me in a suspended dimension. Face your back to the church without looking at her and slowly, I start at the bottom of tiny raised plaza that ends in a wall. Before me lies the plain of Capua. Eyes on the horizon plunging bathed in a celestial expanse, where, perhaps, is the sea that merges with the sky. Here, I now face. The eyes run double flight of cypresses to the church and the frame in the background, then rest on the shady porch, and tracking the warheads dell'intercolumnio music, rise upward, serene, until the apex, which resemble the basilica a hut. I climb the stairs to the front porch. I pass over the middle and higher arc within the temple.
The calm silence of light is tinged with blue and pink in the hieratic and naive image of Christ Pantocrator frescoes in the apse.
time of the sacred narrative continues, the columns and floor from Roman times to the Byzantine biblical narratives painted on the walls in delightful colors here and there, faded or erased by time in history. I'm not interested in the artistic elements.
I find myself engrossed in a magnificent simplicity.
the narrow confines of the temple of time and expand in the shadow of light.
Esco.
cross the porch.
the bottom of the square framed by cypress
reddens the sky west.
beyond the plain of Capua, in a bit ',
the sun will embrace the sea.
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