I recently acquired a beautiful stamp from, of all places, Kyrgyzstan, issued for the 750th anniversary, which other nations seem to have overlooked. Other countries noted that anniversary, too, of course: Mexico, Germany, the USSR, Romania, and from South America, Uruguay, Ecuador, Argentina… I think the US and Mexican issues are among the most attractive designs, actually, but the five-stamp set from Monaco may deserve the blue ribbon. One of the exceptions, along with Shakespeare, Copernicus, Luther, Gutenberg, and some others (not Goethe), is Dante, who was remembered in 1965, on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of his birth. American exceptionalism at its most typical. As I’ve said here previously, the United States Postal Service is and has usually been very reluctant to honor non-Americans on stamps. Wilson’s Dante in Love, which helps.Īs for the stamps, most of them, as you’d expect, come from Italy (including an interesting “pneumatic post” issue from 1945), with others predictably coming from San Marino and the Vatican, but I’d like to draw your attention to a couple of the other stamps, and for that we must proceed to Collage No. Now midway through the Purgatorio, I occasionally pick up the book and consume another Canto, but essentially I believe that reading poetry in translation is at best unsatisfactory and at worst pointless. Initially, I read it line by line with the original, but my Italian was not up to the task, and I abandoned that noble project after a fashion. (French and German Wikipedia specifically cite the 14th, and I’m going with that because yesterday’s Arts on Stamps of the World was already top-heavy.) Now a shameful personal confession: I didn’t even start reading The Divine Comedy until 2013, and I’m still at it. Durante degli Alighieri was born around 1265 and died on the night of 13/14 September, 1321. He has as many stamps as some of the most prominent painters, and among writers I think only Goethe and Shakespeare are philatelically-quantitatively comparable. King of the hill today is undoubtedly Dante Alighieri. Now more than ever, we know that joy can be a truly difficult feat, as paradoxical as its fleeting appearance in Miori’s piece that it is deeply and intrinsically tied to its own opposite, as we learn from popular wisdom and from the story by Lagani and that its power as a positive, constructive force is earth-shaking, hence all the more necessary in these times.An Arts Fuse regular feature: the arts on stamps of the world. We may feel joy when thinking of the future or the past, but also when caught up in a brief moment of childlike rapture, as in the story by Cocchi- who, sadly, passed away while we were working on this issue, which is dedicated to his memory. Allegria is an awareness of disaster, an acceptance of the present, but also a will to life this model of freedom turns up in the stories by Lamberti and Di Grado, which are all about the tension between losing one’s way and finding it again, and the poems by Diana, Deotto, and Socci. Nor should we forget the allegria of Giuseppe Ungaretti, that great poet of the Great War, which sprang from a tragic sense of evanescence and precariousness, of abandonment as a necessary mode of survival at certain times. What has happened to this era of ours, which seems to have forgotten the deeper meaning of the word, to have trivialized and rejected it? We’d like to rescue joy from all those simplisti interpretations, embracing Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti’s invitation to defend it like a trench, to defend it from the panderers of laughter.Įvery Italian remembers how Mike Bongiorno, a symbol of commercial TV in the 1980s, started off each show by shouting Allegria! But allegria is more than a pop culture slogan, and Morandini’s piece reminds us of its erudite roots in classical music. And so - joy, as a kind of utopia, nostalgia, and longing. We chose the theme word Joy because even with the worst days of the pandemic behind us, we felt like the end of the tunnel was nowhere in sight. From 2022 it is published by the publisher Le Lettere. Edited by Martino Baldi and Alessandro Raveggi, it narrates the country where we live, through key words, source of inspiration for stories and poems. Founded in Italy as an editorial project in 2016, it publishes and translates in its six-monthly issues a selection of the most important contemporary authors of the Italian literary scene, hosting new voices selected through periodic calls for submission, relevant illustrators and top English translators. The Florence Review is the first bilingual literary magazine in Italian and English.
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