AEROPLANE TO AEROPLANO

               Do you love Studio Ghibli, the animation movie production company founded in 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata? Are you a declared antifascist and anti-colonialist, but you enjoy watching Porco Rosso fly the Ghibli seaplane?      Well, you should know that the name of the famous Japanese animation studio is a fascist and colonial reference! Try to remember that every time you mention Studio Ghibli.      By Alberto Alpozzi      These days, on social media, AI altered images that turn historical figures and movies in animated characters in the Ghibli style are all the rage.      The animated motion pictures Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirit Away, My Neighbor Totoro are very famous: movies that were celebrated by the Oscars for Miyazaki.      But, setting aside the youth-driven social trends and the sweet faces, the big round eyes, the warm light tones an...

       This work, signed by “Ledesma” in 1768, alludes to the passion of Christ, but without depicting him. The artist was perhaps inspired by some engravings in which the tunic takes the place of Jesus Christ as the protagonist, surrounded by instruments of the passion, and sometimes some characters, such as the one made by Hieronymus Wierix around 1586, as part of a book entitled Passio Domino Nostri Iesu Christi, with twenty-one engravings with the theme of the passion.  These works have been called Arma Christi, or Weapons of Christ, and were common in northern Europe from the 15th century.        The New Spanish painting not only depicts the passion instruments but, around the tunic, arranged in a way that recalls the crucified body, are Mary and John, who accompanied him in that painful moment, God the Father, who will receive him in heaven and some cherubs.       Christ's weapons, or rather the instruments of th...

     New records on the Rome to Addis Ababa air route.      The historic flights of 1939.      It was the beginning of 1939, when the Milan daily newspaper “ Il Popolo d’Italia ” launched a race to establish a flight time record in the air route between Rome, the capital of Kingdom of Italy, and Addis Ababa, the capital of the new Italian Empire. The prize was just a commemorative plaque to celebrate the linking of the two capitals, but the goal of the initiative was to study a new civilian air route between Italy and Italian Eastern Africa.      Several crews took up the challenge. The first crew consisting of Leonardo Bonzi and Giovanni Zappetta took off from Guidonia (Rome) on March 5, 1939 with a Piaggio-Nardi FN 305 monoplane tourer, specifically modified for long range flights.      This version of the aircraft, designated FN 305D and registered I-UEBI, featured a redesigned fuselage that was stretched to a...

     Beato Angelico’s altarpiece The Crucifixion  illustrates the meaning of the scene by means of a very special symbol drawn from biblical sources and a very long tradition.      The Christ as a Pelican. Eternal Truths from the Animal Kingdom.      By Stefano Chiappalone  (Translated by Leonardo Pavese)       Last July, for a singular coincidence, the famous Christie’s auction house offered to the bidders' attention a painting by Beato Angelico whose symbology is strictly linked to the Most Precious Blood of Christ, to which the month of July is traditionally dedicated.      The Dominican friar Fra’ Giovanni da Fiesole (1395-1455), is more known in art history as Beato Angelico, a title that attests to his sanctity which was officially recognized in 1982 by Saint Pope John Paul II, who proclaimed him patron saint of the artists.      Notwithstanding the prestigious commissions t...

       “The National Vanguard,” in Italian Avanguardia Nazionale, was a nationalist, anti-communist and anti-bourgeois movement founded in 1960 and led by Stefano Delle Chiaie (1936-2019).      The following is a translation of a chapter of the 2012 autobiographical book by Stefano Delle Chiaie: “L’aquila e il condor” (The Eagle and the Condor). It narrates the events that led to the murder in La Paz, Bolivia, of Pierluigi Pagliai, a young Italian political militant and friend of Delle Chiaie.      On August 2, 1980, a bomb exploded in the Bologna, Italy, railroad station, killing eighty-five people and wounding hundreds. It was the cruelest of the series of bloody attacks that began with the 1969 bombing of the branch of Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura, in Milan.      Right away, the government authorities decided to orient the investigation toward a phantomatic “black medusa,” that is, an international extreme-rig...