The Poetry of Faces

“No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language” – Theodore Bikel

At dinner last night, the guys had offered some alternatives for our trip. Barry had mentioned to Jesse that I am a photographer. They offered that if I really didn’t want to ride (not even the downhills? – no), that one would ride with Barry and I would stay with the other and explore photo ops and such until time to pick up the cyclists at the end of the route(s). They even offered to mix up some of the routes such that there were more straight and downhill options. While we had gone back to the villa and soundly to sleep, the guys had spent the rest of the late evening scoping out potential areas. What lovely men!

This morning was a ride to nearby Pienza – home of the Pecorino cheese (a sheep cheese that has now become one of our favourites) and said to be the most beautiful village of Rennaisance design in Tuscany. It is the birthplace of Pope Pius II. Barry and Jesse rode and Martin and I drove to several vantage point around the area. We ventured through Castelmuzio and Petroio and stopped to see Sant Anna in Camprena, where scenes from the movie The English Patient were filmed. What was most wonderful about the alternative is that I got to know fascinating things about each of our hosts. One is from Australia and climbs upside down on jutting rock faces. He surfs in Australian waters though he knows of Great White Sharks in the area (it is all a numbers game, he says). He snowboards in the winter and is, himself, quite an accomplished photographer. The other is French, a cyclist and soccer player. He dreams of one day travelling throughout the world with just a soccer ball, a guitar, and a chess board. He feels that each of these items offers great potential for conversation and interaction with all sorts of different people. A philosopher at heart, I think. My conversations with these lovely young men as we meandered throughout the Tuscany countryside ranged from education to communism, from family values to the number of creatures that can kill you in Australia, from patriotism to the ugly tourist, from religion to politics, from what loss is to what tugs at the heart. From the yearning to see a hummingbird hawkmoth to how exciting it is to see a solitary deer.

We stopped for lunch in Pienza at another family-run trattoria before another ride in the afternoon. The food was excellent. We sat on the outside patio and watched people in the surrounding area. The trattoria was on the edge of a lovely square that had stunning statues of heads, of great exquisiteness and that I found very moving. What I truly love about Europe is how the art is treated. Art is not confined to art gallery walls or museums. Instead, you wander the streets and back lanes of cities and villages and just stumble upon beautiful art. These statues were out on the piazza. Children were climbing on them, people ate their picnic lunches at their base, and one pair of little girls danced round the statues to the sound of a violinist and guitarist playing around the corner.

Down an unassuming lane, we found a poster about the exhibit and later I did a bit of research. The work is called “The Gift of Harmony”, by Austrian Helga Vockenhuber. Pienza was chosen as a site because of the principles at the base of its architectural design (Renaissance) by architect Bernardo Rossellino . . . .  . .

an emblem of the "ideal city", to pursue a scan of spaces and volumes in perfect balance, in search of harmony that allows man, center of the universe, to regain possession of their social spaces physical and inner. And it refers to the concept of harmony, and not only in the title, this also shows the Vockenhuber, harmony evoked that leads human person, through the perception of the beauty of the places that receive it, and the severe grandeur of his works, a touch with his inner and the intense spirituality that the artist manifests to live and pursue. The works on display are busts monumental whose intense expression bursts paradoxically immobility face, with his eyes closed and lips meekly in a state of inactivity that calls us to the interiority of each, place of spirit and single shore of peace , which it seems to warn the culture of our time tending to only materialistic hedonism, supported by the media technology that flattens everything and empty of true humanity.

The exhibition project The Gift of Harmony, edited by Joseph Cords and with the overall coordination of Patrizia Cerri, is in fact based on the idea of a dialogue between sculpture and architecture that surrounds it and is designed as traveling, just to say, at a time of deep urban aesthetic degradation, which has been and which might again become the union once pursued between architecture and sculpture, and what the potential of poetry that it may radiate.

 - from the notes on the installation by the Civita Arte.

On to another ride and our Italian cooking class.