overall
It’s incredible what Roberto Giardina in historical, biographical, geographical and other data and has gathered here! His paper box (whether made of wood & amp; Paper, chips or brain cells). Possess not only has enormous storage capacity, but be sorted also perfect for the author to create to enable such a comprehensive, detailed and colorful compendium
some fluke when returning sheets after completion of reading:
• “. Palermo one has to taste smell, the market [the Vucciria] is a work of art that even the blind can see.” These two movements are in the middle of a five-page essay (one of the longest chapter of the whole book) on minne, cassata, pasta reale, Zummo, meusa, arancini, Quaglie, sponsa di Gelsomino, melanzane alla parmigiana, falsomagro, granita, neonata and other delicacies from the birthplace of the author. What are they made? How are they prepared? Where are you from? Why are they called that?
• In Piazza dello Statuto in Turin is a monument to the latitude on which the city is located. Why
• Of the thirteen million tourists that flood each year Venice, there are about fifty to commit suicide here -. But it is hardly possible one, for several reasons
• As in 1911 in the lagoon city, cholera broke out (Thomas Mann was staying on the Lido, a Polish boy looking, by the way, died 1986), one prevailed throughout Germany drastic measures to prevent its spread; Venice prefect and mayor, however, expressed concern all in their city (in the day six people from the disease die) with the claim away that these are all just “rumors without any basis”.
• On September 11, 1599 the six-year Artemisia Gentileschi sitting on dad’s shoulders and followed the spectacle in front of Castel Sant’Angelo. Papas colleague Caravaggio is also there and as fascinating as the twenty-two year-old Beatrice Cenci is publicly beheaded. Guido Reni painted the event, and his image is Shelley and Stendhal inspired. Also Artemisia is a painter, and her best works is “Judith Beheading Holofernes” (now in the Uffizi).
• The Palazzo Pitti visited Florence each tourist. What but Luca Pitti who made his fortune to be able to be erected around the Protzbau? He was Cosimo de ‘Medici’s tax inspectors.
• What were what were what drove Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the Mann brothers, Sigmund Freud, Goethe, Stendhal, Shelley, together with wife, Lord Byron (the hapless sailors) Nietzsche, Wagner, DH Lawrence and dozens of other VIPs in Italy? What did the Italian men of the fifties, sixties, when they made German women the yard? What was promised the German women if they then traveled to the south? And what of the “star” when asked “Why I like going to Italy” in a report from 1959?
• Who initiated the Oktoberfest, and why it always takes place in September?
• How has the action “cornflower”?
So rows countless anecdotes, episodes, references to scenes and books, a veritable (verbal) painting of the battle of Jena, quotes from poems, popular songs and diaries, clever and memorable imply any outstanding or everyday people from the past two thousand years, mixed with dates, trivial and significant facts about diameter, construction costs, weights, entrance fees …
not everything is relevant. Even gossip can not be missing: who rose when from what hotel? Which room or she received it? Is there this hotel today, or what stands in his place? (Lady Diana slept in the same room of the Grand Hotel in Rimini as Federico Fellini – No. 315 on the 2nd floor.)
The accumulated knowledge of history, politics, architecture, painting, sculpture, theater, film. music and especially biographies he wears in small thematic Portiönchen front of a maximum of one side before switching to a related subject. Everything comes in a compact style, so kurzweiligem conversational and therefore rhapsodic structured, so to speak not at all, rather, hopping from sticks on sticks. Locker the author manages, on two sides of an arc of the Fugger of the geology of the Rhine and the Sandoz accident up to Tomi Ungerer and the Greens to beat. Often, but not always, the author links the factual with stimulating, critical, ironic considerations.
Roberto Giardina is not just anyone. Born in Palermo, he lived for many years as a journalist and correspondent in Berlin, where he worked for Italian newspapers and magazines followed the development since Willy Brandt and versatile own essays and novels published, for example through the house Coburg, Lola Montez, Fra Diavolo, and a “guide on the Germans to love.” The present German edition (translation by Helene Harth) combines excerpts from a published between 2004 and 2007 at Bompiani travel trilogy “L’Altra Europe …”, “L’Europa e le vie del Mediterraneo” and “Itinerari erotici”. It records the stations of a virtual journey from the south to the north of Europe to, from Lampedusa (where Giardina spent as a child his holidays), Palermo, Naples, Rome, Tuscany, Turin, Bergamo, Lake Garda, Venice, Switzerland, the big rivers and mountains, Maastricht, Xanten, Paderborn and Hanover, then alternatively through the Inn Valley, Munich, Franconia, Thuringia and Saxony to endpoint Berlin. Detour leading to Crete, Istanbul and Baghdad railway.
A common> Guide ‘is not this book, because it leads> Naturally is the non-Italian readers in parts by weight and connects his own country more to be known as the essays on Italy, but the reading is consistently highly entertaining and educational. “Did you know that …?”, You are constantly trying to tell his companions read from a novel finding.
