Category: Museums
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Roman holiday
It’s a long time since I’ve been to a museum or a gallery, what with global pandemics and everything. We didn’t really set out to do so when we went to the English Heritage site Corbridge Roman Town, and to be honest we didn’t realise there was much of a…
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State of the planet
At the age of eighteen I was a dope-smoking, layabout, benefit-scrounging squatter. During this phase of my life I was arrested for shoplifting. The thing I stole, however, was not food, or something I could sell to buy drugs, but a book. It was The Atlas of the Solar System…
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Capitalising on the dark
Darkness is an abundant resource during December in Edinburgh. To many of the city’s residents, trapped in an indoor workplace during the season’s fleeting daylight hours, this may sound like an insufferably upbeat formulation, but for anyone wishing to capitalise on festive cheer, it’s a gift. Christmas markets, cosy shop-fronts,…
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For the birds and bees?
Money, it’s a gas Grab that cash with both hands, and make a stash – Roger Waters Generally speaking, I think of money as a crime. I can imagine, quite easily, a variety of economies in which it does not figure, and I analyse its function in the real world…
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Journey’s end
Eight kilometres to the north, and many lifetimes away from Noto, lie the remains of its corpse. Here was journey’s end for the continuous relay that connected Jesuits, merchants, nobles, criminals, prisoners, artisans, guardsmen and peasants to the Iron Age Sicel people, after whom Sicily is named, Noto’s founders; to…
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The island’s amnesiac heart
At the approximate heart of the island of Sicily there is a site which it is hard not to regard as its historical or spiritual centre, although it is far from the oldest dwelling known there, and certainly not unique in the political and economic power which it embodied –…
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The bright glare of professionalism
We were welcomed to the (deep breath) Antonio Salinas Regional Archaeological Museum of Palermo by a dole of small turtles, lazing in the fountain in the entrance courtyard, to the great delight of Spawn. Clearly taking equal pleasure in the water and the sun, which they scaled one another to…
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Time travelling curatorial aesthetics
The visible surface of a museum, which is to say its collections as they are displayed, tells you what sort of institution it is. Its description of itself, on the other hand, and the way in which it verbally interprets its collections, tell you what sort of institution it thinks…
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Traversing epistemologies
The Cattedrale di Palermo is a chimaera of architectural styles and periods. If someone had drawn it from their imagination, the well-informed viewer might accuse them of anachronism, but this building is certainly not ‘without time’; it’s more ‘panchronic’, or ‘polychronic’. The current structure begins with a Norman foundation in…
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History, re-mediated
‘Palazzo’ is a term that is bandied about quite casually in Italy, and although it is technically cognate with ‘palace’, it refers to any kind of grand residence, from the substantial townhouses of the prosperous bourgeoisie to the vast combined residences and governmental seats of dukes and bishops. The principal…
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Hybridity reified: a cosmopolitan architecture
Like the gardens of the Orto Botanico, the formal beds and pathways through which one approaches the facade of the Castello della Zisa are parched, dry and brown. They are not effaced by a chaos of growth, however, but scourged with an excess of order, a ground whose geometries are…
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A ruptured order
A melancholy sense of lost hegemony and deteriorated grandeur was brought to Britain from southern Europe by the Grand Tourists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and profoundly informed the aesthetics of the Gothic and Romantic movements, as in the archetypically Gothic edifice of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, a…
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Moments of erasure
Facing across a busy Palermo street narrow enough to deny its facade any commanding sightlines, the Palazzo Riso-Belmonte is also situated in a city endowed with an embarrassment of Baroque riches. Despite the twin catastrophes of the WWII Allied bombing campaign, and the mafia construction scams of the ‘Sack of…
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A life lived among relics
Apparently I’ve been to Anglesey Abbey before, according to everyone else in my family who I am claimed to have gone with (and who I went there with this time). This purported visit isn’t supposed to have involved going inside the house, however, so I think I might be forgiven…
Oliver Arditi 