The Mummies of Palermo: A Silent Dialogue

This article originally appeared on the first number (entitled “Apocrifo Siciliano”) of the book/magazine Cariddi – Rivista Vorace, published by Rossomalpelo Edizioni. The magazine explores the forgotten, occult, magical and fantastical side of Sicily, in a collective effort which saw the participation of journalists, writers, illustratoris, literature scholars and photographers confronting Sicily’s countless faces.
Cariddi is in Italian only, but you can order it on Amazon and other online stores, or you can order a copy by writing an email to the publishing house.

You never forget your first.
As soon as I entered the Capuchin Catacombs, I had the impression of finding myself in front of a gigantic exercitus mortuorum, a frightening army of revenants. Dead bodies all around, their skin parched and withered, hundreds of gaping mouths, jaws lowered by centuries of gravity, empty yet terribly expressive eye sockets. The feeling lasted a few seconds, because in reality down in the hypogeum so perfect a peace reigned that the initial bewilderment gave way to a different feeling: I felt I was an intruder.

A stranger, a living man in a sacred space inhabited by the dead; all those who come down here suddenly fall silent. The visitor is under scrutiny.
I was also alien to a culture, the Sicilian culture, showing such an inconceivable familiarity with the dead for someone born and raised in Northern Italy. Here death, I thought, was not hidden behind slabs of marble, on the contrary: it was turned into a spectacle. Presented theatrically, exhibited as mirabilis – worthy of admiration – here was on display the true repressed unconscious of our time: the Corpse.

The Corpse had been carefully worked by the friars, following a process refined over time. One of the technical terms anthropologists use to indicate the process of draining and mummifying bodies is “thanato-metamorphosis”, which gives a good idea of the actual, structural transformation to which the body is subjected.
Moreover, such conservation was considerably expensive, and only the wealthiest could afford it (even in death, there are first and second class citizens). But this is not surprising if we think of the countless monumental citadels of the dead, which the living are willing to raise at the cost of enormous efforts and fortunes. What struck me, as I strolled by the mummies, was that in this case the investment didn’t have the purpose of building a grand, sumptuous mausoleum, but rather of freezing, as much as possible, the features of these dead people over time.

Ah yes, time. Down there time flowed differently than on the city surface, or perhaps it didn’t flow at all. As if suspended by miracle, time had stopped devouring and transfiguring all matter.
As I dwelled on ancient faces, worn out clothes, and withered hands, the purpose of this practice became clear: it was meant to preserve not just the memory of the deceased, but their very identity.
Unlike the basic concept behind ossuaries, where the dead are all the same, the mummification process has the virtue of making each body different from the other, thus giving the remains a distinct personality – an effect further amplified if a mummy is dressed in the clothes he or she wore when alive.
Among all the barriers men have raised in the quixotic attempt to deny impermanence, this is perhaps the one that comes closest to success; it is a strange strategy, because instead of warding off death, it seems to embrace it until it becomes part of everyday life. So these individuals never really died: family members could come back and visit them, talk to them, take care of them. They were ancestors who had never quite crossed the threshold.

Little by little, I began sensing the benign and sympathetic nature of the mummies’ gaze – the kindness that shines through anyone who’s really aware of mortality. Their skeletal faces, which could be frightening at first, actually appeared serene if observed long enough; so much so that I was no longer sure I should pity their condition. Within me I began a sort of conversation with this silent crowd, the guardians of an inviolable secret. Perhaps, as their whispers reached out for me from the other side, all they were trying to do was reassure me; maybe they were talking the end of all trouble.

That unspoken, mysterious dialogue between us never stopped since that day.
A few years later I returned to the Catacombs together with photographer Carlo Vannini. We stayed about a week in the company of mummies, day and night. Who knows if they recognized me? For my part I learned to tell them apart, one by one, and to discern each of their voices – for they still called me without words.

My first book, published for Logos Edizioni, was The Eternal Vigil.
In 2017 the book was reissued with a preface by the scientific conservator of the catacombs, paleopathologist Dario Piombino-Mascali – who in turn, as I’m writing this, has just published what promises to be the definitive historical-scientific guide on the Catacombs, for Kalòs Edizioni.
From the analysis of mummies a paleopathologist is able to get clues about their life habits, and unravel their personal history: to an expert like him, these bodies really do speak. But I am sure that in this very moment they’re also whispering to the visitors who just descended the staircase and stepped into the underground corridors, enchanted by the extraordinary vision.
These mummies, to which I am bound by ties inscrutable and deep, murmur to anyone who really knows how to listen.

Čapec

[SORRY, THIS POST IS IN ITALIAN ONLY]

Qualche anno fa vi avevo già parlato di Hurricane Ivan, illustratore, musicista e cartoonist che assieme a una ciurma di weirdissimi complici mantiene vivo il fumetto underground in Italia.

Oggi vi segnalo la sua ultima fatica editoriale, in cui ancora una volta si conferma l’abilità di Hurricane nell’aggregare e catalizzare talenti diversi: la rivista autoprodotta Čapec.

Questo nuovo progetto è a suo modo davvero titanico. Pensate che per realizzare le 80 pagine di Čapec, Hurricane Ivan ha reclutato quasi un centinaio di autori da tutto il mondo!

La lista è troppo lunga da pubblicare qui (la potete consultare in questo post su Facebook), ma include mostri sacri del fumetto assieme a molti altri personaggi che per un motivo o per l’altro sono “non allineati” — qui tutti impegnati a parodiare e scardinare le regole del classico magazine, con tanto di rubriche farlocche, reportage demenziali e inchieste sovversive.

C’è la pagina di economia che insegna i trucchi per svaligiare una banca, curata da un autentico rapinatore; ci sono le vignette in stile Risate a denti stretti, ammorbate però da un umorismo nerissimo e scorretto; c’è il laboratorio di scienza in cui si impara come costruirsi una giacca resistente al taser della polizia; c’è il gioco per bambini che permette di costruirsi la propria discarica abusiva; ci sono rubriche di cinema, moda, benessere ecc., ovviamente tutte bagnate al vetriolo.

Ma Čapec offre anche racconti (tra cui il bellissimo I poveri si sparano allo specchio di Pino Tripodi), fumetti collettivi, stralci dal vero diario di un ergastolano, e molto altro. Si tratta di 80 pagine di pura follia anarchica tra insolenza e satira sociale, che sembrano uscite dalla San Francisco di fine anni ’60, quella dei gloriosi Zap Comix di Robert Crumb.

E non vi ho ancora detto la notizia più bella: Čapec è disponibile gratuitamente online sul sito di Le Strade Bianche, ma se volete una copia cartacea potete ordinarla — e il prezzo lo decidete voi.

Anch’io ho dato il mio piccolo contributo a questo salutare delirio, stilando il manifesto del Movimento degli Anatomizzatori, che potete ammirare qui sotto (cliccate sull’immagine per aprire la versione PDF in alta qualità, 9MB).

Buona lettura!

ILLUSTRATI GENESIS: Days 1 & 2

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‘Where’s the self-help section?’
She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
(Steven Wright)

This year the seven issues of the #ILLUSTRATI magazine by Logos Edizioni are each inspired by a Genesis day.
Even my column in the magazine will have to stick to this line; I therefore decided to offer readers seven self-help lessons, parroting those “personal growth” books and courses which — despite being often laughable — people seem to like so much.
In each issue I will start from a well-known detail and try to re-enchant it, by revealing the surprising background that lies behind that banality.

The first two “days” have already been published; here you can find both of them, in a double post.

Seven little lessons to rediscover our everyday life.
Seven days for the Creation… of a new perspective.

DAY 1 – AND THERE WAS LIGHT

The well-known detail: In our room, we turn on the light: a mechanical gesture we take for granted, and repeat every day. We don’t even look at that switch anymore, and we find nothing special in the bulb lighting up the room.

Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse.

The background: The flow of electric charge can be unidirectional (direct current, DC) or reverse direction many times a second (alternating current, AC). At the end of the 1880s, Thomas Edison had developed the direct current system, which was reliable but had a serious issue: it could cover a distance of only one mile off the power plant where the current was produced. George Westinghouse’s alternating current, instead, could be efficiently transmitted over long distances, but at that time it was a complex and experimental system which was not sufficiently understood even by engineers.
In order to corner this emerging market, the Edison and the Westinghouse companies embarked on a no-holds-barred propaganda campaign, which was called “the War of the Currents” by the press. Each of them claimed his own solution was better and safer than the other one; during this controversy, Harold Brown, an electrical engineer (no one had ever heard about him before), decided to take side and launched a crusade against AC. Determined to demonstrate how dangerous the alternating current was, he paid some local children to collect hundreds of stray dogs off the streets, then he killed the dogs one by one, connecting them to a generator of the kind used by Westinghouse. He claimed his tests undoubtedly proved how risky it was to use AC—but indeed, his study didn’t follow a scientific method. Brown decided to give a public demonstration of his ‘findings:’ on the 30th of July 1888, he subjected a dog to several shocks of direct current up to 1000 volts (to prove the animal would survive). When he applied a 330-volt shock of alternating current, the animal died with a last, ghastly bark. This show had a boomerang effect, because it only achieved the result of scandalizing the audience: not only was the experiment uselessly cruel but, since the dog received the lethal shock when he was already exhausted by the previous ones, this brutal charade did not prove at all that one kind of electricity was more dangerous than the other. For this reason, four days later, Brown repeated his demonstration and this time killed three dogs with one single 330-volt shock of AC. But even this attempt did not achieve the desired result of swaying public opinion, since shortly afterwards it turned out that Harold Brown wasn’t an independent researcher but Edison had hired him in order to discredit his competitor.
The War of the Currents reached its peak in 1890 when the State of New York decided to replace hanging with the electric chair. Under Edison’s pressure, they opted for AC as “lethal current.” It was a body blow to Westinghouse, who in the meantime had managed to get Nikola Tesla’s patent for a polyphase induction motor. Thanks to this and other technical improvements, Westinghouse won the war and, in 1895, brought to completion a huge power plant on the Niagara Falls.
Edison never resigned to the defeat. In 1903, he volunteered to electrocute with alternating current Topsy, a female elephant guilty, it is claimed, of killing two circus keepers. On the 4th of January, at 2.45 pm, the pachyderm was electrocuted with a 6600-volt shock, in front of Edison’s cameras filming the execution. But not even this last macabre feat succeeded in giving a bad name to alternating current, which had already become the standard both in the US and in Europe. And which still turns on our lightbulbs today.

The moment of Topsy’s electrocution.

The First Lesson: Current is “all well and good,” it is even fundamental, but it costed the life of a lot of animals, sacrificed in such an insane way only to win a patent war. This may suggest us an uncomfortable but essential thought—light is often matched with shadow, and every glow necessarily involves some darkness. As Bob Dylan sings: “Behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain.

 

DAY 2 – THE FIRMAMENT

The well-known detail: Every morning we go to work, we take a quick look at the sky, just to see if there is any cloud. We know who we are and what we have to do. Every evening we come back home at nightfall, just when the first stars appear. We never think about the stars and how absurd they are. We have worked, so we know who we are.

Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, 2014.

The background: We easily forget that the universe is still a total mystery. Its shape, how it began, how it is going to end, what was there before, what is coming after: these are basically fields of speculation. Notwithstanding the huge amount of data collected and evaluated, and despite the numerous theories developed, astrophysicists and cosmologists are often puzzled by what they see. We could say that surprise is the rule in astrophysics.
The matter we are able to see, with our telescopes and other detection instruments, sometimes behaves in such an unexpected way that we need to postulate the existence of something else in order to explain its dynamics.
In other words, since what we observe doesn’t completely add up, there must be something more —and it’s not a small part of it, since we are talking about 95%: researchers conjectured that we can see only 5% of the entire universe.

One of the most complex phenomena to understand is the expansion of the universe.
Immediately after the initial explosion, the universe started expanding very fast; but the gravitational attraction between galaxies slowed down this process and, just like a balloon being almost completely inflated, the universe started to decelerate its expansion. This deceleration led the astronomers to think that in a very distant future everything would stop and cool down. This was the ultimate fate of the universe they envisioned, unless, at a certain point, the process would reverse into the so-called Big Crunch (the opposite of the Big Bang).
This vision remained nearly unchanged during the last century, until in 1998 two different teams of researchers independently made the same disconcerting discovery. It seems that the universe kept on decelerating its expansion during the first half of its existence. And then, some 6 or 7 billion years ago, surprisingly, it started accelerating. Today, galaxies move farther apart much faster than before. How is it possible that they suddenly started to move so fast? What is pushing them away?
Since there is no apparent reason, astronomers hypothesized the existence of an invisible force, called dark energy, which might be responsible for this acceleration. If existing, this energy must be of such a magnitude as to develop the pressure needed to move entire galaxies. To make the math work, dark energy should contribute a 68% of the total energy of the universe; if we add the dark matter (another hypothetical form of matter), we get to 95%—the percentage of the universe whose components cannot be revealed even with our best instruments.
The existence, out there, all around our small planet, of an immense invisible dark ‘force’ playing marbles with galaxies could be an upsetting idea to the most sensitive of us. But the alternative is not comforting either. Indeed, researchers rejecting the hypothesis of the dark energy support something even more paradoxical, at least to the eyes of the laymen: in reality, the universe is not accelerating at all—it is time which is slowing down. According to this theory, the acceleration is only an optical illusion perceived by an observer, like we are, placed inside a spacetime which is slowly coming to a halt.

Things are actually even more bizarre than this. We must consider that what has been said so far relies on the assumption that the laws of physics will always be the same, unchangeable; and until recently everything indicated that the universe had always ‘worked’ in the same manner. Then, in 2010, an Australian study questioned this assumption. Some measurements made by ESO’s Very Large Telescope Project seem to highlight a variation in time of the so-called fine-structure constant – a fundamental quality of electromagnetism that should remain unvaried, constant, as its name suggests. Should it be confirmed, this discovery would imply that the universal laws of physics (gravity, time, space, speed of light, and so on) might not be so universal, and they could vary over time or maybe depending on the ‘area’ of the universe.

The Second Lesson: We live inside a sort of great puzzle, a paradox where the only certainty is that nothing is certain. We cannot even understand what kind of strange place we live in, so how can we always know for sure what we have to do or not to do, what is right and what is wrong? Maybe, only stupid men are certain of everything, as Chuang-Tzu said, as they “believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman”. And, when they come back from work, they have no doubts about who they are or what is expected from them, and they never think about the absurdity of the stars.

2017: A New Year of Wonders

New Year’s Day is just a convention; yet this holiday’s ultimate meaning is to make us aware of seasons, of the cyclic nature of things, to remind us that Time is both an incessant end and a continuous beginning. We suddenly feel able to turn the page, to start anew, allowing ourselves those very reveries and hopes we held back until the day before. New Year’s Day is the time to dream new dreams.

As for Bizzarro Bazar, 2017 promises to be an annus mirabilis: plenty of new things coming our way.
I still have to keep most of these projects secret (they wouldn’t be suprises, would they), but all will be revealed in due time throughout the year.

A first anticipation leaked out yesterday on Facebook.
Cult+, an RSI (Swiss Radio and Television) web format, will devote some episodes of the next season to the macabre and curious side of Rome: who do you think they called to be their guide?

The eccentric Ronco (Stefano Roncoroni, creator of the series), asked me to introduce him not just to the darker side of the Capital and Italy’s macabre heritage, but also to Rome’s underworld of seekers, scholars and creators of wonder.
An ever more present reality, which — I say this with a bit of pride — is emerging also thanks to this blog acting as a catalyst, in particular with the successful initiatives of the Academy of Enchantment. The Swiss crew was present at one of our meetings at the wunderkammer Mirabilia, interviewing both lecturers and participants from the audience; it will be interesting to see what a foreign eye saw in our passions!
You can follow all the developments on Cult+ Facebook page.

But every new year also entails looking back.
Therefore, as a welcome to 2017, I thought I would gather my four years of collaborations with the art magazine Illustrati, published by Logos, in one single e-book.

The Illustrati Archives 2012-2016 is an anthology of all the articles published on the magazine until now, pieces which never appeared on this blog.
Here’s a glance of what awaits you:

A deaf and dumb abbott sculpting a secret, monumental work; several men surviving for six years trapped in a bunker; one single man causes more damage to the planet than any other organism in the history of the world. And then: trousers made of human skin, zombie ants, haunted forests, mini porn stars, wacky scientific theories, and the mystery of the color blue – which for the ancient Greeks did not exist.

Three dollars for thirty treats of wonder.
The Kindle e-book is available at this link.
(My gratitude to those who will choose to support Bizzarro Bazar this way.)

And now back to work, unearthing new oddities, of which reality is always prodigal.
Because “the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder“.

Bizzarro Bazar su ILLUSTRATI

Qualche giorno fa vi avevamo avvertiti che era in arrivo una bella novità.

Ebbene, finalmente possiamo svelarvela: Bizzarro Bazar approda da oggi sulla carta stampata, con una rubrica fissa all’interno della rivista più straordinaria e meravigliosa che ci sia: ILLUSTRATI!

Se non la conoscete, dovreste. È di grande formato, piacevole al tatto, è colorata, folle, visionaria, è un’importante vetrina per talenti artistici vecchi e nuovi, e se tutto questo non bastasse, è gratis. Entrare a far parte di un simile progetto non può che riempirci di entusiasmo.

Il tema di questo numero, in linea con il rientro scolastico settembrino, è “Cara maestra”. Illustratori, disegnatori, grafici, artisti si passano il testimone di pagina in pagina affrontando liberamente il soggetto.

La rivista bimestrale, pubblicata da Logos Edizioni, sarà disponibile nelle vostre librerie preferite a partire da questo week-end. Nel frattempo, è già consultabile gratuitamente online, scaricabile in formato PDF oppure ordinabile – il tutto sulla pagina ufficiale di ILLUSTRATI.

E, se la rivista vi dovesse piacere, non mancate di visitarne la pagina Facebook. Buona lettura a tutti!

Ragazze & Cadaveri!

Una delle riviste preferite, qui a Bizzarro Bazar, è senza dubbio Girls & Corpses. La “prima rivista comica sulla morte”, come la definiscono i fondatori, è una pura follia editoriale che si permette di scherzare aggiungendo al patinato mondo delle pin-up una buona dose di necrofilia. Tutto, ovviamente, per il puerile gusto di poter sghignazzare anche della Beffa Finale.

Il giornale contiene interviste a scrittori e personaggi del mondo dello spettacolo, servizi fotografici, fumetti, finte pubblicità e falsi annunci scherzosi, tutti incentrati, pensate un po’, sui cadaveri… e sulle ragazze. Da un paio di numeri, inoltre, Girls & Corpses esce anche in versione tedesca.

“Perché non unire le due cose che ci piacciono di più al mondo, le belle ragazze e i cadaveri putrescenti?”, si domandano gli autori. “Un giorno speriamo che Girls & Corpses suoni familiare come Ketchup & Patatine”. Il motto della rivista: Così tanti cadaveri, così poco tempo.

Sul sito ufficiale potete trovare anche spille e T-Shirt, oltre che i numeri arretrati della rivista.