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Dino Baldi

Marina Ballo Charmet
Oracoli, santuari e altri prodigi

Sopralluoghi in Grecia

Quodlibet Humbold, 2013

“Greece has created myths: other myths have grown up around it.” With these words Alberto Savinio summed up one of the possible meanings of a new voyage in Greece, taken in the spring of 2012 by Dino Baldi, a classical philologist, and Marina Ballo, a photographer. This book is the story of an itinerary, almost a pilgrimage, through the sacred places of continental Greece, from the Peloponnese to Macedonia, Olympia to Mt. Olympus, passing through Epidaurus, Eleusis, Delphi, Dodona and other, less familiar sites overlooked by the usual tours of today’s travelers. First of all, the oracles, gates of communication between gods and men; but also places the Greeks acknowledged, across ethnic boundaries, as a shared heritage representing their identity, prompting travel even in those days: the sanctuaries and the sites of the Panhellenic Games.

Stories, myths, places that in Baldi’s prose are combined with reflections on the legacy of the classical world, thoughts that pay little homage to the clichés of standard schooling; at the same time, Ballo gets lost and then finds her way amidst the stones, providing us with a miraculous Ariadne’s thread, avoiding any commonplace imagery. The voyage is also a chance to meet a people that live the contradiction between being heirs to the civilization from which all things are said to spring, and inhabitants of a present full of shadows; a populace shaken to its very core by the winds of crisis.

The book presents Marco Rinaldi’s text Il viaggio in Grecia di Gastone Novelli.

Others extra texts:

Maria Giovanna Cicciari, Hyperion, Appunti per un film sulla Grecia
Alberto Saibene, Introduzione semiseria alla cucina greca
Appunti locali: informazioni pratiche e mappe dei siti archeologici