Saturday, November 08, 2008

LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


This is my letter to the President of the United States of America, which I also wish to share with you:




Dear President Obama,

When you come to Italy, when you come to Florence, I particularly invite you to a world monument against the practice of slavery. Frederick Douglass came here to the Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence to pay respects to Theodore Parker who had preached courageously against slavery. Buried here as well are Frances Trollope and Richard Hildreth who wrote the first and second anti-slavery novels, copied next by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Likewise Hiram Powers and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she writing an impassioned sonnet against slavery and serfdom in America and Russia for his statue the 'Greek Slave' exhibited at the very center of the 1851 London Crystal Palace Exhibition. For this reason Lord Frederick Leighton had a broken slave shackle sculpted on EBB's tomb to celebrate her love of freedom. Also buried here is Nadezhda, who came at 14, a black Nubian slave, to Florence, dying here in her thirties. She was baptised in a Russian Orthodox family with the name meaning 'Hope', her story being told on her tomb in Cyrillic.



Near our Cemetery is Piazza Beccaria, named after Cesare Beccaria who wrote against capital punishment as cruel and barbaric, unworthy of civilization, his book influencing the Grand Duke of Tuscany to abolish executions, 30 November 1786, that had formerly taken place in that square, Russia soon following suit.

I lectured on the 80 American burials in our 'English' Cemetery at Little Rock a year ago and was so deeply moved by their Civil Rights exhibition, then still in the small gas station by the school, far more moved than I was by the acres of marble of the Clinton Library. I organized our fifth international conference, 'The City and the Book V', on our 80 Americans in this Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery this past October, our most eloquent speaker being the art historian Marilyn Richardson.

We are restoring this world monument in Piazzale Donatello with the help of Roma families from Romania. The Roma had been slaves of the monasteries in Romania from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Victims of the Holocaust, they received no reparations. Their Indo-European language, Romany, goes unrecognized by the European Union, of which they are citizens yet the Union's largest and poorest minority. Our project combines education and work, and a major part of it is creating their wooden rocking cradles together. The funds they earn from their restoration of the nineteenth-century garden of the cemetery and conserving the ironwork of the tombs, seen in the midst of all Florentine traffic, then goes to build and repair their homes in Romania, which next allows them to work legally there, instead of begging in Florentine streets. This because I listened to the women who told me their dreams were for roofs that did not have holes letting in the snow and rain and for education for their children. Together we are creating a Dictionary in four languages, Romany, Romanian, Italian and English, and with their drawings, that can be used by these families and others in home schooling. Many are illiterate, particularly the women, their poverty being currently too great for them to pay the incidental expenses for their children's schooling, heating, books, clothes, etc. I found most of our families, when I visited them in Romania, live twelve to one windowless room, next to the horse's stall, a recipe for illnesses like tuberculosis. We call our project 'From Graves to Cradles'.



Hiram Powers' statue 'America', sculpted here in Florence, was not accepted by Congress because he had her trampling on slave shackles. It's a magnificent work. Much more lovely than the French-built Statue of Liberty, and truly American. Visit the Smithsonian's Musem of American Art with your daughters to see it. Marilyn Richardson can also tell you her story about how she discovered Edmonia Lewis' powerful ‘Cleopatra’ in Chicago and had it come to the Smithsonian.

You are very warmly welcome here,

Sincerely,
Julia Bolton Holloway, Ph.D.
President, Aureo Anello
Director, Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei'
http://www.umilta.net
http://www.florin.ms
http://www.ringofgold.eu
http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com




We are now at 1535 signatures on the web at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/471134975,
'That the Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence be kept open, be restored and be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site', and with 4321 signatures in-house from our visitors, for a total of 5856 signatures. We should be very grateful for your signature, too, and those of your family.

If you wish to donate to the Aureo Anello Association for the restoration of the 'English' Cemetery you can do so by a cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through the Pay Pal 'Donate' button below, which can also be used for the CDs, for the hand-bound limited edition books or for the sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's 'Clasped Hands' or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html), or some or all of these.











Friday, October 24, 2008

BOOKS, BOOKS, AND MORE BOOKS

WHOLE BOOKS, WHOLESOME BOOKS:
MORE 'FROM GRAVES TO CRADLES'

Books are Books of the Dead, are Books of Life. We have joyously been working in this 'English' Cemetery with a Roma family with their writing of a book in four languages. You can read it on-line at http://www.umilta.net/Romany.html. And with their building their cradle for their coming child while also conserving all the beautiful iron work in this 'English' Cemetery.

Daniel Dumitrescu and Vandana Culea making their cradle for their baby who will be called Gabriela.







And this is the new cradle:



Then I went to Romania, where I found they lived twelve to one room next to the horse's stall. They are now building their house in a flower-filled meadow I also saw when there.

Today they have sent pictures of Gabriela as she now is



and of the house-building.



Only its roof is lacking.



Look at the courage of the grandmother. How empowering she is. Can we help with this most essential part by paying Daniel to do further restoration in the Cemetery? Pray that this be allowed.

Two of Christopher Alexander's beautiful volumes, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, have been lent to me. He is saying much the same. that the hut on water in the Mekong Delta of a poor family has more beauty and utility than has a cold modern architect's fantasy. Look him up on the web. I like his story, teaching at Berkeley he has retired to Sussex; it's rather like mine.

Our library is the Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei'. I think you will see why when you read her little book: http://www.umilta.net/bluegreen.html

Fai attenzione alle persone e alla natura:
E` molto più importante che leggere un libro.



Paying attention to people and nature
Is far more important than reading a book.

Creating a book from beginning to end. That is what I have always done. And now more than ever. All my many published books have been researched, written, typeset and many of them even hand-bound by myself. I think it is important teaching even very small children the art of the book. I used to bring wooden blocks and show children how the letters came out backward/forwards when they were inked and pressed on paper. Then let them do paintings and collages and tell me their stories which I typed up so they could place them with their drawings. These three and four-year olds, knowing their own stories, then could read them to their mothers and fathers! I used to so want such programs for the Head Start schools. Which instead said: 'No, we can't do that. We must keep these children away from books. They must first learn socializing skills. So deprived they are'. Not understanding their very teachers were enforcing deprivation and illiteracy. All you need for a young girl to become a writer, a scholar, is a library she can explore. She doesn't need schooling apart from that.
Think of Christine de Pizan, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of Mary Somerville. Mary, with no university education, only six months of schooling in an iron cage to straighten her back, discovered two planets, wrote scientific books that were used as text books at the University of Cambridge, and taught Ada Lovelace mathematics, who then with Charles Babbage invented the computer, she suggesting to him using the Jacquard loom cards with holes punched in them and the binomial theorem.

We have a friend born in the Mugello, where Giotto was born. He comes many Sundays and recites Dante's Cantos, many by heart, while we record him, our Roma families often listening, too, while looking at Botticelli's drawings for the poem. He is better than Robert Benigni! Most recently, our American scholars at the conference on the City and the Book V found his performance the most moving of their stay in Florence. You can find him at http://www.florin.ms. and the conference Proceedings at http://www.florin.ms/CBV.html

Now that lovely design on Gabriela's cradle. It comes from the house in the midst of a garden in Rome of the Cardinal Bessarione. I fell in love with it when I first saw it, at 21, with my first baby, Robin, in my arms. I sketched it then in situ, and many times afterwards from memory, when that lovely house was shut up and abandoned. A Paradise to which I always yearned to return. The Cardinal at the 1439 Council of Florence reconciled Greece and Rome, the Orthodox with the Catholic, though for so brief a while, bringing so many Greek classics into the Latin West. Why I paint the design on the cradles of Roma babies, whose ancestors had already reached Romania by that date and become themselves such devout Orthodox Christians, though never accepted by either Church, indeed being the slaves of Romanian monasteries from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The design is everything William Morris and Christopher Alexander espouse, the use of natural forms, here the pomegranate of poets, of natural colour, of spheres, not harsh man-made, machine-made boxes.



There are wrong books and right books. Wrong books are for power and against people, David Ricardo and Milton Friedman's laissez-faire economics that caused Ireland's genocide and our present disasters, Machiavelli's Prince and Dean Swift's Modest Proposal, written sarcastically but taken straight, leading again to corporate greed and the Irish genocide of the Potato Famine. Behind these the figures of the Medici. Before them and again under Savonarola Florence was a Republic where Christ was King and where beauty reigned, skilled crafts being prized and the entry into government by the people, of the people, for the people, of great creative energy. Recall those early rooms in the Uffizi filled with saints and gold leaf, not the later ones filled with the Medici, bitumen backgrounds, pornography. About self, not the whole; about greed, not the charity of the Misericordia, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the Buon'uomini di San Martino; about power, not prosperity; about lust, not love.

There are right books. Most of the Bible, certainly Isaiah, the Gospels. The Egyptian Book of the Dead describing how loving married couples shall have a garden they will tend and reap if they have been kind to their slaves and done no ill, but individuals who have been for themselves, who have murdered or stolen or worse. shall be devoured by a monster. The Koran where it speaks of Mary's Annunciation and of how good Jews obeying the Torah, good Christians obeying the Gospels, good Moslems obeying the Koran, shall be saved. And Julian of Norwich's Showing of Love.

My Bibles. Their covers had broken off from their much travelling. I took them to my book-binding maestro, Enrico Giannini, whose family have been binding books for five generations, and who has taught me and my Roma families how to marble paper, how to bind books. Together we discussed how best to save them and all the genealogical notes I had written on the end-papers for my children, about my family in Ireland, my family in England, my family in Portugal and Holland, my husband's slave-owning family in America. I told Enrico the story of how my sandals had become too old, too odorous, in Dallas. How I went to a shoe store and was so ashamed that the salesman was Black and knelt before me placing new sandals on my feet. And I apologized, explaining I hated changing old shoes for new, the old so comfortable but far too smelly. And he agreed. It's just like that with his Bibles, he said. When he completely knows his way around them their covers are falling off and he must buy new ones. Leather-covered Bibles, leather sandals, Christ's feet. And now Enrico has telephoned and they are ready. So I cycle across the beautiful Ponte Santa Trinita and come to his workshop and they are splendid. I have the money to pay for the work. No, he says. But what he would like are two packets of Irish moss for marbling paper. The Carageen moss coming to me in packets, because in Ireland it is for human consumption, for breakfast, and not expensive, and these packets always arrive exactly when they are needed from a great Irish scholar in Cork, Maire Herbert. Who had come to the first and second City and Book conferences in Florence we organized, giving marvellous papers at them.

Medieval monasteries, obeying Benedict's Rule, knew that for physical, mental and spiritual health a balance was needed, of work, study, prayer, the use of the body, the mind and the soul. Our modern education, forgetting this, now has the young rebelling with the ugliest graffiti even on the beautiful convent where St Therese of Lisieux stayed as a young child in Florence. Perhaps because there is no healthful recreation. We recall the beauty of her sister's photography, the play-acting they did of Therese as Joan of Arc, and the loveliness of her theology written by one so young. This is what our library is about in this cemetery, a place where we weed and garden with Roma families, build with them cradles for their babies, share with them Dante and Botticelli, and where photographs of them are honoured on its walls and they are welcomed. In seven years they have stolen nothing. The dry walling has been repaired, the cast and wrought iron conserved, the garden planted and weeded, and soon -- we hope -- the tombs cleaned. The first family came to us with the mother, who is illiterate, singing this as her lullaby to her baby and which I recorded seven years ago: http://www.umilta.net/alleluiawhole.mp3 [cut and paste this in the URL line to listen, then reduce that page and return to this one). And now over seven years our Aureo Anello Association has made possible first the buying of a house for this family, the re-building of a flood-destroyed house for another family, the rebuilding of a roof of a third family headed by a widow and the sending of her 18-year old adopted son who was first in his class the one year he had had in school to study in a six month program for his diploma, and now the building of this house by our fourth family, these extended families each living in one room, around twelve people. We have done this through listening to the women begging in Florence's streets, learning their greatest need is the roof over their family in Romania to be intact, and then the education of their children. A cemetery restored. Fifty Romanian Roma of all ages - many lacking schooling - helped to become European Citizens. Done through a library in a cemetery. 'From Graves to Cradles'. Of which we have now built ten. Nine of them with babies in them. The tenth for our library. Flouting Heloise and Abelard!

Blessings,

Julia Bolton Holloway
President Aureo Anello Association Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei' and Friends of the 'English' Cemetery
P.le Donatello, 38
50132 FIRENZE
ITALY



We are now at 1498 signatures on the web at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/471134975,
'That the Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence be kept open, be restored and be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site', and with 4190 signatures in-house from our visitors, for a total of 5688 signatures. We have decided to keep them coming.

If you wish to donate to the Aureo Anello Association for the restoration of the 'English' Cemetery you can do so by a cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through the Pay Pal 'Donate' button below, which can also be used for the CDs, for the hand-bound limited edition books or for the sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's 'Clasped Hands' or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html), or some or all of these.











Saturday, May 03, 2008

APPELLO/APPEAL

We have together created so much beauty in the English Cemetery. Take a walk with us amongst our purple irises - which are Florence's lily.


The main avenue of which the right side is about to be destroyed.


Newly restored tomb to the right was placed by Mary Somerville for her husband William. She discovered two planets, taught mathematics to Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who, with Charles Babbage, invented the computer.


Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Leighton copying the iris which is Florence's lily for the tomb motif. Left side of central avenue.




August Mannerheim, Finland. Top left of central avenue.


James Lorimer Graham, American Consul, top right of central avenue.


Southwood Smith, beginning of left avenue.


Left avenue


Ann Susanna Horner. Left of central avenue.


Arthur Hugh Clough's tomb and the last standard rose left of an avenue of these on right of central avenue.

But all this is now about to be destroyed. In January the Cemetery will be shut down, the digging will start and concrete loculi for the burial of ashes placed everywhere. Can you write a letter to the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church to be copied to the Belle Arti which judicates concerning historical monuments, saying that the 500 modern concrete loculi amongst the 700 historic tombs that remain of the 1400 burials here will destroy the atmosphere of the place. Explain that you understand the Swiss need the funding for the Cemetery these loculi for the burial of ashes would give but that they need to be placed with sensitivity for the historic and artistic importance of this place. Request that the work be carried out first on one side, then on the other, allowing the Cemetery to still be visitable. Request also that the 42 loculi planned along the right side of the avenue blocking access to Arthur Hugh Clough's grave and destroying the symmetry of the very beautiful central avenue be placed elsewhere in the Cemetery. Specify also that the tomb slabs for the new graves be simple and in marble, so as not to clash with the historic monuments. Send the letters to this address in e-mails or by post and I will deliver them to the Swiss Church which owns the Cemetery and to the Belle Arti.

Yours sincerely,
Julia Bolton Holloway
President, Aureo Anello Association Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei' and Friends of the 'English' Cemetery
Piazzale Donatello, 38
50132 FIRENZE, ITALY


We are now at 1482 signatures on the web at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/471134975,
'That the Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence be kept open, be restored and be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site', and with 4150 signatures in-house from our visitors, for a total of 5632 signatures. We have decided to keep them coming.

If you wish to donate to the Aureo Anello Association for the restoration of the 'English' Cemetery you can do so by a cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through the Pay Pal 'Donate' button below, which can also be used for the CDs, for the hand-bound limited edition books or for the sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's 'Clasped Hands' or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html), or some or all of these.











Tuesday, April 01, 2008

CEMENT AND FLOWERS


Wild irises (Florence's purple lilies) planted by the tombs

This morning I woke up remembering a story Rose had written. Rose was an abandoned gypsy child taken to an orphanage in England by her mother because her father could not control his drinking in their poverty. This is part of her story she wrote for me, for us, in my convent. In which she described, after a successful career as army cook, buying a house. The previous owner had been a woman dying of cancer and angry with the world and unable to tend her garden. She ordered it covered over with cement. Rose and her children now set to work with pickaxes, removing that layer, at night taking hunks of concrete to the skip illegally, and finally restoring the once-lost, murdered garden. Rose died of cancer before she could see her book published on the web and in print. But she left for us seeds of words and seeds of flowers, a book and a garden.

Camus in his Notebooks says we are free to stoke the crematoria at Auschwitz or to nurse lepers in Africa. We are also free to cover the earth with concrete, purchase and drive gas-guzzlers - or to plant gardens. Those who do the first in these series will do their best to cover gardens with cement, those in the second part will be lugging hunks of concrete secretly in the night! But we just might between us save or restore some gardens, heal some ravaged bodies and minds and souls and ourselves have peace of mind and great joy.

And this is now happening here! For years this Cemetery has been put to weed killer and four years ago almost all its nineteenth-century plants rooted out - to save money. It looked so gray and dead. Finally I persuaded the Swiss to stop the weed-killing, visitors have been giving us bulbs, lavender, rosemary, strawberry plants, box, myrtle, pomegranate and rose bushes, and master gardeners have been giving us advice and help. Not only this, my weeders of stinging nettles and dandelions are gypsy families and we have now won the right to establish a training center here for them, an apprenticeship, where they can learn gardening, stone masonry, blacksmithing, sewing, book-binding, paper marbling, reading and writing, so they can work to repair their houses in Romania and send their children there to school. I love our Rom families. They don't really need training, already knowing how to build dry walls expertly, how to carpenter (the women!), how to sew (the men!), how to tell weeds from flowers, before you even tell them. But no one will give them work anywhere. This will be our breakthrough. Because of the television broadcast on Easter Day (you can find it in the middle of the video that you can call up by Googling 'tg1 speciale silenzio Dio' and then its archive) people are now finding the funds for this program from foundations. We are writing proposals explaining how they work in families, not as individuals. And the women work better almost than the men. In our seven years of them here nothing has been stolen. We are calling our project 'From Graves to Cradles', for we even make their beautiful traditional rocking cradles - which are immediately put to use with their babies in them!

Our Cemetery is now filled with flowers, lavender and rose petal sachets are perfuming the library, and there is great joy everywhere. The Rom and I are planting shoots in pots under plastic - what the Italians call a 'vivaio', a nursery garden. Costs nothing. It is so much better to produce than to consume, so much better to build a hospital, a school, a library, a garden. And to keep on doing so. A great conspiracy of peace, of healing, of learning, of nurturing in the world.


Florence's Cathedral seen from the 'English' Cemetery

We are now at 1488 signatures on the web at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/471134975,
'That the Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence be kept open, be restored and be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site', and with 4134 signatures in-house from our visitors, for a total of 5572 signatures. We have decided to keep them coming.

If you wish to donate to the Aureo Anello Association for the restoration of the 'English' Cemetery you can do so by a cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through the Pay Pal 'Donate' button below, which can also be used for the CDs, for the hand-bound limited edition books or for the sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's 'Clasped Hands' or tondos with their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprè's sculpture can also be found at http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html), or some or all of these.













Sincerely,
Julia Bolton Holloway
Aureo Anello Association for the Library and Cemetery
Piazzale Donatello, 38
50132 FIRENZE, ITALY


'The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world'