Category: The wider contexts
World Media Are Noting The Earthquake Damage To Italy’s Priceless Historical Heritage
Posted by Peter Quennell
[Above, the unity prime minister, Mr Monti, inspects the damage]
This post explained why Italy has such bad earthquakes.
The two halves of the country are separating, and the Apennines are slowly sinking down down. Perugia is at almost dead-center of that mountain range. This post described why despite that, Perugia may be at somewhat less risk than neighboring towns.
Sunday’s earthquake hit approximately midway between Perugia and Venice, at the top right-hand corner of the earthquake zone. Seven deaths are reported, and cultural icons destroyed by the thousands.
Media have very widely reported the historical and cultural damage. This is from the report by Reuters.
San Felice Sul Panaro was just one town where the quake inflicted severe wounds on centuries of heritage, memory and tradition, in some cases erasing them.
“A thousand years of art has turned to dust,” was the headline in Monday’s La Repubblica newspaper.
The damage done to Italy’s artistic heritage was the greatest since a 1997 earthquake hit the central Umbria region and parts of the ceiling of the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi collapsed.
San Felice’s three main churches were in ruins and the town’s trademark Castle, La Rocca, was standing but wounded, perhaps fatally, by the 6.0 magnitude quake that hit Italy early on Sunday…
Started in 1332 by the Este family and enlarged in the following century, La Rocca housed a museum and was the town’s main tourist draw.
Only one of the castle’s four towers was left standing and a wide V-shaped crack in its brickwork suggested it too might fall.
Perugia Park Name Dropped, But Most Of Seattle Seems Now To Accept Knox’s Guilt And Moves On
Posted by Peter Quennell
Reports on the naming of this tiny park, now to be Summit Slope, appear in local Seattle media outlets here and here and here.
The xenophobic ugliness of the Knox-Mellas-Marriott campaign rolls on.
But many of the commenters from Seattle on the threads seem to find this slap at Perugia embarrassing and some even cowardly. The previous parks commissioner who first blinked at the naming of Perugia Park made himself wildly unpopular over this and other decisions and was forced to resign.
The pro-justice-done trend of the Seattle readers’ comments, except for the regular fanatics that biased reporter Steve Shay attracts, confirms what we are hearing from all our Seattle posters and readers. Seattle is seeing Knox’s guilt and is moving on.
The Massei Report has been very widely read among those interested in Meredith’s case, and our posters and readers say they can go days or week between encounters with anyone who still sees a railroading. Commendably, that includes in West Seattle.
One witness in Meredith’s case, the guy in the park, Antonio Curatolo, is reported-on in a couple of the same stories to have been charged with drug dealing a very long time ago.
One of several positive aftermaths of the terrible crime against Meredith seems to have been a major clamping-down against drugs in Perugia, and even cold cases are being revived.
Our main poster Machine had this to say about Curatolo in a comment on the post directly under this one.
It’s completely misleading of some journalists to refer to Antonio Curatolo as a key witness, star witness or super witness. Knox and Sollecito weren’t convicted on the strength of his evidence. His testimony merely provided further confirmation that Knox and Sollecito’s alibis are false and helped establish Meredith’s time of death.
I find it astonishing that Curatolo is facing trial for drug dealing 8 years after these offences allegedly took place. If there was sufficient evidence against him at the time, surely he would have been charged and convicted of this crime years ago. I wonder if the police officers and prosecutor involved in Curatolo’s case informed the authorities in Perugia of his alleged criminal activities.
It will be interesting to see what evidence there is against him. Photographs of him talking to a drug addict in Piazza Grimana will prove nothing. Why was wasn’t he stopped and searched for drugs? It seems there is no actual evidence that he was ever in possession of heroin. It needs to be established whether Curatolo was specifically targetted by the police for drug dealing or whether he was photographed when the police were carrying out survelliance on all the people who frequented Piazza Grimana.
Presumably all the people who think Curatolo testimony should be discounted because of the allegations against him feel the same way about the convicted baby killer and convicted mobster who have been called as witnesses for the defence.
True. There is zero sign that Antonio Curatolo had anything to gain by making things up at the trial of Knox and Sollecito. His testimony stood up well, and he was unflustered in the face of the lackluster and uncertain defense cross-examination.
In strong contrast defense witnesses Alessi and Aviello are both in prison and hoping for breaks, are almost certainly potential perjurers, and may blink rather than taking the stand and face perjury charges and longer sentences
Worth noting that the defenses have NEVER produced a witness that actually undermined the real case, as opposed to simply raising bizarre hypotheticals.
An Improvement To The Old City of Perugia: The End Of Civilization As We Know It?!
Posted by Peter Quennell
Probably not.
The Italians are veritable geniuses at design, and all over Italy you can see the starkly ancient and the starkly modern working very well side-by-side.
Boutiques in the ancient city-center buildings throughout Italy are often stunning in their interior modernity. Some Perugia examples can be seen here and here.
And the mountain autostradas (see bottom shot here) swoop and swerve along through tunnels and over bridges, often hundreds of feet high, in a way that makes you want to keep driving forever.
Perugia already has one major modern project that looks really good, is extremely useful, and generates an enormous amount of fun. Namely this one.
And another project now in the works is a very long escalator from hard by Meredith’s house to the highest point in the city.
This solar structure above and below is over the Via Mazzini which connects the great Corso Vanucci and its larger piazza with the smaller piazza slightly below where the courthouse complex is located.
You can see the courthouse directly ahead in the shot above, and in the shot below the courthouse is directly behind.
The blue vans carrying the defendants to trial usually unload right here.
