Il Tirreno Giornale (PISA, Italia, Tuesday 11 June 2002)
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The book on the revelations by Antonino Caleca is presented at the Feltrinelli bookstore by the editor Pacini PISA. Perhaps they have discovered the true authors of the Tower of Pisa. We have already spoken of it about a month ago, but this time the names are made facts in public during the presentation of the book by Antonino Caleca with the title "The Tower of Pisa, Photographic and Historical Journey" ("La Torre di Pisa, viaggio fotografico e storico"). At the Feltrinelli bookstore, in Corso Italia, the public was present thick with impassioned university teachers, and students of Pisan history. The volume, available in a bilingual Italian and English edition, and which contains photographic reportage by Aurelio Amendola, an art photographer of international fame, whose work offers a suggestive and special visit to the bell tower, has been introduced by the publisher Pierfrancesco Pacini. Then they have presented the historical work by Ottavio Banti of the university of Pisa and the art historian Enrico Castelnuovo of the Normal School, about whom the author, Anthony Caleca, teacher at the University of Siena, has spoken. The work, brief and concise, consists of a wise man who, with a rhythm that reminds one of the sequence of a detective story (as Castelnuovo has observed ) tracks down, after an impassioned investigation, the "true" authors of the Tower of Pisa. They would not be, as thought for centuries, Bonanno Pisano and Thomas Pisano, but for the lowest part, Gerardo of Gerardo, an architect of the XIII century till now almost unknown, and for the upper part Giovanni Pisano, the celeberated sculptor, who was also an experienced architect. The wise man follows the withered footsteps of the history of the construction of the bell tower and opens new and interesting proofs to support of his thesis, that won't fail to reopen the debate among students of art. Then there is a curious unpublished anthology, contained in the volume and assembled by the young student Lorenzo Carletti, of the opinions on the Tower of Pisa expressed over the centuries by illustrious characters and less illustrious from all over the world. It goes from the admirable expressions of Herman Melville to the acute observations of physicist Albert Einstein, from a lyric hallucinated by William Wordsworth, to the vivacious chronicle of a suicide by Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, to the continuous variations on the theme of the "unfortunate" tower made in recent times for the use of the children of Gianni Rodari. |
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