Jean-Pierre
Barricelli
Fireplaces of Civilization
ISBN 1-879378-07-8 (paper)
ix, 176 pages, $15
Professor, linguist and musician, the late
Jean-Pierre Barricelli (1924 - 1997) roamed through the world's cultures with
a familiarity that belongs only to a very rare species –- the Renaissance
man. In this book, one of his last, he evokes the leisurely and yet
exhilarating joys of French cuisine, Italian poetry, Spanish music and all
the permutations thereof, as if he were a young and very bright romantic out
for a stroll in the streets. It's a refreshing and uplifting visit to
the fountains of world culture in the company of a seemingly omniscient guide.
The cover, drawn by the author, puts landmarks from Florence, Paris, Sicily
and Grenada all in one place, in an Escher-like composition.
Excerpt from Fireplaces of Civilization:
More than any other city, Florence evokes a tumult of sensations and images that besiege my memory years after the initial impact of wandering through its austere streets. Memory soars over various mindscapes of the past, the present, and the future, blending chronologies while giving relief to that sensitive and superior reality, that concrete and abstract life of forms and associations which in the aggregate shapes what one calls character or personality.
The Tuscan capital is less a city than a beloved entity, and if it is a monument of the past, it offers itself also as a pulse of the present while extending a hope and a warning for the future. For it stands, not as a plastic image of a glorious and bygone moment in history, but as an eternal mode of beauty, something that stimulates movement in my maze of recollections, as it would for anyone who belongs to that breed that lives not only of the intellect but also of the heart. In no other place was I moved by that essential quality of the critical mind, the quality of loving. For of Florence I love her virile femininity, those aesthetic movements of the emotion that possesses me as I absorb the entire city from the Belvedere of the Boboli gardens or from the Piazzale Michelangelo. They emanate from the aristocratic green of the cypresses and invite me to retreat into meditative silence. And the meditation contains messages of glory and genius, suggesting that I may ask the city for counsel because –- yes – museum that it is, it still resists being called a vestige or a preserving vault. Hence the complex fascination of Florence, whose symbolic lily, not surprisingly, vaunts a vibrant color.
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