It may well be that for the next couple of months the frequency of postings will drop.
You’re off.
Today you will fly to Venice to work on the installation of this year’s Biennale for the Australian Council of the Arts.
Over the next two months therefore the blogging will probably be more frequent on your other pubblic forum, the Italian WeedyConnection.
It will be a great opportunity for you to finally see the Biennale, from the inside, and to search the city for the botanical left-overs of the earliest opening to the east.
Marco Polo and his family laid the way for the first stable route of exchanges with a previously unconnected part of the world: East Asia.
“Marco Polo (1254-1324) was an Italian voyager and merchant and one of the first Europeans to travel across Asia through China, visiting the Kublai Khan in Beijing. He left in 1271 (he was a teenager at the time) with his father (Nicolo Polo) and uncle (Maffeo Polo); they spent about 24 years traveling.”
Venezia had, what is now regarded as, the first botanical garden of continental Europe.
In 1333, Master Gualtiero developed a garden devoted to the study and procreation of specimens from around the known world for medicinal uses. Many of the plants brought back by Marco Polo’s and by successive merchants from the east found their first home in this garden.
You will look for this Garden.
You will find a copy of the Millione, the book written by Marco Polo about his voayages.
You will find the Italian WeedyConnection.
But it will mostly happen in the italian blog…
