Sabato scorso sul supplemento dedicato ai viaggi del Financial Times, storico quotidiano londinese, sono stati pubblicati due rilevanti articoli che si occupano di Ferrara. Due i temi scelti dai giornalisti Dan Hofstadter e Justin Marozzi: la mostra del Simbolismo di palazzo dei Diamanti e le opere dello scrittore, poeta e saggista ferrarese Giorgio Bassani.
Nei due lunghi e dettagliati servizi giornalistici vengono descritti aspetti, atmosfere, collegamenti storici e artistici, dettagli e aneddoti di una città che è stata culla del rinascimento e luogo di nascita e crescita culturale, artistica e urbanistica.
Ampi cenni alla mostra appena conclusa, a un artista ferrarese, Giorgio De Chirico e a una cittadina simbolo dell'architettura del '900, Tresigallo sono contenuti nel pezzo di Dan Hofstadter. Justin Marozzi ripercorre invece il cammino del "narratore ebreo" attraverso i suoi romanzi e il suo legame con "la città più bassa nella valle del Po, da lui descritta con affettuoso distacco.

Questi gli articoli pubblicati (in lingua originale).

FT WEEKEND - TRAVEL: Ferrara
Financial Times del 19/05/2007 , articolo di Justin Marozzi
Had it not been for Vittorio De Sica's film adaptation, which scooped the Oscar for best foreign film in 1971, Giorgio Bassani's politically powerful classic would have languished in even greater obscurity than it does now.
Italians rightly cherish this understated author, poet and essayist. "The memory of the great writer will remain alive in all of us," the then Italian prime minister Massimo D'Alema said on Bassani's death in 2000. "The poetry and political commitment of his work place it among the most beautiful pages of 20th-century Italian literature."
First published in 1962 to international acclaim, the novel is set in Ferrara in the years 1938 to 1942. Giorgio is our middle-class Jewish narrator, who tells the story of the Finzi-Continis, an uncommonly grand, aristocratic family, also Jewish, who live apart from the rest of Ferrara in splendid isolation. The high walls that divide them from the city initially offer protection. Then, as the war years accelerate under Mussolini's Fascist regime, safety slides into outright danger. Jews must contend with racial laws, reprisals and deportation to death camps. The haughty Finzi-Continis, shut up in their rarefied world, are oblivious to the impending tragedy. Status - and high walls - count for nothing when the family is deported to Germany in 1943.
As a Jewish writer who survived the Second World War in Italy - he lost relatives to Buchenwald - Bassani brings to bear direct personal experience of the unfolding horrors of wartime Italy.
Yet this is much more than an anti-Fascist tract. The darkness is both political and personal. As the atmosphere of repression intensifies, the Finzi-Continis deign to visit the temple and even open up the grounds of their mansion to the local Jewish community. In goes hopeful Giorgio, his heart set on the hopelessly unattainable daughter Micol. Captivated by this latter-day Estella to Giorgio's Pip, he starts losing track of what is happening in Ferrara. Eventually, his adolescent dreams are snuffed out. "She looked into my eyes, and her gaze entered me, straight, sure, hard: with the limpid inexorability of a sword." An epigraph from Manzoni has already pointed the way towards this moment: "The heart, to be sure, always has something to say about what is to come, to him who heeds it. But what does the heart know? Only a little of what has already happened."
Bassani was often talked of as a potential Nobel laureate. His evocation of place and period, here and in other Ferrara novels, mark him out as an exceptionally gifted writer sensitive to the physical and emotional landscape around him. The city and its surroundings in the lower Po valley loom from these pages in rambling, finely crafted prose. At times it can be as dense and heavy as the soil of this deeply unspoilt corner of Italy, but it is never less than a pleasure to plough through. A masterpiece on memory, love, dislocation and solitude. (Justin Marozzi)

FT WEEKEND - TRAVEL: Symbolic values
Financial Times del 19/05/2007 , articolo di Dan Hofstadter
It's appropriate that a huge exhibition of symbolist painting, Il Simbolismo, covering the period from Gustave Moreau to Gustav Klimt, and full of writhing nudes and femmes fatales, should have opened this February in Ferrara. The show, which runs until late this month and presents works by Puvis de Chavannes, Gauguin, Redon and Munch, among others, and was so packed with spellbound viewers one recent Sunday that I could hardly move, brought home a truth about this beautiful Italian city. For the symbolist movement, so engrossed in the experience of erotic fantasy and dream, directly prefigured surrealism, which arguably was born right here.
Ferrara lies in the lowlands of the country's eastern Po Valley. It is substantially unspoilt, often wreathed in mist, traversed by cobbled streets and medieval alleys and dominated by a castle that is also a work of art. As befits a university town, it is swept by pulsating waves of cyclists and its many churches and mansions can be easily reached by bicycle. Here, too, the mutual exchange of the real and the symbolic, the aesthetic and the promotional, tends to become arrestingly visible. An example is the Palazzo dei Diamanti, which is hosting the symbolism show. This fabulous building, with its dragon-like hide of diamond-shaped blocks, gave palpable form to a heraldic device favoured by the ruling Este family, who saw the diamond as an emblem of permanence.
I owe to a friend, a Ferrarese writer of wit and verve, the following historical titbit. It is well known that Giorgio de Chirico painted his best pictures between 1915 and 1917, a period he spent in Ferrara, recovering from war wounds. One day de Chirico noticed, in the window of a clothing shop called Cottica, in via Mazzini, a pair of unclothed mannequins that suggested, as my friend put it, a "suspension between past and future". Actually, Cottica displayed bare mannequins once a year, merely to mark the return of the fashion cycle, but they soon showed up in de Chirico's paintings as signature elements of the style dubbed "la Metafisica", a direct forerunner of surrealism. Thus, what began as perfectly ordinary - some objects in a Ferrara vitrine - ended up as impossible and otherworldly: window-dressing transformed into a dream.
For a place so singularly lovely, so central to the history of art and letters, Ferrara is often left unexplored by visitors, perhaps because most of its treasures were carted off or looted after the fall of the Este family in 1598. The Estensi, whose ancestors were part ofthe Germanic tribe of Longobards or Lombards, had feudal holdings to the east who rose to power in the late middle ages, when the River Po or, after a later diversion of its bed, a ghostly branch of it, still flowed through the city. They derived legitimacy from a papal grant, from a degree of popular support and, more intangibly, from their good taste and showmanship. Everywhere in Ferrara, from the superbly-proportioned Castello Estense to the various delizie, or "delights", as their palaces were called, the visual intelligence of the Estensi shines. Whenever Ferrarese chat about local culture, their name inevitably comes to the fore and, for all their faults, people still rue the day when the papacy sent them packing. Most notably, they supported writers. The great Italian poets of the 16th century - Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso - were all supported by the Estensi, though not necessarily at Ferrara.
Architectural historians have recently shown that Ferrara was redesigned in the Renaissance according to a city plan involving the modular repetition of certain lengths and circumferences, perhaps with reference to some Pythagorean scheme. Within this urban space, whose proportions can feel truly musical to the walkeror cyclist, lurk numerous treasures that survived the post-Este depredations, but some initiative is requiredto seek them out. Take the productsof the Ferrarese Workshop of the mid-15th century, an atelier whose existence the great Italian art historian Roberto Longhi first posited in 1936.
Much of Ferrara is built of slightly irregular, rosy-brown brick, which perfectly suits the steep angles and sensuous curves of Renaissance military architecture. In my trips to Ferrara, I have always enjoyed walking at sundown on, or just outside, the city walls, which effectively gird the town and were partly rebuilt in the early 16th century by Alfonso I d'Este. These matchless examples of minimalist design stretch for six miles, and are frequently bordered by luxuriant parks, gardens and evocative cemeteries.
Of the fascination of Ferrara's eastern hinterland a lot might be said, but everything would come back to la bonifica, a word that means something like "land reclamation through drainage". One is distinctly reminded of the UK's East Anglia in this area of wetlands, canals, waterbirds, eel fisheries and beaches. Even here, however, one finds an echo of the eternal wish to use design to promote some group in power - not, in this case, the Este family, but rather the Fascist regime.
If at mid-morning you walk around the streets of Tresigallo, you may, for a moment, imagine that you've strayed into a painting by de Chirico. The haunting silence, the long colonnades, the sensation of antiquity conjured by a dream, but a dream too elemental to bother with detail - it is all there. The town, situated halfway between Ferrara and the Adriatic coast in an area of fruit cultivation, was brought into being in the 1930s by Edmondo Rossoni, Mussolini's minister of agriculture, as one of a series of città di fondazione - cities straight off the drawing board (another is Sabaudia, near Rome).
This sort of architecture (essentially stripped-down neoclassicism with a dash of modernism), which cannibalises de Chirico for nationalistic purposes,is called razionalista by Italians, but Tresigallo's D-shaped piazza, a tribute to the Duce, seems less rationalistic than bizarre. In the carvings over the main portals, as my friend also noted, much that is central to both Romanand Christian iconography is reprocessed for Fascist purposes. But whereas de Chirico is genuinely beautiful,Tresigallo would only make a "beautiful" movie location - not quite thesame thing.
As I left Ferrara by train, it seemed to me that if there are many places where art and ideas have undergone a long interchange, it is seldom as clear, both to the eye and brain, as it is in these parts. Sometimes the people who commission art are almost as important as those who make it, and we have the Estensi to thank for much of the loveliness of this surprising city.
Dan Hofstadter is the author of 'Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples'