"Once upon a time..." Amelia Pisante | ||
For about 900 years the word “castle” has entered our architectural, literary, fairy, legendary vocabulary giving life to history and the histories of every nation. Also the metaphors have multiplied: to build castles in the air, to tell a castle of lies, a leader is like a castle and, in the collective image, a castle represents the place where the accessibility seems forbidden to common mortals, the poor, the common wayfarer.
So, the castle, as an architectural and conceptual representation of power, social and territorial hegemony, economic wealth, owner’s exclusiveness, dark and mysterious lair of good and evil where the humanity models itself or conforms to the dimensions of what is mastodontic, becomes symbol of intangible and untouchable superiority.
Castle as natural habitat of noble sagas, feuds among powerful castes as theatre of true or fanciful tragedies (Shakespearian Hamlet is the symbol par excellence of that).
Castle as fortification, defense from the enemy, war emblem where the protagonists will not be the simple dead or mercenary soldiers, but always who owns and manages the economic and social supremacy.
Castle as hegemony of the loneliness ( the unicity and structural isolation on the territory), construction as a barrier that prevents the entrance to not authorized people and as a choice of elite and self-referential life.
Here is the inspiration of the literary impulse that stimulates the creation of legends that feeds the mystery often linked to horror,
translation by dr.ssa Francesca Perotti, curator "Museo della Stampa", Soncino
that becomes interpretation of the “apparent impossible” because nothing has ever stimulated the curiosity of the invisible both in children and adults more than the fairy fantasy. The myth, the legend, the fable, the fairy tale are able, perhaps, to tell the anxiety of the subconscious by releasing it, with a free narrative form, from the tensions and uncertainties of the existential doubts.
But a castle is also the place where the voices fade away and light up, like a lot of lights, with trembling flames, the dreams alternate to the daily reality, women and men compete with the extraordinariness of feelings and emotions, love and hate find their natural location in the magnificence of halls and small halls.
If the imposing walls and the arcades of the ceilings could speak, they would tell us stories of ordinary disorder, typical of the human hear and perceive. Perhaps behind each closed door the desire of eternity is hidden, not to disappear, to remain in the existential time, to reappear, in a ghostly way, not to renounce the self-promotion that the events of the stories have created in some ways.
It was right and inevitable that even the web was in charge of the historical narration and not only of a chain of such important structures spread on the world territories by lingering, in the case of this site, over some examples that have been cohabiting for centuries with our existences and culture.
Let’s share, therefore, the beauty of the castles, from Padernello to Brescia, from Soncino to Pandino, by letting us overcome by the wish of artistic and historical eternity.
Brescia, 1st May 2020, Amelia Pisante
