Description

I shot this photo inside the Ghirlandina, the famous medieval bell tower of the Modena Cathedral), beautiful and slender (it is 86m/282ft high), while I trudged towards the belfry, from where one can enjoy a splendid panorama over the whole city.

If I'm posting it here, certainly it's not for its quality (it was taken in semi-darkness, a condition that is almost prohibitive for my Lumix compact camera), but to demonstrate how photography is capable of instantly reawakening past memories, perhaps even remote ones: when I looked down from the staircase balustrade towards the huge empty space of the bell tower and saw the other ramps winding inside it, I immediately thought: "Escher!"

In fact, immediately one of the best-known drawings of the famous Dutch engraver who lived in the first half of the past century came to my mind, that "Relativity" dated 1955, famous for those flights of stairs that cross each other, despite belonging to spaces with different references: depending on the direction from which it is seen, there are at least three different up-down directions, traveled by anonymous mannequins that go up and down, intertwining but ignoring each other.

And… what does the Ghirlandina have to do with it? There the top and the bottom are unique, and there are no mannequins… yes, but the plan of the bell tower is square, just as the scheme of his drawing is, and the perspective of the respective flights of stairs and their supporting arches have a lot more than something in common.

But then I also remember that as a young man Escher had been around Italy for a long time, and there he portrayed many different environments, to then re-propose them many years later in his typical and surreal environments. I had read about Savona, Florence, the Amalfi Coast, Calabria… was he also in Modena? Well, I would now say: "Yes, he did!!"

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