One room has a wall hung with framed maps, some old and beautiful, hand-tinted, others engraved on ivory-paper.
There are modern maps of geological structures and primaeval seabeds, land-locked now, but in their aridity yielding Giotto’s landscapes.
Les Estats de l’Eglise et de Toscane speak of religious power ceded long ago, while Magni ducis Hetruriae status, in ditiones tres Primariis tribus, Urbibus cognomines confims the survival of ancient divides into the present day.
L’Italie, Golfe de Venise lays out Dalmacie with the Republ. de Raguse and its glittering city Ragusa (how ugly the name Dubrovnik) facing its mother state across what now is called the Adriatic.
Across from Venice itself Istria and the city of Fiume speak in the lost voice of d’ Annunzio (who, as commander of the 87th fighter squadron "La Serenissima", in aeroplanes of such beauty they take the breath away, will always be a fallen hero).
A map of Illyrium offers the scale in Roman miles of 5000 feet each - I can see more calculation of the ‘190 kilometres divided by five eighths is - what dear - oh, now I’ll have to start again’ kind, during long journeys.
One group of maps is not framed. Folded and repeatedly refolded into a military pocket or pouch sized wedge, they show where they are only by the lettering . There are sets of numbers and marks and scrawls hand-written in, to me as indecipherable as the printed cyrillic script denoting this lost terrain. These are the maps of an artilleryman. A pen and ink sketch of huge skies with rolling clouds, orderly family houses with hayricks, groves of poplars beside water, entitled ‘Tappa nella Steppa verso il Don - Luglio 1942’ is framed on the wall; it speaks volumes.
2 comments:
G.M. Lascelles always said he saved their airoplane in the desert by recognising a sand dune and changing their route; I wonder if he really had a map like the Siberian one on him - although, would that have helped?
Major General Lascelles was not in the artillery I think; wasn't he in a tank? If he was looking at sand dunes he must have been in North Africa as well as the Italian campaign.
I wonder if they found it all exciting or were just so scared they were operating on automatic.
The major general was the mildest of men whenever I met him.
Not sure if the maps here are Siberia; western Russia? Actually I'm not sure of Russian geography at all and these are detailed and obviously just a sector of the front, or route or something; or perhaps a part of a battle. If a soldier comes to stay we could ask. Sadly their owner isn't here to answer, though I don't think he would have liked to, he never spoke of it all.
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