Amici dell'Ufficio Nazionale Antidiscriminazioni Razziali - UNAR - PCN

31/10/2024

Such a vivid dream this morning. That Britain chose to be ruled by Denmark. And there was I, as a medievalist, speaking against this decision, reminding the UK what it was like for Iceland to be Denmark's colony, forbidden their own language, which is the closest and purest to what ours was before the Norman Conquest colonized us, that we paid the Danegeld to Denmark from East Anglia with its ship burials, that King C**t ruled us (but he was wise about not imposing power unilaterally, remember the story of his sarcastically 'ruling' the waves), of how Denmark first confiscated all Iceland's manuscripts of literature, then only returned half of them. And I ended by saying we should not have Brexited, as that is a federation where we received more than we gave, also all Europe, especially universities and scholars, now use our difficult mongrel colonized language, English, as their lingua franca, instead of French. Then woke up to read about a Greenlandish woman M.P., angering the Danish Parliament because she spoke on Human Rights in Greenland's language, not also Danish. And that recalled all this dream!

31/10/2024

A dear retired Princeton colleague who gave my children a broken boomerang (he couldn't give away a good one as he kept the museum), spoke of an old lady in Vermont who told him she kept her home 'in dying order'! The Swiss Church in Florence's President lamented to me about parishioners who failed to have a Will and who did not leave things in such good order. So have been sorting out mouse-eaten boxes, finding letters from Samuel Beckett, from my D.S.O, M.D. grandfather in South Africa who would be buried there when dead in the tin hat he wore in WWI front line trenches in which he was twice buried alive. Letters, which we no longer write on paper, that came from Ireland, England, America, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Iceland, Kenya, South Africa, from monks and nuns and lay people, with wonderful postage stamps, again become obsolete. And I found this, which I used to have in my house's doorway in Boulder, that I love as it makes sense of both life and scholarship, of what is useful, beautiful, good, now shared electronically. I might change 'all men' to 'all persons' though, to include women and children equally!

27/10/2024

I live and work with Roma in Florence's English Cemetery, teaching them literacy while they garden, restore tombs, build bookcases for this library and cradles for their babies. We discuss policy issues together, which I speak to at the EU State of the Union for them over the years . We all agree that the win win solutions to homelessness is to build garden cities where citizens and migrants can live together, with market gardens, a central park with a Sargent Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Bandstand, a sort of village green, with children playing together, undoing racism, providing building jobs for young people so they can have families, for peace and prosperity. This is especially needed right now in Ireland and Italy. Segregated camps are not the answer. I have seen this work in Berkeley where Married Students Housing is an international village of families where the children play and study together. A young Black architect in Oakland proposed a similar scheme restoring a rundown community around a central octagonal Child Care Centre which sadly was rejected. I remember following WWII, the building of council houses in our Sussex village. The architect Jane Jacobs understood this need, likewise did Octavia Hill and her grandfather Thomas Southwood Smith, who is buried in this cemetery. We need to push the EU into proactively working on this solution throughout Europe as a viable way to counter homelessness, racism, genocide, war.

19/10/2024

Eleven years ago I had posted this. Finding I still agree with it.

Thinking about Education:
Negative for society
Competition
Mind only
Mental
Entitlement
Myth of the Metals
Exclusion of the Other
Instant Gratification
Debt
Indulgence
Consumption
Callousness
Machine
War
Left hemisphere

Positive for society
Cooperation
Body/Mind/Soul balance
Sensory
Reciprocity
That of God in Everyone
Inclusion of the Other
Planning Ahead
Savings
Moderation
Production
Kindness
Nature
Peace
Right hemisphere

17/10/2024

Finished the index, 45 pages of it! To a 915 page book on the English Cemetery in Florence. Researching this Etruscan prince's tomb, with walls then built by Arnolfo di Cambio and Michelangelo, next landscaped by Guiseppe Poggi, with Roman, medieval, Renaissance and Victorian pottery shards in its soil, a potter's field, like Jerusalem's burial place for Judas, like Rome's Il Testaccio, for burying Florence's foreigners, British, Swiss, American, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Egyptian, Nubian, Indian, etc, slaves, serfs, slave owners, servants, a king's son, a queen's relative, Florentine nobility, Guicciardini, Pucci, Capponi, Gigliucci, rich and poor, side by side, is like having one's finger on the pulse of the world. It's an archeological sounding of the fifty years between 1827-1877, and more, in one Florentine piazza that ingathers cultures of so much in time and space. Visited by King Frederick William IV of Prussia and the American ex-slave Frederick Douglass. And then its second to last chapter on all those listed in the archives who now lack tombs, restored to memory, the poorest, usually Swiss from the Grigione, English servants, a deserter from Croatia, and its final chapter on how its garden and tombs were restored from abandonment by the Romanian Roma families who live with me, have learned literacy, and help me write book after book. This one filled with stories and poetry. Death a democracy, of inclusion. This place a celebration.

12/10/2024

Interesting that while Italian does not have a word for kind, 'gentile' meaning being upper class rather than the classless democratic universal natural caring that is our 'kindness', the expression that comes close to it is 'bene educato' which does not mean well educated academically, but having been taught consideration of others, being well behaved. I need the equivalent in Italian for that natural kindness one finds more at the bottom of society than at the top!

12/10/2024

I love this entry in the book on Florence's English Cemetery as a fine attempt at Decolonialism: B24/ 1171/ MARY [KYD] DE DORNBERG/ ENGLAND 30/5/1872 27
Mary Kyd's father, Lieutenant General Alexander Kyd of the Bengal
Engineers, was a relative of the Lt. General Robert Kyd who founded the Botanical Gardens in Calcutta. William de Dornberg, who participated with the British against Napoleon, was pensioned in 1831, thus is too early to be her husband, perhaps her father-in-law. Wikipedia: ‘Robert Kyd made a request in his will that he be buried without any religious ceremony in the botanical garden that he founded (Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden), but was instead interred in South Park Street Cemetery.
He also left behind specific payments to be made to his native servants “Rajemahl Missah ... in retribution for the unsuitable education given to him, entailing separation from his native soil and kindred. To the other native known by the name of George, in reparation of the injury done him by his former master, in alienating him from his tribe (understood Rajpoot), converting him to Christianity, and secluding him from all future connection
with his family, the monthly sum of six rupees during his life; to both on condition of their continuing to serve Major Alexander Kyd during his residence in India. . .” Major Alexander Kyd was a relative of Robert and was the father of James Kyd (1786-1836) and his brother, also a Robert Kyd (d. 1825), who became shipbuilders. Kyd street and the locality Kidderpore derive their names from this family’. There seem to be further mixed-race Sector B
191 Alexander Kyds, who settled in Austria, one of whom may be this lady's father. She is thus more cosmopolitan than she is English.

10/10/2024

Swiss Henri Dunant came up with the Red Cross from seeing the Battle of Solferino's carnage, the classical/medieval idea concept of sanctuary. I can remember my mother on hands and knees composing the Red Cross newsletter to their families with news of the British POWs in Germany. There once were rules. Barbarically no more in Ukraine or Gaza in our era. But this is why I love Aucassin and Nicolete (www.umilta.net/aucassin.html in French and English, aucassinital.html in French and Italian) for its scene when stupid European Christian Aucassin with his Muslim name thinks wars mean you wound and kill, Muslim African Nicolete with her Christian name explaining to him that instead they fight with throwing apples at each other, wounding and killing not allowed. So wish we taught this in universities, and performed it, for it comes with its music in neumes. Have never managed to persuade any one to record its songs embedded in its prose. Should love to put the mp3s into these web pages.

Chant Fable, Aucassin, Nicolete, Medieval Studies, Manuscript Studies, Picardy, Provence, Carthage, M.Moleiro, music, illumination, poetry, prose, Boethius, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, mock chivalry, adynata, gender reversal>

09/10/2024

I believe garden cities for both citizens and migrants so their children can play together would end racism, create prosperity.

Prime minister champions migration in stance at odds with European neighbours

09/10/2024

Am battling the indexing of this more than 800 page book crammed with names, a two week deadline before printing and have only got as far as C. The Word indexing program was dreadful and I scrapped it after four days of intense work. Now doing it manually. But this is the cover! The book will be useful to Victorianists in literature and history, genealogists, migrancy history, the Abolition of Slavery movement and others such, the liberation of nations from empires, the liberation of children, the liberation of women, a history written in marble.

24/09/2024

In 2001 we held our first City and Book conference in Florence, the first of ten we have organized, the last one on Florence and India, this first on the Alphabet and the Bible at a time when the EU, being Masonic, was being anti-Christian, our conference showing the sharing of the non-European Semitic Alphabet and Bible, then Gospel, and with Spain, Koran, as the basis of European civilization. Then the British Library copied us with their exhibition of Sacred, again on the Torah, Gospel, Koran as shared. Now the British Museum exhibition on the Silk Roads is doing the same. There are no boundaries to cultural sharing, it is all a richness of beauty. Think of Chinese and Venetian bridges, think of silk in Florence, resulting in the Hospital of the Innocents.

Following China’s epic ancient trade routes through fabulous oases, desert palaces and burial mounds will radically change the way you feel about borders

06/09/2024

Have a problem. The owners of the cemetery are making their payment a month late so I am using my small pension to pay the workers at the same time that Mihai's four children need to start school. He is sending the two boys to school but can't afford the 500 euros for his two daughters, 11 and 12. to continue their schooling.
I had to leave school ar 16, there being no funds for the daughter to do Sixth Form as all the money went for my brother to continue at Shrewsbury's elite and costly public school. Fortunately an aunt in America got me into San Jose State at 16 and I was able later, without funds and with three small children, to get my Berkeley Ph.D. I value equality in education, not gender discrimination.
If anyone could help these two daughters, especially those believing in education for women, there is a PayPal account at

Unitamente all'operazione di transazione inviare tramite e-mail a Julia Bolton Holloway una breve nota precisandone la causale: versamento quota associativa, donazione restauro cimitero, o altro.