Saturday 5 October 2024

Busseto, Piazza G. Verdi and Monastery of S. Maria degli Angeli

4.30 pm Piazza Verdi Urban trekking between places of worship and hospitality in Busseto, with Alessandra Mordacci

Urban trekking is a “gentle” form of sport, suitable for all ages and seasons. It is a new way of tourism far from the most well-known circuits, but full of surprises, which favors the lesser-known corners of the cities of art.

The guided tour, offered free of charge by the Monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, involves the meeting of the participants in Piazza G. Verdi – overlooked by buildings adorned with splendid 15th century terracottas and the churches of San Bartolomeo and Trinità – and includes the church of S. Maria Annunciata to which a hospital was once attached. It then stops at the Monte di Pietà and the Jesuit College (used after their expulsion in 1768 as a school building also attended by Giuseppe Verdi and later as a barracks, Civic hospital and now a protected house) and continues beyond the ancient walls up to the superb Villa Pallavicino, known as the “Boffalora” due to its checkerboard plan with five square bodies, of which the central one is porticoed and open to the four winds. The route culminates in the church of S. Maria degli Angeli built together with the Monastery between 1470 and 1474 in the traditional late Gothic forms typical of the Pallavicino state. It is rich in works of art but the most precious is the Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Guido Mazzoni (1476-77), a masterpiece of fifteenth-century Emilian sculpture: eight life-size figures in polychrome terracotta, two of which can be traced back in physiognomy to the clients, rendered with extraordinary psychological introspection and emotional intensity.

FREE

6.00 pm, Cloister of S. Maria degli Angeli: Dances on the “Four sacred pieces” by G. Verdi, with the Artemis Danza Company

In this artistic project the dancers of the Artemis Danza Company shed their individuality to become a choir, a community, sound waves which, as happens in Giuseppe Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces, vibrate in unison, part of a single music, or are linked by a complex polyphony. “Liturgical Body” is therefore a collective, timeless, universal prayer of a humanity that still has faith and hope in a better world and finds its fulfillment in the continuous exploration of movement. A journey that crosses the many landscapes of spirituality, experienced outside of any temporal and spatial connotation: hope, pity, emotion, tears, yearning, elevations and abandonments. Despair is part of the game, but it is only a moment over which the continuous flow of the movement wins and around which the embrace of the community tightens. The performative action inhabits the sacred place of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in which the space is not a neutral container but part of the research, with live music performed by Beatrice Marozza (violin) and Antonio Amadei (cello).

EURO 3.00

Organized by the Municipality of Busseto and the Via Francigena Association. As part of “Open Monasteries 2024” initiative promoted by APT Emilia Romagna and CEI.