THE MAGAZINE OF THOUGHTS, DREAMS, IMAGES THAT PASS THROUGH EVERY ART OF DOING, SEEING, DISCOVERING

29 June 2010

Suggesting, comparing, reviewing, criticizing, divulging




-->
Proporre, confrontare, recensire, criticare, divulgare ogni cosa che ci sembri importante, ed utile alla conoscenza collettiva, nello spirito di un turismo trasparente e creativo.


International Note-books means to bring back to its pages, to the knowledge of everybody and constantly updating it, what the good product of the North-West italian lakes expresses, anytime it reveals itself.
Suggesting, comparing, reviewing, criticizing, divulging as much as possible, in the spirit of a transparent and creative tourism, what the regional and local tourism, public or private, cranks out every year in the area between Varese and Cusio, with the Verbano in the middle, between East and West (which is, for the foreigners, what happens between Varese lake and Orta lake, with lake Maggiore in the middle, and all the minor lakes in this area), and between the low Novara and Vercelli area, the Novara hills and the Ossola Valleys, between South and North, is this space’s task, which would like to put itself to readers and co-reviewers as a web magazine able to express determination and criticism, but also vitality, soaked with passions and interests, desires and pleasures.
Besides the writings, whenever we talk about places and events we would like to have abundance of photographic images, better if original and unpublished, able to act as descriptions and comments, hints and talks.
Let’s begin here, in Casabella of Lesa, this journey inside the Note-books, for us imagining far-back a tourism less impressionable and more aware, less built above us, more dreamy since its birth, and so more emotional, practicable by every age and class. To act as a background there would be not just testimonies from the past or previous generations’ legacies, and not even the employment of huge economic resources projected on a future that is not compatible anymore, to determine the flow data of its economy.
We would like the many perspectives that this planning lets foresee to be immediately perceived, if we were less susceptible, like a lot of us always are, to mass-media’s influences, to preconceived ideas, to fake and misleading dreams or even just to easy adaptations to all the forms of advertising that still and always surround us, or lastly if we listened more carefully to the simplest things our instinct could suggest us.

We are convinced that we don’t need great capitals, long terms or powerful tools, to satisfy, even just once a year, some of our most authentic desires. Our needs of rest or our necessity to “detach the mind” taking it somewehere else, for a moment at least, can’t end up being a pure contact, mostly still, with nature; lastly, even our need of increased knowledge or amusement beyond the restricted corner of world where we live can’t always become just a pure list of places to see, museums to visit, monuments to take pictures of, or “commonplaces” to verify in person. We firmly believe that you don’t need much to have a good holiday, if well conceived, to find many and true satisfactions, those that it’s hard to forget since you lived them so intensely, and enjoyed them so truly. And it’s not even necessary to go far away, because sometimes, staying really close to the place where you live is enough to find something new, unexpected and different things, if you know how to look around in another way.
You don’t need airplanes or ocean liners to move and find heavenly corners, or big hotels, gourmet restaurants, to have sublime experiences, or to live on precious treasures in towns not far from us more than about ten kilometres, where maybe we had never been before. We can affirm, at the limit, that even by bike or foot we could discover new things, if just we were able to see in a different way what sorrunds us, and the environment in which we are too much immersed, or if we strived to come out of the routine of a nagging reality, which often deprives us of the most basic forms of creative freedom.
If then is a philosophy, ours, which advises our choices, and a credo that we would like to strenghten even through the belief of others, who believe in what they do and assimilate it to tourism’s main themes, like we do, this philosophy lives in our way of being and living, in the ways of working and in the manners we have, that could concern even others, who, in turn, could interest others to create an exchange and powerful recalls to reciprocity.
So that every human activity can interact with the ones who travel to diffuse knowledge, so that what it’s done by me can concern you, so that when I travel I can find welcome and interest in what I do, in what I look for, in what I try to know.
Easy formulas, these, almost featureless I would say, but they have little catch and practice today, in Italy more than anywhere else, and above all where tourism, a specific kind of tourism, has become a presence granted by the big flows and the mass-media’s advertisement. Formulas that don’t have any catch where touristic models are conformed to schematic and simplified formulas, for the only use and advantage of the ones who sell tourism in “packages”, more than the ones who exercise it with dedication and wisdom. And it is also whoever practices this tourism, who makes himself responsible for these abuses, because he adapts himself to them without any hesitation, conforming himself in a flat way, flat like his preparation at the origin of that travel, with a blurry dream guiding him.

We believe that tourism must be encouraged in ways that are different every time, chasing ideas which, at the beginning, could even look impossible, ideas that create a relationship between things and behaviours, between forms and cultures that concern the past or between the modern ones, transversal ideas that could turn out possible in the future, after the appropriate tries and the first tastes.
A stimulating tourism has birth in a union of improbable places and events, in facts that could make history, for us, since they’re unique and unrepeatable, among encounters and cultures that have never had anything in common, but maybe could start interacting, among knowledges that we didn’t think could belong to us, but that keenly interested us.
All the big events can sometimes do thousands of things endlessly repeated, but only if they are able to seize the exceptional, commuicating it not just to their favourite adepts, but also further, to new possible users, to a coming people of enthusiastic discoverers.

We would like to give start, with this pages of the Note-books, to a collection of ideas and experiences of tourism, made out of competence, sometimes, but also of personal experiences to be told and deepened, that draw on pure sensations lived in places or on more objective “reviews” of events attended or lived in our territorial sphere, trying to see, besides the commonly innovative implications, also the inherent possibilities, so that we can get better, become a good example for others, or even models to be imitated.
To get a good knowledge of the places of interest in our territory and of the main events that have been planned in the past years, we suggest the reading of “ The territory of Casabella – Lake Maggiore- touristic contents of our horizon on different scales ” and of “ Links ”, both belonging to our website.
We accept to publish inside the Note-books any contribution you wish to insert, within finalities and territorial limits above described.
Their duration of permanence in the publication, so that they can be read in every part of the world, or their becoming an integral part of it, will depend on their general and particular interest and on their peculiar qualities, of which we’ll make ourselves guarantors.
Every article can be commented on at the foot of the page by anyone who desires to.
The articles of major interest, which acquire permanence, can be translated by us also into English.


Enrico Mercatali

(Translated from Italian by Penelope Mirotti)

No comments:

Post a Comment