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An Unknown Jewel Near Via Veneto, Rome

19/2/2015

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The Boncompagni Ludovisi Museum for Decorative Arts, Costume and Fashion of the 19th and 20th century.
When you visit Rome, you'll certainly go to the Capitoline Museums, the Vatican Museums, Galleria Borghese, perhaps also the Modern Art Gallery... but  you'll probably miss a marvellous experience if nobody tells you...
A few steps from the famous street of the Dolce Vita, via Veneto, at the number 18 of via Boncompagni, don't be afraid to enter in the courtyard of an Art Nouveau villa that looks like a private property. You understand that you are in the right place just for some photos on the left wall. Opposite, the entrance door seems closed, but it is not. Just push it and you’ll enter in the hall of a beautiful villa of the beginning of the 20th century, with the original furniture: some precious antiques mixed with "modern" design peaces.  Princess Alice Blanceflor (a fairy tale name!) Boncompagni de Bildt (her father was a Swedish diplomat) will receive you in one of the drawing rooms and you'll certainly have a "coup de foudre" for her amazing full-length portrait. But this is only the beginning.

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The Boncompagni Ludovisi Museum
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Portrait of the Princess Alice Blanceflor
The Princess who lived in that house for half a century gave it to the Italian State in the 1972 to make it a centre of cultural activities. In the 1995, the villa, built in 1901, became a museum, as a part of the Modern Art Gallery. The collection of paintings (Belle Epoque but also Futurism), sculptures, tapestries, ceramics and other objects, high fashion clothes and refined accessories, bags, shoes etc... became more and more important, thanks to different donators. Amongst them, an extraordinary and beautiful woman, Palma Bucarelli, who ran the Museum of Modern Arts for decades, beginning from 1941, when she was only 31!  She gave to the new little museum her own collection of magnificent dresses and elegant accessories.

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Palma Bucarelli
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Dresses Collection
In one of the second floor rooms (that was opened recently), between an impressing stained glass window of the roman artist Duilio Cambellotti of the beginning of the century and a portrait ("The Girlfriends") from the thirties of an unusual Giorgio De Chirico, you can also admire four of the eighteen paintings of Galileo Chini called "La Primavera" (the spring), inspired by a travel in Siam and, even more, by the Viennese Gustav Klimt. These paintings decorated the room where the sculptures of a talented young Dalmatian artist, Ivan Mestrovic, were exposed, at the Venice Biennale of 1914.
You find all this and so many other splendid objects - from the end of the 19th and the 20th century - in the villa of the princess Blanceflor that, in front of a classical museum, is a sort of delicious "chamber music" that you can't miss during your Roman holidays.
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"La Primavera" - Galileo Chini
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"Le Amiche" - Giorgio De Chirico
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Dalmatia And The Return Of Hydroplanes

5/2/2015

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Dalmatia, the beautiful Croatian coast, characterized by an extraordinary string of islands, has, henceforth, an exceptional new opportunity for tourists and inhabitants, unique in the whole Mediterranean: from the end of last summer, hydroplanes, little flying machines (some for 19 passengers and other for only 7) that can land on sea (and airports, of course) connect, in a very short time, islands and Split, the main town on the coast. An example: to go from Split to Jelsa (on the island of Hvar) takes 13 minutes.  By ferry it is two hours! 
The project was already launched 14 years ago by the European Coastal Airlines (ECA), a German- Croatian company based in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. In fact, it wasn't anything very new.

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European Coastal Airlines Twin Otter 300-6 over Jelsa, Hvar Island
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European Coastal Airlines Grumman Goose and some very special passsengers
Already in the thirties, when a part of Dalmatia was Italy, the Alitalia's ancestor, "Ala Littoria", had connections between Trieste, Zara (now Zadar) and the islands of Losinj and Lastovo with seaplanes.  Split, in the kingdom of Yugoslavia at that time, had also a connection of that kind with Prague, in Czechoslovakia. Both were, until the end of the 1st world war, in the same Austro-Hungarian Empire and the most important tourism in Dalmatia came from the rich Prague.  Later, between 1941 and 1943, during the Italian occupation of Split, Ala Littoria had flights also there. The hydroplanes coming from the port of Ancona, at the other side of Adriatic, landed in the hearth of Split, in the natural little fishing port, the "Matejuska", a few meter from the church of Sveti Frane, used before by the Czech's hydroplanes.

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Hydroplane in Split Harbour - Old postcard
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Hydroplanes in Split Harbour - Old Postcard
For the moment, a shuttle takes the passengers from the Matejuska to the airport. More exactly, to the terminal of Resnik, at the sea side, near the Split airport. They can chose to go or to Jelsa on the island of Hvar, south of Split or, in the North of Split, to the island of Rab and to Zagreb. With two types of these little amphibian planes:  or a Dehavilland Twin Otter 300-6 or a Grumman Goose.  New destinations will open very soon, to Pula, Rijeka, the islands of Lastovo and Korcula. In a second time, also to Dubrovnik and to the Italian port of Ancona. As more than 70 years ago. 

Curiously, in this moment, in Rome, you can see, until the end of February (Galleria Russo, via Alibert 20), a very interesting exhibition of a famous Futurist painter, Tato, specialised in "Dynamical Aerial paintings". Tato used to work, in the thirties, for the Ala Littoria.   

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Tato Guglieml Sansoni - Flying Over The Colosseum In a Spiral
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