On the road with all your senses

Astonishing and cherishing your taste buds is the leitmotiv of this issue. But taste isn’t the only sense that can be awaken on holidays: the other four ones deserve to be satisfied as well!

Let’s start with the hearing to talk about an amazing place: Pinuccio Sciola’s Garden of sounds, he’s a sculptor and a great artist, he’s famous for his graffiti in San Sperate (a village near Cagliari and also his birthplace), for his acoustic sculptures that are displayed all around the world. Sciola could make the limestone and the basalt materials vibrate, the materials he worked could produce melodious notes. His outdoor museum is in San Sperate: the guides lead the visitors around the huge menhir stones at the discovery of the different sounds that the different materials make. It’s a different way to sip the art, it’s a place where you

can feel the sounds that have been imprisoned inside the inanimate materials for millennia. Let’s consider the smell now: in the village of Marlia (a district of Capannori in the province of Lucca) there is Villa Reale, an old country-house that belonged to the merchants, the bank owners and the royals including Elisa, Napoleon’s sister who was fond of botany. In the villa’s wonderful park, a bit aside from the classical Tuscan tours, an olfactory route around beautiful views and heady scents has been designed in remembrance of Elisa. In every season there’s a different blossoming: the mimosas and the camelia blossom in March (their variety is one of

the park’s prides), the wisteria blossoms in April, the hibiscus in Summer until the Fall when the leaves and their changing colours becomes the protagonists. A map has been dedicated to this olfactory route and the park is open every day from March the 1st to October the 31st. Regarding the touch there are some museums that have inaugurated some dedicated routes for the blind visitors and the visually impaired ones that give the chance to touch the artworks or hear about the exhibitions. We can mention the Omero Museum in Ancona that keeps a collection of 300 works including some archaeological findings; the Uffizi Art Gallery in Florence with Uffizi da toccare (Uffizi to touch) that offers a dedicated route to the blind visitors

who can touch sixteen original sculptures from the Classical Age belonging to the Medici’s collection; there are the Capitolini Museums in Rome which are equipped with a rich educational layout made of braille books, CDs, embossed maps, boards and dioramas of the statues and the architecture works. The Calarcheo, the underwater archaeological park of Reggio Calabria offers an amazing experience since it guarantees everyone the possibility to visit it without any barriers including the beginner divers or the ones with vision problems. For this purpose an archaeological tour for the disabled visitors has been implemented, the disabled visitors are equipped with underwater communication systems through which they

can get the historical, the biological and the technical information to touch the history and feel the emotions of diving with the oxygen tanks. Let’s end our tour with considering the sight and nothing can fill our eyes more than a beautiful view! In my personal ranking the bronze medal is awarded to the three peaks of Lavaredo, the symbol of the Dolomites to be viewed while hiking along the tracks, from the bottom of the valleys or from a belvedere near the village of Dobbiaco (Bolzano). In second place the Cliffs of Capri you can contemplate from the Gardens of Augusto featured by a rank of terraces from the top of which you can also see the Via Krupp which is made of a series of hairpin

turns among the rocks with a climb of around 100 metres to be covered on foot to reach the bay of Marina Piccola: it’s an unforgettable natural wonder! The landscapes from the Orcia Valley in Tuscany are on the podium: the rows of cypress trees that lead to the old stone farmhouses, the lonely tiny churches on the hills (the chapel of Madonna di Vitaleta near San Quirico is the main landmark of this area), the Medieval villages perched on the top of the gentle hills like Pienza and Montalcino, so beautiful they don’t sound real, so true and untouched you can even recognize the landscapes that are in the background of the paintings from the 15 th and the 16 th centuries.