Tea at Trianon: The Village Without Sun Which Created Its Own

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 1, 2022

The Village Without Sun Which Created Its Own

From The History of Yesterday:

Viganella is an Italian town located on the Alps, in the region Piedmont. As of December 2010, it had a population of 204. You might think that Viganella is a small mountain town just like many others, but you would be wrong. There is something more, something extraordinary. Until 2006, the town used to remain shadowed for eighty-three days per year — from November 11 to February 2. Viganella was built at the bottom of a steep-sided valley; therefore, in that period, the sun disappears. It hides behind one of the mountains that surround the town.

In 2005, the then-mayor Franco Midali and an architect named Giacomo Bonzani began to work on an ambitious enterprise. Those two hundred inhabitants could not bear those dark cold days any longer. As a consequence, Midali and Bonzani started to consider the plausibility of making the mayor’s dream come true. That dream, as you might have guessed, was bringing the sun back to Viganella. (Read more.)