Mafalda, Ivan’s oak
The meeting between Anna Bischi Graziani, wife of the evergreen Ivan Graziani, and Gabriele Geminiani, creator of the San Marino and Montefeltro Green Festival, is surprising. It is yet another gift picked up on the “Via degli Alberi”, a well-established director among those of the festival and thus defined by the indomitable Geminiani. So consolidated as to give life to a real project which has been given the name of ORTIPERLAPACE and as its headquarters, the enchanting Podere Lesignano in San Marino which already houses a small Shinto temple, the only one in Europe. In the Rimini meeting Anna revealed to Gabriele a singular love story: the one that Ivan had towards an oak tree in their garden. “When it was raining outside and you could hear the sound of a storm, Ivan broke in on time: Here, Mafalda is angry,” says Anna. And this is how the Montefeltro Green Festival will dedicate a poetic reading to the Mafalda oak on Saturday 24 September at 12.00 in Novafeltria. The friends of the Rodari Club will propose a selection of poems in which we talk about trees, especially oaks. The purpose of the meeting is also to formalize the entrance of a tiny oak, a direct descendant of Mafalda, inside the Podere Lesignano and the ORTIPERLAPACE. Mafalda Junior is located right next to Giorgio Gaber’s holm oak, coming from Montemagno di Camaiore, a small village on the Via Francigena where Gaber lived in the 1970s after his death, and where his partner Ombretta Colli still lives today. Not far from the two small trees, there is already a small but significant persimmon, the son of the persimmon that survived the Nagasaki bomb, and planted last March 27 in a setting of enthusiastic children and an immense flag of peace. Chatter between intellectuals what we will have between Ivan and Giorgio to which will be added shortly, the wisdom and naturalistic knowledge of Mario Rigoni Stern. In fact, “The sergeant in the snow”, through his son Alberico Rigoni Stern, made himself available to join the project, opening the doors of the Plateau and giving further poetic suggestions in his reply letter: “Just the other day it happened to me to take a walk in one of our woods that have survived two wars, the storms and storms that hit our Plateau. When I met some spruce trees that were certainly over a hundred years old, I couldn’t resist the desire to hug them like my grandparents’. My dad was particularly attached to birch trees (readings from Russian writers and events from his life) and larch trees (conifers that withstand the harshest winters and storms). I think you have read his “Savior Arboretum”: there you will find many suggestions for your work. ” But the most ambitious goal will be a path that wants to bring the ORTIPERLAPACE to Jerusalem and, precisely, to the garden of Gethsemane. “Here we will bring the works of the children of the Montefeltro schools as gifts. And we will return with a thousand-year-old olive branch from Gethsemane ”. Geminiani points out with an overwhelming optimism that anticipates the official agreement with Father Ibrahim Faltas, the vicar of the Custody of the Holy Land. Following and gathering characters, the souls and the thought of the greats of history and contemporaneity through the trees, is above all a way of rethinking the organization chart of life and the ecosystem in which we live. By giving due importance to trees and making “man” fall into the only possible category which is that of the living beings that populate the earth, within which all should have the same rights. At the same time it is a path that creates growing relationships and triggers virtuous processes. Today’s man has both the vital need to dialogue with other people and the need to find himself in the deepest point of himself. To then return to the surface to listen to the words of the wise. By virtue of the trees.
cs San Marino Montefeltro Green Festival