People From Rome

"The only Ariana we know is Strabo's Ariana, whose Geography describes its limits precisely: to the east the Indus, to the south the Arabian Sea, and to the west an irregular line..."

"We do not know for certain which river of the traditional cosmology it corresponded to, although the one that naturally comes to mind is the river Arodvi Brzi. Likewise we are unsure of its identification with this or that river of actual geography, although in this case, too, it does not seem that we have a great many rivers to choose from. For a number of reasons that we cannot go into here, as it would lead us too far astray the only rivers we can seriously take into consideration are those such as the Oxus and the Helmand... I have already collected on several occasions evidence and arguments in favour of the latter river in particular..."

"Zoroaster probably lived at the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, within the vast region known to the Greeks... The Central Asian steppes or Chorasmia are again excluded from this geographical horizon."

"With regard to this region, Xwarizm, far from being a center for the spreading of such an important part of Iranian civilization as the Zoroastrian doctrine was, appears, upon an unprejudiced examination, as a remote, outlying province which never played a really central part in the political and cultural history of Iran before the Middle Ages."

"There are no convincing arguments, whether historical or archaeological ones, for such an hypothesis. The archaeological arguments are not at all convincing... The historico-philological arguments are not convincing either."

"The Chorsamian hypothesis, which is still quite commonly held amongst scholars, should definitely be abandoned, as the historico—philological and archaeological arguments on which it is based are essentially groundless. The historical perspective it fits into is also distorted, as it suggests a political situation in eastern Iran, in the period immediately before Achaemenian rule which is by no means backed up by the available sources. The sources tell us quite unequivocally of political supremacy exercised by the Bactrians in the eastern part of the plateau, certainly not by the Chorasmians whose alleged hegemony over the various peoples of eastern Iran is supposed to be recognized on the basis of arguments given in favour of the aforementioned theory. As a matter of fact, the little we are able to reconstruct of the Median or pre-Achaemenian period in the eastern regions should be reconstructed as a radically different political situation. This position of superiority amongst the eastern satrapies which Bactria seems to have had in Achaemenian times was probably the heritage of an earlier situation"

"I simply cannot understand ... how one can think that "... its original may have been the Black Sea or Caspian, as known to dwellers on the steppe-lands to the North..."... it seems evident to me that the geographical horizon ... is the one we are familiar with by now: the central-southern areas of eastern Iran, south of the Hindukus."

"The idea of a Turanian, or Scythian, or Chorasmian period of Zoroastrianism... should thus be definitely rejected."

"...either they construct an antagonism of an essentially ethnic character... The first of these two hypotheses is not based on any sound arguments. On the contrary..."

"“the importance of cattle in various aspects of the Gathic doctrine can be taken as certain. This importance can be explained as a reflection in religious practice and myth of a socioeconomic set-up in which cattle-raising was a basic factor.” ..."

"namely the entirely eastern character of the countries listed in the first chapter of the Vendidad, including Zoroastrian Raya, and the historical and geographical importance of that list."

"The case of Vakereta was resolved by S. Lévi, who linked it to the name of the yakṣa of Gandhāra, Vaikr̥tika, in the list of the Mahāmāyūrī. This identification is solid and widely accepted, as evidenced by the consensus it has gathered."

"I gradually grew more convinced of a number of definite points. First, that the milieu of the origin of Zoroaster or, as I was then inclined to think, of the tradition that bore his name, could not be in Chorasmia, either little or great”, ie. reaching as far as Marv and Harat, but must be sought in a region further south. Secondly, that the difference between the milieu of Zoroastrian origins and the cultural, social and political reality of the Achaemenian empire were so marked that they must needs be explained by means of a process of historical evolution that was neither brief nor superficial."

"The discoveries made by Soviet archaeologists in Margiana and Bactria uncovered settlements and constructions of such complexity that they leave us little doubt about the special importance of these regions in the cultural geography of Central Asia and eastern Iran until the threshold of the 1st millennium BCE... one can conjecture, in the pre-Achaemenid period, the existence of an extensive geopolitical entity: research conducted on the ground would suggest attributing it either to Bactria alone or to a larger geopolitical entity that also included Margiana and Sogdiana, a parallel technique, even prior to the rise of the Achaemenids, but in which neither the Persians nor the Medes seem to have been much involved."

"Varena was identified by Henning with Buner, the Varnu of the Mahāmāyūrī."

"“we may consider that the northernmost regions where Zoroaster carried out his work were Bactria and Areia”. ..."

"The Hilmand region and the Hamun-i Hilmand are beyond all doubt the most minutely described countries in Avestan geography. ..."

"[Likewise, in later Greek tradition, Ariane] “is the Greek name which doubtless reflects an older Iranian tradition that designated with an equivalent form the regions of eastern Iran lying mostly south, and not north, of the Hindukus. It is clear how important this information is in our research as a whole.” ..."

"The gaining of this information on the primitive location of Mazandaran in the eastern and southeastern regions of Iran is remarkably important in reconstructing the early history of Zoroastrianism, just as important as the recognition of the fact that Avestan geography, particularly the list in Vd. I, is confined to the East."

"When we speak of Medes and Persians, we must not lose sight of a historical perspective. In all likelihood, the ethnic groups of the Medes and the Persians that were settling the historical lands in the 8th century B.C. must already have been the result of processes of assimilation of heterogeneous ethnic, linguistic and cultural elements."

"All this gives Sistan a central role regarding the origins of Zoroastrianism, as it is almost presented to us as the Zoroastrian land par excellence."

"[Gnoli identifies the sixteenth land, Raηhā, as an ―] eastern mountainous area, Indian or Indo-Iranian, hit by intense cold in winter."

"Now, the obstacle that arises from the theory of the Medes and the Persians having emigrated from the North ... on the basis of a highly conjectural interpretation of the archaeological evidence, is now removed by the archaeologists themselves. A body of evidence... orients us in quite a different direction, namely towards that of a migratory movement, probably a slow, progressive one, from East to West, along the great Khorasan Road....."

"On the contrary, it was certainly not before the Achaemenid period that areas with greater agricultural potential like Sogdiana and Chorasmia were widely populated and exploited. In light of archaeological research results, this delay is attributed less to their intrinsic geographical characteristics than to the distance separating these areas from those that, in the 3rd millennium BCE, saw the first state formations in eastern Iran. This marginality will disappear when they become demographically saturated and fully exploitable."

"If to these reasons we add archaeological considerations that demonstrate the entirely peripheral situation of Chorasmia in relation to the Iranian world of the first half of the 1st millennium BCE, we can exclude this northeastern region from the geographic horizon of Zoroastrian origins. Chorasmia retained this peripheral position throughout the entire 1st millennium BCE... No valid argument can make us think that it was ever decisively larger than present-day Khwarezm and that it extended to much more southern territories."

"It is farther south than in Chorasmia that we must strive to reconstruct the historical environment where the Iranian prophet lived and acted. A set of data from different sources... leads... to shifting our focus toward the areas around the Hindu Kush and toward the lands south of these mountains...in short, between ancient Bactria and the ancient Drangiana and Arachosia."

"A much more convincing theory than that of the western Iranians having emigrated from North to South across the Caucasus is that of a slow, progressive East-West emigration, a gradual penetration as it were, over the centuries, from the end of the 2nd millennium to the first half of the 1st millennium B.C. ..."

"The foregoing leads us to believe that the answer which we gave earlier, at the beginning of this chapter, to the question as to whether we ought to see a sort of continuity and a close link between the western Aryas, the Medes and the Persians and the Airyas of the Avestan people, is a well grounded one. We can reply that the Aryas who became part of the ethnic groups of the Medes and the Persians were none other than western branches of the Avestan Airyas who, in their westward migrations, had taken with them the name Aryan and so had extended, in a way, the boundaries of Ariana proper."

"Having done away with the obstacle provided by the theory of the trans-Caucasian migration..., we can see both these peoples as western branches of those same Airyas that in the Younger Avesta are described as being settled in such a large part of the eastern Iranian world...."

"Zoroastrianism had its beginnings in fairly early times, no later than the beginning of the 1st millennium B.C., in the eastern part of the Iranian plateau, in the central-southern regions rather than the decidedly northern ones."

"As a matter of fact all this is due to a persistent effort to make accounts work out at all costs according to the logic of a pre-established plan."

"These Aryas doubtless took with them their religious traditions as well, and this explains in what terms we must speak of the Achaemenians’ belonging to the airya tradition, i.e. to a religious and cultural heritage from a country further east. Afterwards Mazdeism grew up amongst them, and we do not know of any Mazdeism that could be defined for a certainty as non—Zoroastrian, nor, as I have tried to show elsewhere, have we any real reason, even if we take into account the name as—sa-ra ‘ma-za—as in the Assyrian tablets, to maintain that the very conception of a god such as Ahura Mazda was not the work of Zarathustra, in spite of the opinion of some leading scholars to the contrary and a hypothesis put forward recently by F.B.J. Kuiper. On the contrary, we might suppose that it was the decisive and most original feature of the message of the great prophet of ancient Iran’."

"Painting is human, too human."

"Mario Schifano per la qualità della pittura è un artista straordinario aldilà della sua biografia."

"Se non fossi Andy Warhol vorrei essere Mario Schifano."

"Schifano è un pittore puma: Un piccolo puma di cui non si sospetta la muscolatura e lo scatto, che lascia dietro di sé l’impronta nitida e misteriosa dell’eleganza"

"The ideas are contemporary to the gesture, I immediately spit them on the painting."

"Voglio dipingere la pittura."

"Painting is my way of existing."

"Spero sempre di fare quadri senza inutili volontà di spiegazioni."

"È l’alba di una fantasia [...] La sua pittura è un darsi totalmente delle mani e del corpo."

"I do not accept the blackmail of the past."

"I live in the present and in the future [...] I don't accept the blackmail of the past."

"C’è in ogni sua opera brivido di movimento, fremito di ribellione contro il rischio della decorazione, c’è vita, mai staticità, morte."

"As long as I'm alive I'm rich."

"Have you ever stopped to see seagulls suspended in the wind? If all beings on earth disappeared and only the seagulls remained, and maybe the little fish for their food, perhaps you think that from the seagulls, with the passing of millions of years, the animals that inhabit the earth and also man and perhaps even the frogs, butterflies and minnows? And even if the seagulls disappeared, can you imagine that the little fish of the sea, through gradual transformations, would give rise, at the end of time, to new seagulls or in any case to some new kind of sea bird capable of hovering in the air?"

"No form (including man) is [...] a form derived or improved with respect to some "primitive" progenitor. Man does not derive from primates (in the same way that birds do not derive from reptiles) except in the deceptive sense in which any form can be considered derived "from" the larger group to which it belongs. […] We have given names to the pre-human forms. We called them man-apes, subhumans, or brutes. But did they ever exist, or rather don't they belong to a mythology that has now disappeared?"

"Exhilarated by his 'discovery', Darwin jotted down these sentences: 'Origin of man now proven. Metaphysics must flourish. Anyone who understood the baboon would do more for metaphysics than Locke did." Darwinian metaphysics placed all wickedness, all cruelty, all evil at its origins, in the bestial. Carrying this thought to extreme consequences which are certainly not Christian, Darwin placed the Devil at the origin, he made man a redeemed demon. "The origin of our kind," he wrote, "is the cause of our evil passions! The Devil in the form of a Baboon is our grandfather." This doctrine was cultivated and developed by Darwin's cousin, the great statistician Francis Galton. [...] «The sense of original sin» he wrote in 1865 «would not demonstrate, according to my theory, that man has fallen from a superior condition, but rather that he is rapidly recovering from an inferior one»."

"To state today that the Pope did not have the courage to speak, means not recognizing Pope Pacelli even in a photograph, because he was not a man of half measures, he was not a man of arrangements."

"In those moments of war, there were no distinctions. They were all lives that needed to be saved. We as the Church had to help them."