Sturm und drang.

|Aut quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox, furtivos hominum vident amores.|

[my-retro-vintage]

A rainy night in Oxford Street, London   Photograph by Philip Jones Griffiths.   1960

[beautifulmedievalmanuscripts]

Title :  Psalterium romanum.

Publication date :  1301-1400

Language :  Latin

Format : Italian writing and ornamentation. Initials of gold filigranes and 7 large initials historiated on a background of gold. Historiated frameworks.

Source

[partigiani-blog-blog]

Beppe Fenoglio, partigiano

[thelongvictorian]

Guinevere (c.1910) by William de Leftwich Dodge (USA, 1867–1935). From the Arthurian legend.

[tsaifilms]

Il Decameron (1971) Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

[backtotheussr]

Saint Petersburg, the Anichkov bridge (1968)

[artist-monet]

The Promenade near the Bridge of Argenteuil, Claude Monet

[lottereinigerforever]

Gian Maria Volonté in “Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto”. Photo by Mario Tursi.

[dareios]

💕

[streetiphoneography-deactivated]

Exhale

[greatwar-1914]

July 5, 1918 - War Communism in Red Russia

Pictured - A Bolshevik placard entreats readers to “remember the starving!”

The Bolshevik takeover of Russia gave Lenin control of an economy in a state of collapse. Meanwhile the breakout of a vicious civil war put the revolution at risk. Fighting for survival and trying to reorganize the economy, the Bolsheviks began a program of “war communism” in the summer of 1918.

The Bolsheviks controlled the most important industrial cities of European Russia. But Russian industry was failing, and the Bolsheviks did not have firm control over the agrarian countryside, which meant feeding the urban population and the growing Red Army was a problem. Many urban Russians were starving. War communism redirected agricultural produce to the cities and the front.

The policies the Bolsheviks used to redirect produce varied from well-meaning to brutal. Private property was abolished - a major tenant of the revolution - and production centralized. But Lenin overestimated the enthusiasm of rural Russians for revolution. Town committees were established but met with no cooperation from peasants, eventually forcing Red Army soldiers to seize food by force. Eventually the countryside began to starve as a result of the Civil War and the requisitions. Many Russian peasants took up arms themselves, not fighting for either Reds or Whites, but as “Greens” and “Blues” fighting for food and to be left alone.

[all-changes-pass-me-like-a-dream]

William Morris: Flamma Troiae (c.1860)

[greatwar-1914]

June 29, 1918 - Americans Arrive in Italy

Pictured - The most famous American to be in Italy during World War One was Ernest Hemingway, who drove ambulances for the Italian army. He was wounded in July and nursed back to health by Agnes von Kurosky, pictured here, who inspired his character Catherine in Farewell to Arms.

There were 800,000 American troops in France in June 1918, a far cry from the amount demanded by Britain and France but already making a decisive impact plugging the Allied lines. To the irritation of their commander General Pershing, however, American troops were still serving under the overall command of British and French corps commanders.

The Allies called upon more help from the Americans that June in Italy, where a US infantry regiment landed at Genoa. From there it marched towards the Asiago front where Italians troops were locked in a life-or-death struggle versus the Austrians. Some Americans had already beaten them there, though, by volunteering to serve as ambulance drivers for the Red Cross. One of them was Ernest Hemingway, another was Lieutenant Edward M McKey, who that month became the first American to die on the Italian front.

[artist-vangogh]

The Green Wheatfield behind the Asylum, Vincent van Gogh

Medium: oil,canvas

[brigantias-isles]

 L’ornementation par le pochoir 

 by Maurice Pillard Verneuil (1869-1942)

[demotulibrorum]

Bestiary, and various theological texts, e.g., Isidore of Seville, Imago Mundi (1200-1224). GIFed by Morgane Perrier.

[on-misty-mountains]

Italian Chapel, Orkney, build in 1941 by Italian prisoners during WWII for their Prisoner of War camp.

[lionofchaeronea]

An Epitaph for the Dead of Chaeronea

Anthologia Palatina 7.245 = Gaetulicus (1st cent. CE?) O Time, you spirit who watch over all Affairs of every sort for mortal men, Be messenger to all of what we bore- How, trying to preserve the holy land Of Hellas, we encountered death among The far-famed level plains of the Boeotians.  Ὦ Χρόνε, παντοίων θνητοῖς πανεπίσκοπε δαῖμον,     ἄγγελος ἡμετέρων πᾶσι γενοῦ παθέων· ὡς ἱερὰν σῴζειν πειρώμενοι Ἑλλάδα χώραν     Βοιωτῶν κλεινοῖς θνῄσκομεν ἐν δαπέδοις.

Allegory of Time, Pierre Louis Omer Charlet, 1st half of 19th century