History and Fantasy

“Understanding is not the ability to answer any question, but the attempt to engage fully with the question… These questions are the presupposition for sapiential understanding”. This is one of any number of quotes to be taken from the monumental work by Elemire Zolla, “Il conoscitore dei segreti”, one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century.
"How are cities born? Why does a village grow into a city? This teaches us the mechanisms of history." These are the questions that inspired the research of Italian archaeologist Patrizia Zolese, “The Lady of Lost Cities”.
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The two characters belong to distant philosophical and spiritual dimensions. But, as in parallel universes, they co-exist and are connected by gateways in the space-time continuum. In their case, that gateway is in the ancient East.
“The course of history depends less on what actually happens than on the falsehoods people believe,” wrote historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, thus offering another gateway. It's one way of explaining the previous connection. Zolese's research is perfect for constructing mental representations: temples, monuments or entire cities of long-gone civilisations are not only pieces of stone in the domain of history. They are a gateway to stories, even fantastical ones. And Zolla, that connoisseur of secrets, seemed to me to be a character that could introduce the meaning, or the sapiential perspective, of Zolese's research.
Other characters and other histories could come in at this point: the situation in the South China Sea on the routes of the ancient Cham merchants, the explorations into the deep jungle of the sacred mountain that dominates the Lao coast of Mekong, the things that inspired Kipling on his Road to Mandalay. These are all mental representations constructed on Patrizia's research. All of them are in places that, thanks in part (if not entirely) to her (as the Lerici Foundation's head of archaeology and culture for Asia), have become World Heritage sites: the Vat Phu site, in southern Laos, called the “cradle of the Khmer civilisation”; My Son, on the central coast of Vietnam, one of the most important centres of the ancient kingdom of Champa. Finally, the sites of the cities of the ancient kingdom of Pyu, in central Myanmar (better known as Burma).
Patrizia calls it "one of the greatest civilisations in Southeast Asia". "One of those populations that change things." Once again, history and its representations seem to meet: last June, the ancient cities of Pyu became Myanmar's first World Heritage Site.
As Patrizia says: "In the end my job can be summed up in two words: logos and archeo." Archeo in Greek means ancient. Logos means reason, but also story.

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