iBarga and iPascoli featured on national TV

The iBarga  ( the first mediaeval historic centre in Italy coded up with QR codes – the system has been running successfully since 2008) and the  iPascoli project appeared on national television this weekend on the TI CI PORTO IO programme on La7.

The presenters, Gianfranco Vissani and Michela Rocco di Torrepadula are seen on the program listening to the voice of Graziella Cosimini reading a part of one of Pascoli’s poems and wondering where it was coming from.

As you can see in the video below, in the end, the find themselves in front of the Teatro dei Differenti with Luca Galleotti who explains how the QR code functions and the difference between the black and the green tiles.

For those equipped with a smart phone or a tablet there is a kind of “poetry treasure hunt” activated in Barga this week. As part of the celebrations for the centenary of the death of the poet Giovanni Pascoli the organisers of the iBarga information system – the first mediaeval historic centre in Italy coded up with QR codes (the system has been running successfully since 2008) have now added a second series of small ceramic tiles containing QR codes. This time to distinguish the new tiles from the iBarga information tiles, they are green in colour and instead of pointing to information for visitors to the city, these once activated by scanning them with a smart phone or tablet, instead contain the voice of Graziella Cosimini recounting small fragments of poetry from Giovanni Pascoli.

It was decided early on in the project that the voice for the poetry should be a woman’s voice and not the usual male voice so often used in the past when his poetry was read out aloud and more often than not, in a declamatory way.  ( Latin dēclāmāre, from clāmāre to call out)

Maybe it was possible to give a different feel to his words and reach out and touch people who had not heard Pascoli in a somewhat softer vein?

The decision to bring Graziella Cosimini into the  iPascoli  project came about after an event that took place in nearby Sommocolonia during August of 2010 – the night of San Lorenzo to be exact. That evening, she recited verses from the poet Giovanni Pascoli. Later on that evening the street lights were switched off and all heads turned up to watch the stars above. On cue the clouds, which had been covering most of the sky up until then , magically parted to reveal the night sky with most of the constellations perfectly set out above their heads for all to see. (article here) All in all, a magical evening.