This year the festival started with a bang: on the opening night, Martin Scorsese himself introduced the crowd on Piazza Maggiore to the screening of that masterpiece of Mexican melodrama, and personal cult of mine, that is Emilio Fernandez’s Enamorada (1946).
When it comes to evil, Darlingtonia is second to none – everything about it, from the pitcher’s morphology to its commensal adaptations, contradicts the stereotype of the innocuous vegetable.
Il Cinema Ritrovato is a festival in constant expansion: since I first attended it in 2003, it has grown bigger and bigger, acquiring new screens and theatres, and the amount of films presented has long ceased to be within the...
If you have ever experienced that extended period of cold, rainy darkness known as Berlin winter, you will agree that escaping it even for a few weeks can be a good idea. Even more so if you cultivate botanical interests:...
Tall and slender, elegantly veined and often brightly coloured, Sarracenia is a personal favourite of mine – in front of a good selection of specimens I really have to control myself or I would buy them all. There are currently...
If you’re into silent films, or you have ever lived in Bologna, you’ve probably heard of Il Cinema Ritrovato – the festival devoted to film archives and their content: great classics and forgotten gems, obscure fragments and lots of surprises....
“I should note that in those days, professor Bulwer was teaching his students about the dreadful methods of carnivorous plants” an intertitle warns us, in gothic lettering on a green-tinted background “one viewed with horror the mysterious workings of nature”....
“Monsters from the dawn of man’s existence might still roam these heights unchallenged, imprisoned and protected by unscalable cliffs”(1) wrote British explorer Percy H. Fawcett about his expedition to Venezuela in 1911 and the effect his tales had on the...