Le Guide Impossibili
5567 Babilonia
ovvero miserandi avanzi di perdute grandezze
Edited by Gianni Guadalupi. Texts by William Heude, Guillaume Lejean, Athanasius Kircher, Jorge Luis Borges, Giorgio Manganelli
1992 / 208 PAGES.
Language: Italian
A stroll through the ruins of the ancient capital of Semiramis, along the desolate banks of the Euphrates, deprived of its hanging gardens and full of Arab plunderers.
In the 5th century, the Parthian kings transformed the grounds (by then a desert) within the crumbling walls of Babylon into a game reserve. And when Mesopotamia fell under the Arab dominion meant to give life to the caliphs’ mythical Baghdad, the memory of Babylon was entrusted to the tiny village of Babil, built from and among its ruins. In the 1800s, based on classical texts and on the sparing (and often incorrect) information left by the few who had gone before, European explorers began to travel there in search of lost treasures. For example, Lieutenant Heude and Monsiur Lejean, whose writings describe the questionable allure of desolation.