Korongo: The Art of Travel: Fiesole, Italy

Sunday, June 10, 2012

The Art of Travel: Fiesole, Italy

Testa Etrusca

In 1969, after a year of living in Paris, I moved to Florence, Italy, where I got a job teaching English. I rented an apartment in Fiesole, a nearby Etruscan hill village. The next eight months were among the most pleasant of my life. Each morning I would ride my Vespa down into Florence. Each afternoon I would return to Fiesole to stroll through the Roman ruins behind the village, visit my friend the librarian at the Franciscan monastery, or read la Divina Commedia at a café under the lime trees. When I left to return to the United States, my landlady gave me this sculpture of a woman's head. She told me she had found it in the fields around Fiesole when she was a girl, and that it was Etruscan. —Tom Cooch

Tom Cooch, right, at the opening of the Art of Travel.

The Art of Travel, featuring photographs by Wink Willett, watercolors by Bonny Willet, sketchbooks by Susan Abbott and Paul Calter, and souvenirs collected by local globetrotters, is on view until July 20.

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The Randolph Herald on Korongo

From Herald writer Dian Parker: "Living in the East Village in Manhattan in the late '60s and all through the '70s, I’d often hang out with artists at a street café and we’d talk about our work incessantly. Bongo drummers lined Second Avenue and the small alcove of my eighth-floor walk up was often a place for bums to sleep. Artists opened their apartments as tiny makeshift art galleries. On one wall hung a tie-dyed sheet and on the floor a double mattress. Not much else except art. And more art. It was everywhere, some of it not very good, but it was an outpouring nonetheless; a place to be seen. We never thought the East Village would become what it is now, one of the hip places to live in Manhattan, still filled with art, only much more expensive.

"Along comes the Korongo Gallery to Randolph, and we have promise again of a beginning that could very well burgeon into something hip and wonderful, a place for artists and writers to display and read their work, congregate and hang out. At the opening on March 17 there was a feeling of excitement and expectation that we might just be on the verge of a new happening, right here in downtown Randolph. The gallery was packed. Patrick Texier, the owner, schmoozed with the folks and Laurie Sverdlove Goldman, the painter, and talked about her work which hung on three of the walls. Jack Rowell took photographs and everyone was smiling and milling about. The food was delicious. This was a real opening in a new little gallery that has a big and bright future." To continue reading Dian's article on the Herald website, click here.