The history of the Bosco De ‘Medici farm shows several similarities with that of the journey of George Taylor, the protagonist of the film “The Planet of the Apes”. An often too imitated, never equaled blockbuster, today in the National Film Registry of the United States Library of Congress.
In telling you the beautiful day in Pompeii in the company of Antonio Russo and Giuseppe Palomba, respectively responsible for communication / marketing and owner of the Bosco de’ Medici farm, we voluntarily neglected something about the history of this company.
This happened because – when we gathered to rework the articles for this new review – we immediately realized that the artistic combination was going towards a very specific direction. There was something we had already seen in a cinematographic work and that led us to a pairing – and then to an article – that practically made by themselves.
More than the entire film itself, the one that struck us was the resemblance between George Taylor’s journey aboard the Icarus, the fundamental starting point of the entire history of the Planet of the Apes franchise, with the history of the Medici who they gave the name to the resort / company.
In the film with Charlton Heston of 1969 – we say film because the book by Pierre Boulle tells the same story but in a different way – George Taylor is an astronaut who decides to leave for a space trip, with the intent to hibernate for the the next seven hundred years, in the hope that mankind – on their return – has evolved into a more intelligent and peaceful race.
With him, on board the Icarus, colleagues Langdon and Dodge leave, in addition to Miss Stewart.
From Icarus to our Pompeii
Now, imagine yourself going back in time too, and doing it on this side of the ocean. But you are not in our 2019, but in the sixteenth century, and your family name is not Langdon, Taylor or Dodge but you are part of the noble and powerful Florentine family of the Medici.
Suppose then to abandon the world capital of the Renaissance, the beautiful Florence, and move to a completely different area, in the South of the Italian peninsula, in the heart of the Kingdom of Naples, in an area close to Vesuvius and a few kilometers from the sea.
Arriving in Pompeii, in an agricultural area that you find extremely fertile, and buy a fiefdom from local princes, who – just like you – do not know the existence of an underground necropolis destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD
Here you start to produce wine, exploiting the fertility of the places and especially the company of Vesuvius that closely observes you, and continue to do so for about two hundred years, up to the middle of the eighteenth century. You know that underneath you – in the past – ancient coins and remains of ancient buildings have been found, but none of the rulers who rule the kingdom of Naples understood that history is buried there.
Then, one day in March 1748, Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre , with the help of Abbot Giacomo Martorelli and engineers Karl Jakob Weber and Francisco la Vega, opened a building site in the Civita area – one side of which looks towards Castellammare di Stabia and the other towards Nola – and find Roman statues, frescoes and skeletons.
In a moment, everything that the story had told since the time of Pliny the Elder turns out to be absolutely true. There below – a few tens of meters from the ground and your grapes – there is a world that has been erased in an instant but made imperishable. So – even if you still can not know – here you feel just like George Taylor after he finds on the beach the remains of the Statue of Liberty in New York.
The world that had been destroyed forever and we – like the monkeys in the film – are the heirs of that civilization.
In conclusion
Without wanting to consider the moral aspect – the film, in fact, is violently raging against the innate violence of the human race that has self-destructed through a nuclear war – the combination of this week with the Planet of the Apes is very emotional .
In Bosco de ‘Medici we live aware of what has been and how the power of nature can sweep everything in a moment, as long as our race is always able to recover and recover. We are like the Lincoln of the Washington Memorial that – in the Burtonian remake of 2001, has the face of a monkey. We modern men are the hyper-evolved scimme, our predecessors of ancient Pompeii, the men who would see us today.
