Guido, with his teacher Remo Luca, known in Bologna, stopped Italo Balbo during a visit to a trade fair, asking him for an appointment. The purpose was to open a school of goldsmith artisanship in Libya. After a few months, Balbo, governor of Libya, called Remo Luca and his assistant Guido Angelini to inaugurate the school of goldsmith’s art in Tripoli.
After a couple of years, Remo Luca returns home for family reasons, leaving the school to Guido. In the school where both Arab and Italian children are welcomed, Guido Angelini begins to study the ancient decorative motifs present in the Amazigh civilization. He does not want to copy the Maghrebi style to which the local artisanship is adapted, but he completely reworks the art of the filigree and that of the chisel, creating a new style of his own which, while refining itself over time, will distinguish in a decisive and personal way the school of goldsmith’s art, at first called Benvenuto Cellini.
Dear Silvano, is the goldsmith art museum in the province of Forlì-Cesena? No, it is in the province of Rimini.
In this museum, “two lands and two lives” intertwine: the land of the Karamanli* and the land of the Malatesta*. Silvano’s life and Guido’s life obviously intertwine with that of the many refugee friends from Libya, about 20,000, and Arab and Jewish friends. The works of the school are scattered in the homes of many people around the world because, in the 60s, people from all continents came to Libya.
A fundamental and irreplaceable help for Guido, due to a lucky meeting of destiny, is the meeting with Ada Linda Semprini, who, once married, will forget her training as a midwife to embrace both as a collaborator artisan and then as an administrator, the nascent Goldsmiths School.
Another vital help for the whole family and the School of Tripoli will be given by Luciana Angelini, who, animated by an innate kindness of spirit, will manifest her gifts of artistic ability and artisanship in the art of filigree. Here is the work and love of two women.
While the first 35 years took place in Tripoli and ended in 1970, the second, in Rimini, ended in 2005. In the second period, the art of medal making is developed; at first, father and son turned their art to the monuments of Roman Rimini, and then to the cultural heritage left by Sigismondo and Isotta Malatesta in the 14th century.
Those who enter the Malatesta Temple in Rimini soon realize that they are not in a simple church but probably in the place where Sigismondo and Isotta received delegations and ambassadors from other princes of the time. Sigismondo was a warrior, an ‘improvised’ captain, but not only, but he was also a man of culture and a patron of the arts, surrounding himself with the best artists of the time: Leon Battista Alberti for the architecture, Agostino di Duccio for the delicate marble bas-reliefs that decorated the walls, the medalist Matteo De Pasti and the greatest of painters, Piero Della Francesca.
Augustine was commissioned to paint the planets and the zodiac signs; perhaps, at this point, it makes sense to say that the Malatesta Temple is unique in the world! In the temple, two lives intertwine: Isotta and Sigismondo, and here we discover the link with the Planetarium Botanico: the planets.
In the Guido Angelini Museum, the visitor will be able to see some works of the School of Tripoli, and in this way, we want to reaffirm and maintain the link with the Libyan people that first with Gaddafi’s dictatorship, then with the civil war unleashed by Sarkozy is subjected to terrible trials, to the school of mutual hatred and the war of all against all.
Another light supports us in order to be able to achieve the establishment of the Guido Angelini Museum, with the necessary time to create a Guido Angelini Anthroposophical Foundation. The aim is to raise funds for disseminating arts and crafts that support the development of man’s individuality in various ages according to the principles of Waldorf pedagogy and the broader principles of adult man found in Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom.
