President's Report from Perugia, November 2007

Ciao Everyone!

We’ve had a very busy two weeks in Perugia, but there’s always time to walk around; here’s one favorite view of the city, looking over the old Roman Viaduct toward the University and Porta San’Angelo.

Saleh and Lucy Joudeh and Donna James and myself met several times with the working city group here to discuss progress on the Marvin Oliver sculpture, Sister Orca, to be installed in the new MiniMetro plaza below the center, not far from the soccer stadium. From these pictures, you can see the site of the Sister Orca installation, on a rise that leads up to the station. It’s a commanding spot, and will be the signature feature of the plaza and the station – a symbol of the Seattle-Perugia relationship, and also of the Native American and Etruscan cultures.

Above, the artist is pointing out the proper direction for the Orca sculpture, which will rise from a pool of water, as if swimming toward the old center of Perugia.
These meetings with local officials went very well, and all parties are on target for a grand inauguration ceremony – tentatively set for May 3, 2008. Sister Orca is expected to ship from Seattle near the end of February, arriving in mid-March. The work of installing the sculpture, with the pool and landscaping, will take the remaining weeks to that first weekend in May.

Following these work meetings, we also had a good short appointment with Perugia Mayor Renato Locchi, who would like to visit Seattle again. We gave him an open invitation, looking at autumn of next year. That will depend on other events (more below), but it was a good meeting, focused on the Sister Orca progress, with Locchi and Marvin both smiling at the end.

We’ll have more details in the next few months on the events surrounding the Sister Orca celebration, but the target dates, again, for those who might be planning a trip to Perugia for the occasion, are that first weekend in May, 2008.

At right: Urban Planning Conference in Palazzo dei Priori
Assessore Wladimiro Boccali, center, with Kristian Kofoed, 2nd from left

Otherwise, we’ve had good meetings with the University for Foreigners, the language and culture school here. They’ve agreed to process our own additional scholarship and will consider adding one more of their own. That would give us three yearly scholarships here, and four if some other ideas are realized. We talked with the library (Biblioteco Augusta) as well, about the Matricole, the set of beautifully illustrated medieval books of the Guilds here, and the possibility of an exhibit in Seattle. This an exchange then Seattle council member Jim Compton started working on several years ago, and if we decide to go ahead, we might pull it off in the next year or two working through the University of Washington Library.

We had also arranged a small conference with planners from Orvieto, Viterbo (Lazio), and Perugia, to discuss transportation and preservation issues in these Italian hill towns that offer some lessons for Seattle. The City of Seattle senior urban planner who attended, Kristian Kofoed, will pull all the information together as part of an international urban planning grant. These are all ancient cities, much older than Seattle, but the issues – traffic, pollution, preservation, space for people instead of cars, how to revitalize old centers – are common.

There’s much more, but I’ll close this note with a shot from Castello di Montecapanno, the home of Seattle’s great friend in Perugia (Bosco), Giuseppe Vicarelli, one of the founders of the Seattle-Perugia Sister City relationship. The castle was virtually destroyed in the great 1997 earthquake here, but as you can see below, it has been beautifully restored (below).

Ciao for now,

Mike James, President
Seattle-Perugia Sister City Association