In Buenos Aires exhibition on Italian-Argentine explorations
One hundred years of Italian explorations and research in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego: the new exhibition inaugurated in Beunos Aires, Argentina, on the explorations of Don Alberto Maria De Agostini tells you about it
ROME – ‘Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego: from the explorations ofDon Alberto Maria De Agostinito the Italian-Argentine research on geology and the environment’: this is the title of an exhibition that retraces, with photographic and video material, one hundred years of Italian exploration and research in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.
The exhibition was inaugurated in Buenos Aires, as part of the conference entitled ‘Five centuries of Italian explorations in Argentina between culture, science and fundamental rights’. Organized at the Italian Cultural Institute, the event saw the collaboration of the NGO Visionando and the Italian Interuniversity Consortium for Argentina (Cuia).
The round table, says the Institute of Culture, began by illustrating the expeditions of the Salesian missionary Father Alberto Maria de Agostini in the first half of the last century, which led to a fundamental mapping and geographical and geomorphological description of the most important mountain reliefs of the southern Andes and the glaciers and lakes of Patagonia.
Then presented are the geological, geophysical and glaciological research that the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (OGS) has carried out over the last 20 years, in collaboration with Italian and Argentine universities and research centres. In particular, the exhibition is based on the ethnoanthropological and cartographic material of the great Salesian missionary and on the geophysical, bathymetric and sediment study of the large lakes of southern Argentina and the space-time morphological variations of the Patagonian glaciers. Such research provides fundamentally important information on the paleoclimate and at the same time constitutes a key to understanding the anthropic processes underlying current climate changes.
The event was opened by Admiral Antonio Natale, commander of the Navy Schools; Salvatore Barba, scientific attaché of the Italian embassy in Buenos Aires; Emanuele Tondi, president of Cuia; Antonella Succi, president of the NGO Visionando.
The director of Cuia, Carla Masi Doria, then moderated the round table ‘Five centuries of Italian explorations in Argentina between culture, science and fundamental rights’, attended by: Giovanni Luigi Fontana, professor at the University of Padua, to illustrate ‘The 500th anniversary of the voyage of Magellan and Pigafetta’; Cosimo Cascione, professor at the University of Naples, and Don Francesco Motto, to talk about ‘The explorations of Don Alberto Maria De Agostini’; Alejandro Tassone, Conicet-Universidad de Buenos Aires professor, on the topic ‘Bilateral activities in the environmental and geophysical fields in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia
over the last 25 years’. Antonella Succi, president of Visionando, spoke on ‘The fundamental right to the environment’, recalling the project launched in the region in collaboration with the Cuia and with the Navy and the Vespucci ship. The event concluded with the delivery, by Visionando, of a research grant to a young Argentine researcher in marine environmental matters.
