Palermo/Bonn (gro) Two students from the University of Bonn are helping to create a new documentary about the “Room of Miracles.” The central work being created is a video that will be shown Sept. 23 in the studio’s auditorium Palermo will be shown for the first time by Radio Italiana (Rai). The “room of wonders” (“camera delle meraviglie”), a square room in blue and about 4 meters high, decorated with Arabic elements in gold, had been discovered in 2013 rather by chance in an old palazzo in the heart of the old town of Palermo. The video that is now emerging shows the latest research results of a scientific investigation involving the students from Germany.
Attention at Expo Milan.
A first video on the “Room of Wonders” has already been available since last year. It was made for a presentation of the “camera delle meraviglie” at the World Expo 2015 in Milan and was content, also due to time constraints, essentially with a description of what was found. Further research has now been funded by the “Ioa” , the Italian Institute of Oriental and Asian Languages, further by the Palermo airport company Falcone e Borsellino (Gesap) and the “B & B Porta di Castro”. Among other things, it has come out that the caligraphic , shimmering in pale blue gold elements were not applied by an Arab, but by an artistic Palermitan “a few hundred years ago”, by a painter or a painter who knew how to copy the Arabic script.
Remembrance of the Arabic era.
The blue room is a testimony of the Arabic era of Palermo – and Europe. Through Palermo, from the 10th to the 12th century, mathematics (including the Arabic numerals that we still use today), the then modern medicine, astronomy and literature reached northern Europe, also the writings of the Greek philosophers from Heraclitus to Plato, which have been preserved for us only because they were translated into the once “classical” Greek by Arab scholars residing in Sicily at that time.