Ann Marlowe

By ANN MARLOWE

TURIN, Italy — There’s a general, and luckily false, belief that the years of war have wiped out Afghanistan’s artistic heritage. Many of the greatest objects from the Kabul Museum survived the years of war and are part of “I Tesori Ritrovati,” a revelatory show now in Turin.

Many of the 220 items in this exhibit were hidden for decades in the vaults of the Presidential Palace in Kabul, while others are recent finds; it’s highly unlikely you have seen any of them before. The current show began its tour in December at Paris’s Musee Guimet, which also lent a few objects to the show, and will travel to Bonn, Amsterdam and the U.S. before returning to exhibition in Kabul for the first time in some thirty years.

In Turin, you enter the exhibit by descending from the street level to the remains of the city’s Roman theater. The installation in a series of relatively small rooms in the vaulted brick basement of the 1899 Manica Nuovo di Palazzo Royale, allows for an intimate experience of the mainly small-scale art. (more…)

My first good night’s sleep in Afghanistan and a good thing, since today Dr. Ahmed and I go to Mazar. Just as I’m getting out of bed around 9, I feel the earth move. It is the Kabul effect of the massive Pakistan earthquake. Maybe because I’ve felt the aftershocks of a quake before (Thessalonika, 1978) but I make nothing of it, and it’s not until I talk to friends in Kabul later in the day that I learn what it was.

We pass through the Salang tunnel uneventfully. When I took the same route in November 2002 it was freezing cold, the mountains were covered with snow, and a massive traffic jam kept us in the tunnel for an hour. This time there are hardly any cars. The descent in altitude from Kabul’s mile high height is ear-popping. The countryside is pretty here and I’m looking forward to two stops we’re going to make to see archeological sites.

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