AQUILIEA, ITALY--Her name is Glenda Zanolla, and 20 years ago she was an exchange student at Wayne County High School in Jesup, Georgia. Then she returned to her home in Trieste (the capital of Friuli Venezia Giulia), earned a law degree, and went to work as a public policy specialist for the regional government.
Now she's been appointed chief administrative officer of the Aquilea Foundation, a new organization whose members include local governments (region, province, municipal) and the national ministry of culture, with the specific assignment of cutting the red tape that has traditionally slowed or stifled innovative cultural projects in Italy's notoriously overstaffed and compartmentalized cultural bureaucracy.
The project at hand: restoring the 4th century mosaics of the north portico outside the basilica here. These days, Aquileia is a sleepy backwater of 3,500 inhabitants at the north end of the Adriatic, but in Roman times it was a huge trading center, the principal access from the Mediterranean into central Europe, and boasted a population of 300,000. Historians come from to Aqauileia from around the world to study Roman history; northern Italy's most important archeological museum is located across the street from the basilica, whose mosaics are a national treasure.
Dottoressa Zanolla, as she's known professionally, hopes her foundation's pilot project, to restore the paving of the portico, will be finished by May because an important visitor is coming to town, on his way from Ljubjjana to Venice on May 5th, to be exact. That would be Pope Benedict XVI, you see, and he's planning a stop at the basilica in Aquileia to celebrate mass. And that's the 11th C basilica below, built on a 4th C foundation, with gorgeous mosaics depicting the story of Jonah and the whale.
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