Ligabue Magazine

Giancarlo Ligabue’s story is the inspiration that led to the editorial project of Ligabue Magazine, in 1982.
This is how his story began, forty years ago.

“When the son of Mr. Krull – an industrialist from a Prussian family operating in Venice and Treviso – first showed me a stone arrowhead, I was surprised. I was even more surprised – I was little more than a boy – when he began to tell me the story of that arrowhead he had found on the sides of Montello, a peak in the province of Treviso, and the events that that chipped stone could tell.

Apparently his was only the description of an object: in truth it contained the story of a man, of many men, a community that had preceded us leaving its own testimonies. Since then I haven’t stopped reading the ancient traces I found near home, comparing them with those left by men, animals, living beings or fossils all over the world. My story, as well as that of the Ligabue Study and Research Center, begins from the curiosity that another man transmitted to me.
Together we had tried to understand who had built, owned, and used that arrow and also to know the landscape where that being lived, how he fed himself, what he believed in, how he could behave when faced with difficulties. Over the years they have become part of my life and my studies. Questions (and answers too) that I shared with many friends, collaborators, scientists in hundreds of explorations, travels, researches, discoveries. It was a fortune that we – at the Study Center – wanted to share with as many people as possible.

That’s why the books, the films, this magazine were born.
The first issue of the “Magazine” came out thirty years ago. Cell phones didn’t exist, there were no personal computers, there was no talk of the Internet; even the research in the laboratories appeared modest. However, we were guided by our faith in a science that could explain, in a research that could talk about human life, in an effort that could help us understand our environment and our future. That’s why we traveled, photographed, wrote.
We have greeted and told about the New Man that we met each time, in scenarios sometimes mysterious, sometimes degraded. Man and his tools, his art, his cultures. The Study Center has always acted aware that the path of discovery is the one that is made in the edges, understanding the nuances, listening to the small sounds, intercepting the last vibrations that are disappearing in the languages and signs of the cultures.

The “Ligabue Magazine” has thus become a map of our existence and of our common emotions because I believe that feelings of discovery only really exist if there is sharing. This is why, after thirty years, we continue to be the magazine of those who travel the roads of the world.”

Giancarlo Ligabue

Publishing editor
Alberto Angela

Editor
Alessandro Marzo Magno

Editorial manager
Lucia Berti

Advertising
Silvia Lattuada

Research, iconography and archive
Elisa Bissacco
Cecilia Riva

Graphic and layout
Federico Dei Rossi

Each issue of the Magazine is prepared and organized as a geographical and scientific exploration. And although we use the modernity of satellite maps and electronic instruments, we are not exempt from confronting the risks of the climate, human physical fatigue, and the uncertainties of the environment. Building the Magazine is equivalent to travel unexplored stretches – or even tread little or barely traced paths – with the certainty that curiosity and intellectual passion for disclosure are our only compass.

Every reader who travels with us through the articles and images knows that in front of everything there is the desire to know and understand.
The texts and photographs are mixed with encounters with people, places experienced in first person, stories, legends, objects and documents compared each time.
The recipe for a success that has lasted almost forty years needs real and virtual maps, scientific research, sometimes mixed with a bit of “serendipity” that – as we all know – favors discoveries and revelations.

This has always been the case for all the scientists and collaborators of the Ligabue Study Center who have made research – in the deserts, mountains and forests of the world, in laboratories, museums and universities – and constant study their shared method.

The magazine is born from the suggestions that Alberto Angela brings back with him on each of his trips, from the letters we receive from archaeologists in Peru, from the ideas of scientists who live among the ice of the South Pole, from the biologists who read the signs of evolution and change, from historians who know how to bring archives and documents back to life.

But also from the invitations that readers offer to the editorial staff, from the ideas that young scholars or researchers bring to the Study Center; even from the curiosity to compare some historical research with new methods and instruments. Each issue of the magazine – as it happened in the past for cartographers who had to know and verify everything about the new boundaries of the world – is then subjected by the editorial staff and graphic designers to a long, continuous quality test before arriving at the printer, or on the web.

For this reason – be it archaeological research in the ancient burial grounds of the Asian steppes, the evolution of species, the history of geographical discoveries, the travels of anthropologists and researchers, the intimacy of the paths in Venetian culture, or the vertigo of astronomy – the magazine is an irreplaceable travel companion.