click here to view and download “The Story oh Jonah”

Special edition for the Order of Malta by the Ambassador to the Holy See, Antonio Zanardi Landi, former president of the Aquileia Foundation.

Photographs: Elio Ciol
Publication date: July 2018
Publisher: Umberto Allemandi

The volume, dedicated to the splendid mosaic cycle of the story of Jonah in the basilica of Aquileia, is magnificently illustrated by photographs taken by maestro Elio Ciol and boasts essays by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi and Professor Carlo Ossola, and precious contributions by the coordinator of the Rabbinical Tribunal of northern Italy Vittorio Robiati Bendaud, the Imam of Al Azhar Sheik Ibrahim Reda, and the director of the Fondazione Aquileia Cristiano Tiussi. In the special edition specially produced for the Order of Malta, the book contains an introduction by H.M.E.H. Prince and Grand Master Frà Giacomo Dalla Torre of the Temple of Sanguinetto, of whose family four Patriarchs are buried in the Basilica of Aquileia itself.
The book, which has a strong connection with religious themes and the great challenges of coexistence in the Mediterranean, wishes to contribute to the awareness of the gravity of the loss that the world’s cultural heritage has suffered in the Near East, where Christianity has its deepest roots and where the Order of Malta itself is still present and active today. As Ambassador Zanardi Landi states in the preface, the publication “is part of the “Archaeology Wounded” programme, launched by the Aquileia Foundation in 2015, which aimed to bring to Aquileia artefacts from museums and sites devastated by fundamentalist terrorism with the aim of making visitors understand how much the civilisations whose memories are destroyed were linked to the Aquileian world and part of a wider Mediterranean civilisation. The Mosque and the Tomb of the Prophet Jonah – a unifying element among the peoples of the Mediterranean and present in the Bible, in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, and in four Suras of the Koran – are the first building of worship destroyed by Isis, and with this volume we want to offer a contribution of ideas and reflection on the seriousness of the damage caused to the heritage of the countries affected, but also to our identity as Mediterraneans and Europeans”.