Gran(i)Tour 2024

Projects

The Jug Band Colline Metallifere goes North with the 2024 GRAN(i)TOUR!

One of the articles about our 2023 Brezel Tour

After the “Geomusical Tour” in 2019 and the “Brezel Tour” in 2023, the “GRAN(i)TOUR” with the Jug Band Colline Metallifere in 2024 is all about grains (Grani in Italian). At the bottom of this page you will find more articles about the development of this project.

The reason for the tour comes from two invitations at festivals in farms commemorating Rudolf Steiner’s answer to the farmers exactly 100 years ago and that point further into our future.

Our band is a music collective from three countries and three generations, based in the Colline Metallifere, the metalliferous hills of Tuscany. We have been working together since 2018. About half of our repertoire consists of our own songs on contemporary topics, all based on folk, blues and rock, and we also play some of the classics in our own interpretation.

In addition to the music, our passions always play a role in our shows: environmental issues, stories about our land, anecdotes about agriculture, and more incredibly strange facts. We do have recorded material, but our strength is live performances, and “Musica&Territorio!” is our motto.

In the photo from left to right:

  • Simone Sandrucci – recording studio expert and music teacher, vocals, guitar, banjo, mandolin
  • Wolfgang Scheibe – ex-typesetter with a small printing workshop, long-time biodynamic farmer consultant, one-string bass
  • Dario Canal – educator, songwriter, vocals, guitar, harmonica, washboard, percussion
  • Andrea Giacomelli (aka Jack O’Malley) – Environmental engineer, songwriter, vocals, guitar, percussion

(photo credits: Romina Zago)

The GRAN(i)TOUR 2024 will take us from Maremma to Trentino, Munich and the Black Forest, Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg and the Hohenlohe region. We will be on the road from June 14 to June 30, and then back to Tuscany for more Summer gigs.

The tour is co-sponsored by

Follow us on www.jugbandcm.it or Instagram @jugbandcm.

For more information and booking: jugbandcm@pibinko.org or +393317539228.

The BuioMetria Partecipativa Map now embeds also readings by Unihedron

Announcements
A sky quality meter in the process of being “passed” as a relay baton between two characters in the pibinko.org network (Dec. 2016).

After switching back on the interactive BuioMetria Partecipativa map during the twentieth edition of “M’illumino di Meno”, we are gradually adding layers to the canvas that we would like to use over the coming months to trigger actions about light and darkness.

After the CNR IBE monitoring network, we have reloaded the data collected by Unihedron, i.e. the producer of the “Sky Quality Meter”, which we renamed as “buiometri” for our Italian communities.

The new map is available at https://www.pibinko.org/buiometriapartecipativa-map/.

We would like to recall that the Sky Quality Meter is not the only type of sensor existing for the measurement of night sky quality. In fact, with the BuioMetria Partecipativa since 2011 we have conducted various intercomparison and cross-calibration experiments. However, the SQM still remains as the most widespread entry-level sensor, plus it is the one which we have historically used as a liaison between the various participants to the buiometria measurement campaigns.

For more information: micalosapevo@pibinko.org or +393317539228.

Here we go with the “In the Heart of Tuscany” survey!

Announcements

The more you review presentations of tourism and culture situations in Tuscany, the more you get the feeling that a very high number of these places is characterised as being “…in the heart of Tuscany”. At this point we would like to better assess what is the perimeter of this heart…

The pibinko.org network, with over thirty years of experience in incredibly strange mapping, welcomes you to a “geo-anatomy” exercise, by helping us to locate the pulse-setting organ in this region.

If you manage a business, or you know somebody who does, and this business is “in the heart of Tuscany”, please let us know at micalosapevo@pibinko.org or +393317539228.

For those of you who are more social-network oriented, please see also https://www.facebook.com/groups/intheheartoftuscany/

All of your feedback will be relayed to our mapping department, and they will gradually create a map, which will be published at some point (we will give the survey a couple of months). If you like the initiative and would like to help us keep it alive, please consider supporting the pibinko.org network (https://www.pibinko.org/support/)

Thank you for your attention, and best regards from…the heart of Tuscany!

The BuioMetria Partecipativa Map now includes the CNR IBE Research Network

Announcements

Thanks to Luciano Massetti of the Italian Research Council Bioeconomy Institute, who is a historical collaborator of the BMP project, we are glad to add to our “classical” measures (i.e. those made with manual measurements by citizens), a new information layer.

This is represented by the location of fixed stations that CNR IBE has been deploying since 2015 to monitor artificial night sky brightness in various parts of Tuscany. The Tuscan network had a recent “spin-off” in the Svalbard Islands, since Luciano was on a mission in February 2024 to install a sensor in that remote location. By clicking on a given station, you may either review publications where the data have been presented, or contact Luciano for more information.

Open Data Day 2024: Merging the pibinko.org network Community Maps

Announcements

In the framework of the 2024 Open Data Day, we are preparing a simple “alignment” exercise involving various community maps which we created starting from 2013 in collaboration with various characters in the Metalliferous Hills, and beyond. In a few days we will release additional details on this initiative, which will take place between March 4, and March 10, 2024.

In the meantime: