SPOLETO RETURNS

We're fortunate to live so close to one of America's premier cultural centers, especially with the return this spring of the performing arts celebration that put Charleston on the international cultural map, Spoleto Festival USA. The Festival returns over the Memorial Day weekend and continues for 17 days, drawing performers and audiences from all over the world to multiple venues throughout the city for its 45th year. (The 2020 season was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic, but survived in a reduced series of radio and streamed events, "Spoleto At Home".

Gian Carlo Menotti

The Festival was the brainchild of Italian-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Gian Carlo Menotti (1911 - 2007) who in the mid-1970's began searching for a location for an American counterpart to Spoleto, Italy's, Festival Of The Two Worlds, of which he was the director. (The Pulitzer was for his opera "The Saint of Bleecker Street", but he's most widely known for "Amahl And The Night Visitors", written for television.) On a visit to the United States, he was invited to Charleston and noted that "It's intimate, so you can walk from one theater to the next. It has Old World charm in architecture and gardens. Yet it's a community big enough to support the large numbers of visitors to the festival." Promoted by Charleston's then-Mayor Joseph Riley and Theodore Stern, then the president of the College of Charleston, Spoleto USA opened its premier season in May of 1977.

The Festival has served as the setting for numerous world premieres of opera, theater and musical performance by artists such as Tennessee Williams, Phillip Glass, Laurie Anderson and many others. This year's Festival brings the world premiere on May 27th of "Omar", an opera by Rihannon Gibbons and John Abels, which tells the story of Omar Ibn Said, an early 19th-century West African Muslim scholar seized in his native village by slave traders, shipped to Charleston's Gadsden Wharf and sold into slavery for the rest of his life. The opera's based on Ibn Said's handwritten autobiography written in Arabic in 1831 and translated into English in the 1880's

Learn more about the Spoleto USA Festival, including performance schedules, here.

ALONG THE SANTEE

History and nature came together for us during a recent SINHG Trip to Old Santee Canal Park in Monck's Corner. The birdwatchers among us were impressed by our guide's remarkable ear for identifying birds strictly by their song, like the Prothonotary Warblers and Eastern Bluebirds, all busy tending their

Prothonotary Warbler (courtesy Old Santee Canal Park)

nesting sites in the cypresses and live oaks along the many boardwalks threaded through this Lowcountry National Historic site.

The Santee Canal, we learned, was the first canal built in post-Revolutionary War America, authorized by the South Carolina General Assembly in 1786 and completed in 1800. Its 22-mile length. with ten locks, provided a shipping route between Charleston's Cooper River, via the Santee and Congaree rivers, to Columbia, the new state capitol. But the canal couldn't compete with the new railroads that began crisscrossing the state in the early 1800's, and

A preserved canal lock (courtesy Berkeley Observer)

the canal had fallen into disuse by the time of the Civil War. Much of it disappeared by flooding when nearby Lake Moultrie was constructed. Remnants of the old canal's locks have been preserved, along with the Stony Landing House (seen above), built in in 1843 and now used as a meeting venue.

While SINHG Trips continue through May, the schedule of trips for the fall season is under development and will be ready soon. Stay tuned!

IRON, BEER & GARDENS

We’ve been back downtown quite a bit this month, starting with a tour of one of Charleston’s signature features - the ironwork of Phillip Simmons (1912 - 2009), whose delicate scrollwork adorns the gates of gardens and walkways throughout the Peninsula. Some examples we saw are pictured above. During our tour, we learned that some 500 examples of Simmons’ work are still extant, a tribute to his training as a young apprentice with the ironworking grandson of enslaved African-Americans. Simmons was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship for his work. At his death, the city marked all his artwork with white ribbons to honor his contribution to the cityscape.

In the garden with fellow SINHG members.

Simmons’ delicately wrought gates adorned the entrances to some of the private gardens we visited on our Charleston Home and Garden tour, a rare chance to enjoy the quiet corners of downtown seldom open to visitors. We also noted the marked changes in architectural styles that outline the city’s transformation from earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters, all of which changed the face of downtown during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The group at Frothy Beard Brewery

The beer lovers among us piled into two vans for a tour of downtown’s burgeoning craft beer industry, visiting three breweries on the northern peninsula to sample their beers and ales. It’s an industry with a long history tied to the city’s growth, culture and politics. The first mention of a “beer cellar” on what is now East Bay Street appeared in 1732, although at the time most ingredients for brewing, arrived from outside the colony, principally from Virginia and Pennsylvania, as we learned from Timmon Pettigrew’s entertaining “Charleston Beer” (The History Press, 2011). It wasn’t until the 1760’s, with discontent growing over Britain’s control of imports like the malt and hops needed for brewing, that local farmers began growing their own. The passage of the hated Townsend Act that imposed even heavier taxes on the colonists’ favorite refreshment, and much else, drew Charleston into the revolt that led to independence. Cheers!