Bigliodromi
Artistic devices to play with marbles
This article is a translation from the original Italian version written by Roberto Papetti. He is the Author of the "Bigliodromi " exhibition: whose purpose is to play with marbles. Click here to read the original text.
Playing with marbles is an ancient pastime that was and still is a prevalent in each continent. It's a passion always capable of involving adults and children. Clay marbles were discovered in Egyptian tombs. Moreover, there are archaeological finds from Roman and Greek periods. Marbles were made in different sizes and materials.
In the past, marble manufacture was restricted to work of able artisans.
Today it depends on sophisticated technology and machinery that produce a huge amount of perfect spherical toys, with a high quality finish. These end products are distinguished by: the marbling, the opalescence, the transparency, the brilliance, the blend of colours and the object's spherical perfection.
Prevalently and for a long time, the normal place to play with marbles was the street.
On the unsurfaced road children traced schemes of play, dug holes in the ground, made tracks, and above all they met friends and challengers. The street was, and is, the perfect “bigliodromo”, as an irreplaceable and excellent school of ability, conviviality and children’s impertinent, cheeky use of the urban spaces. 
The above picture shows some Bigliodromi of the Roberto's collection of toys to play with marbles.
All these objects are mainly made with discharged materials, such as flat pieces of wood, from wooden boxes containing fruits and vegetables, or cardboard boxes and metal lids.
In the past, there were people who found it fashionable to build homemade devices for playing with marbles. The habit of making schemes for playing on the ground was always matched by the making of small devices, which were more or less either complicated.
This demonstrated that "play and toys are deep-rooted in the world that expresses them". This play activity found - and even now finds, inspiration in the associated ways of living. After its miniaturization, dismantling and abandonment the toy keeps the mark of human transience.
The objects displayed in "Bigliod
romi" exhibition are equally representative of the Author's peculiar way to give meaning to the play activity and to the world. They come into being from a proposal directed to the children and adults. The proposition was made in some different Italian towns, during the week after the summer school term.
That initiative was called Università delle biglie (The Marbles University). Today, the project is an educational "institution" that promotes traditional games and hand-skills ability, inviting people to make the devices, tracks, supports for the play activity with marbles. On the way, Roberto with his team noticed the unending tangle between making, inventing and playing activity.
When happiness comes with rolling a marble could be the slogan for what visitors and participants find in Roberto's toy collection.
In Roberto's words: "The inspiration for this exhibition came to me when looking at most common and ordinary things. Sometime quite spontaneusly. Other times it arose from dreams and play, but also when I was reading the wonderful adventures of Qfwfq, in "Cosmicomics" book, by Italo Calvino: "I was a child, but I was already aware of it, - Qfwfq narrated, - I was acquainted with all the hydrogen atoms, one by one, and when a new atom cropped up, I noticed it right away.When I was a kid, the only playthings we had in the whole universe were the hydrogen atoms, and we played with them all the time, I and another youngster of my age whose name was Pfwfp. What's sort of games? That's simple enough to explain. Since space was curved, we sent the atoms rolling along its curve, like so many marbles, and the kid whose atom went farthest won the game. When you made your shot you had to be careful, to calculate the effects, the trajectories, you had to know how to exploit the magnetic field and the fields of gravity, otherwise the ball left the track and was eliminated from the contest."
Particularly, Roberto liked 
Calvino's book because the story was, and still now is, a source of continuous discoveries. In Calvino's book the literary fiction brings theplay in an expandingCosmic space, crossing scientific theories, toward imaginative hypothesis. But at the same time it is a comic and surreal story.
The pieces of work displayed are carefully made and maybe they have an aesthetic quality too. They could be tested for their formal quality and for their appearance, but their real meaning is in their use. In fact, only playing with them and by consuming them will they find their coherence. They don't want to end up as phantom objects in a museum.
At best they might end up in a junk shop, or a second-hand dealer or between objects that are lost among human beings.
The "Bigliodromi" are naturally connected with marbles (biglie). They are objects to serve marbles, which are little things without a playing scheme. Marbles don't have imitative scenery, abstract, material or pretence where these perfect playthings can find fingers to shoot or roll them, or hands to handle them. They need pockets that accumulate or empty out, and stones thatsmash them into pieces at the end. This is the way to realize a marble's destiny.
Today's marbles are mainly made of glass, which is a material so exiguous and unprotected, that they don't decay. If so, also it does not changes timeless, it ignores the yesterday, centuries time, that is. Nor it does beg favour from the impurity of money. When glass becomes rolling marbles on tracks and run onto Bigliodromo arrangement, it stumbles into a paradox of the suspension play-frame and in the time. The time that wears out all things… and so it becomes.
So are you ready to shot your marbles into the "bigliodromo"?
or are you loking for a Playful Marble Devices workshop?