English Texts

The Italian Issue EMANUELE FARNETI French magazines have a tradition of celebrating national fashion with covers dedicated to local style icons or the magic of Paris. The same happens in the US and the UK. But less so in Italy. Due to a certain typical conditioned reflex of ours, it always seems to us that whatever happens far away from here is, by definition, less provincial. I believe it boils down to a lack of perspective. Suffice it to see how much the leading international press talks about Italy and Italians, and how much curiosity one reads for the latest news and novelties traversing our country. For this reason, we have decided to make Italy the protagonist of the September issue, which is traditionally the most important of the year. Nothing could be further from the rhetoric of some allegedly “better Italy”. Instead, it is a snapshot – albeit partial and subjective, as inevitably happens when one is so close to the portrayed subject – of a country that, between trials and tribulations, and despite an objectively unfit ruling class, is waking from its slumber. It’s no secret that something is stirring in Milan. On these pages we speak of new designers and age-old costumes returned to their splendour, of the city’s polished Galleria, and of upcoming exhibitions. Florence is also on the move, with contemporary art challenging historical resistances. A blossoming of small-scale publishers is painting a picture far removed from Italy’s usually stereotyped topics such as food and tourism. The female authors of this year’s most unexpected best-seller tell us about other rebellious Italian women. David Leavitt writes of 17th-century wonders, while Lila Azam Zanganeh describes her dream of an Italian square on an autumn morning full of light and rarefied air. The brother of a famous American writer casts light on some of Italy’s most obscure places. Patrick Demarchelier gives three young Italian girls the style and grace of erstwhile divas. And Juergen Teller ventures to the western tip of Sicily in pursuit of his “Italian crush”. Then there are the three covers. The first pays homage to a monument of Italy’s artistic heritage. Willy Vanderperre and Olivier Rizzo travelled and researched to create their story on Caravaggio, portraying him with images that are simultaneously old yet strikingly modern. The second cover is the story of a gesture, entrusted to Mert & Marcus with Alastair McKimm. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco reveals why Italian kisses are the ultimate and unlike others given elsewhere. Ivan Cotroneo, meanwhile, recalls their role in the construction of Italian cinema’s imaginary. The third cover is a wish. A hope that Rome – whose monumental sites provided the setting for the narrative told by Inez & Vinoodh with Alex White – can return to its former self, which, on reflection, was not even so long ago. Because the country will only really get moving if Rome gets back on its feet. Obviously, all these threads are held together by fashion. Specifically, the considerable amount of fashion designed directly by Italians; and that enormous amount, almost all of it, which is produced in this country. After all, with all its well-known limitations, the fashion system plays an anything but marginal role in Italy’s drive towards the future. Not only by giving jobs to over 400,000 professionals in 50,000 companies, and with a turnover of 52 million euros (in 2016). But also by representing the Italian sense of beauty all around the globe. It is the soft power we possess. Let’s not forget to feel at least a little bit proud of it. As Franca Sozzani once said: others talk, we do. • original text page 30 Bacio! PIETRANGELO BUTTAFUOCO* French kiss is well-known. As Cyrano de Bergerac would say, it’s a pink apostrophe between the words An Italian kiss, on the other hand, is an allusion. It’s a midnight kiss – “un bacio a mezzanotte” – untrustworthy by definition. Kisses are like artful thefts. It’s not a sin if you dream of kisses. And it’s always “The Last Kiss” of the day for people who never want to grow up. In fact, staying young is a trade-off of excuses – “just a kiss” – when a kiss, alone, is a madhouse of fireworks and promises. “The mouth that has been kissed does not lose its savour, indeed it renews itself,” as Boccaccio’s proverb goes. Or “Give me a thousand kisses”, as Catullus would say. In rock ’n’ roll the round figure for kisses is 24,000, but la cara sillaba, or “the sweet word” – at least in the songs that grandpa sings – is summed up with “ba ba baciami piccina”, or “ki ki kiss me little darling”. This bright stutter is intended for grandma, and what she gets in her “heart of hearts” is “baci in quantità” (i.e. lots of kisses) and a cheeky question: “Tutti questi baci a chi li devo dar?” (Or, “Who should I give all these kisses to?”) The kiss finds refuge in the kiss curl: a lock of hair that drips allusions onto cheeks – or even foreheads – and the kiss sleeps as if in a slumber of coral, silk and flowers. Implied in an inadvertent twitch of the lips, the kiss remains an omission: the eloquence of things left unsaid as a way to safeguard oneself. Love seized us. Galehaut is the book and who wrote it, but the story of all the world’s kisses is Italian: a bundle of film clips – of censored kisses – that were cut, preserved and then edited together. It’s the story of Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso”, and between the vibrant colours of the film, the blackand-white images make every allusion plain to see: “You can never get your fill of escargots to suck and girls to kiss.” An itch. And then the substance. This is what the woman demands, and the imperative is always categorical: Kiss me, stupid! Vapid stubble lines his upper lip – like a row of marching ants – and it prickles as his mouth sinks almond-flavoured throbs onto her lips, all of coral, silk, flowers and closed eyes. Back in the days of men’s-only clubs, the barbers – certainly not hairdressers – heartily recommended a moustache: “Wear a pencil moustache as fine as a line of ants, and the girls will thank you for it.” Italy’s fear lies in a kiss – the kiss of Totò Riina – and who knows if this mafia boss had a tongue piercing to keep turning the aching tooth. Goodbye kisses, they say. But the whole Italian fairy tale lies in a toing and froing of kisses. Like Totò the legendary actor, who went looking for kisses in the station among the departing trains. Petrarch’s entire “Canzoniere” in vernacular Italian lies in a kiss.

And it’s a ciao ciao! Another kiss. And then a thousand more (“deinde usque altera mille”).

(Trad. Antony Bowden) • *Journalist and author, 54 years old, from Agira, with a degree in Theoretical Philosophy. His latest book “I baci sono definitivi” (La Nave di Teseo) was inspired by daily trips on the Rome subway and features stories about sweethearts, inscriptions on railings, phrases, and glances, hurried traffic, stops, and lunch breaks. Buttafuoco takes notes and observes as everything rushes by, is erased or fades. Only kisses definitely remain. original text page 112 Roma! LILA AZAM ZANGANEH* Every writer is a lover moved by a dream. The dream of a woman, a man, a sword or a city. And this dream needs a foot in the real world. Because the world, in sum, is the fabric that desire’s made on. So what better place on earth to dream than Rome? Rome, on any given morning in the early fall (my favorite time of the year in the city), on a square, not too far from the Madonna del Divino Amore. The sun shines lightly, it smiles upon you, like a momentary grace, or a stroke of good luck. One could be having a cappuccino, or else a cornetto full of Nutella (I had six in a row, not so long ago, prompting my neighbors to leer in dismay). There I am, having my sixth cornetto, and dreaming. I dream of a square giving birth to another square and another yet. I dream of the Scala Santa in San Giovanni in Laterano, and though I’ve scaled it before, I dream it leads to the clouds and the stars, to a place beyond the painting. I dream of the Domus Aurea, and how the painters of the Renaissance dug holes to see the frescoes and steal beautiful ideas (good poets steal, they steal to dream again.) I dream of the Palatino, full of the rumor of Emperors, and strangely empty on a fall afternoon. I seek that emptiness, that void, because inside it, when you prick up your ears, you begin to hear the living pulse of time. I think of fountains and their philters, “Love” and “Disdain,” and how Orlando was driven raving mad by perhaps no more and no less than such a philter (passion often seems to spring from a fountain, a metaphor for madness, or simply, the lack of rhyme and reason in our dreams.) I dream of narrow byroads where swords have fallen over rocks, and where in their place only a footprint remains. I dream of castles rising above mausoleums and boys sleeping where doves once slept. I dream of a time when Rome, somewhere far off into the future, will be but the dream of a dreamer dreamed on a fall morning, in a piazza full of light and thin air. • *Author of “The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness” (W.W. Norton & Co.), Lila Azam Zanganeh spent long periods of her life in Italy. She is one of the five members of the Man Booker Prize jury. original text page 114 Ad Arte! DAVID LEAVITT* As an artist and a man, Caravaggio belonged to the shadowland. Darkness, you might say, was his stone, light the chisel with which he sculpted. Starting with such early works as the “Boy with the Lute”, Caravaggio reveals an understanding of light so masterly as to make us forget that he lived on the candlelit cusp of the seventeenth century, in a world that did not know, could hardly imagine, electricity, photography, the flashbulb and the flood light and the portrait umbrella. Flood, flash, umbrella: tellingly, the language of camera equipment is the language of storms, just as in Caravaggio’s paintings storms always threaten, and with them the burst of lightning that will, for a millisecond, expose all that the darkness conceals. If the moments Caravaggio portrays are ephemeral, it is because light itself is ephemeral. His eye, like the camera, captures the briefest of exposures. What makes him a great artist is that he always knows where to aim his lens. To look the Medusa in the face is to be turned to stone. Caravaggio not only looked the Medusa in the face, he painted her portrait. Wrathful and appalled, his Medusa meets the viewer’s gaze with an anguish beyond pity, even beyond cruelty, as if to say, You knew all along you could not resist. Now see what I see every day in the mirror. In principle, we have defenses against this sort of seeing. Most of us, were we to be forced to witness a crucifixion, would turn away in horror. Our eyelids might shut of their own volition against such brutal light, as they do when we try to stare into the sun. And yet once you have looked the Medusa in the face, these defenses fall away. You can observe the harrowing of another’s flesh with equanimity because now you are stone, you are stony, you are endowed with the capacity not just to scrutinize suffering, but to choose the moment that most perfeclty embodies suffering, and thereby transmute it into art. By all accounts, Caravaggio was wayward and violent. He killed more than once. He lusted, mostly after boys, yet even in his most eroticized portraits – “Saint John the Baptist”, “Sick Bacchus”, “The Boy Bitten by a Lizard” – the effect of his famously tenebrous chiaroscuro is to emphasize the vulnerability of the flesh. Consider his “Bacchus” in the Uffizi: the lips are red, the muscles supple, you sense the blood pumping beneath the skin, and know that the merest caress of a sharp knife will be enough to make it flow. For this is the world as the petrified and petrifying Medusa sees it, a world in which the body is neither idol nor ideal. As Saint Peter is nailed to the cross upside-down, it is the logistics of the operation, not the actual upending, on which Caravaggio focuses: the engineering that underlies torture, the strain it brings out in the faces of the soldiers rather than the face of Peter himself, who appears to be giving directions. Similarly, in “The Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus”, what catches the eye is less the ecstatic young Saint’s reaching arms as the hoof of his horse, delicately lifted over its master’s chest. For Caravaggio, light is the tool that allows the artist to capture those rare moments when pain and ecstasy converge and the suffering visionary sees heaven, sees Christ, sees Charon’s barge pulled up to the bank of the murky river he navigates. A paradox: to portray all that is soft in the human body, you must make yourself hard. You must look in the mirror. You must confront the snake-haired Gorgon in yourself.• * Author, 56 years old, born in Pittsburgh. A professor at University of Florida, he has lived for an extensive period in Italy – the country that is at the center of his two books: “Italian pleasures” (Chronicle Books) e “In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany” (Counterpoint LLC). “The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel” (Bloomsbury) and the biography “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (W.W. Norton & Co., recently reprinted), are his latest publications. The author will be at the Pordenonelegge 2017 festival (September 16, piazza San Marco, Pordenone), in a conversation with Ottavio Cappellani original text page 117 Franca Sozzani LUCA DINI On September 3rd, 2016, I sent an email to Franca Sozzani. The night before in Venice I had seen Franca: Chaos and Creation, the film by her son Francesco Carrozzini. I wrote to tell her that I was proud, as a colleague and as an Italian, to hear in the documentary so many important names from around the world celebrate the genius and uniqueness of her work. I also told her that, being a father