One, none, many

This house created for us by Paolo Ventura is the sum of many houses lived in, recalled, maybe just imagined

I didn’t know how important houses were for me. Then I decided to tell my story and the resulting book, Autobiografia di un impostore, was full of houses. The house where I was born in Milan, my aunt’s place where we went for Sunday dinner to hear stories of the war, the bombs. My grandmother’s house in the mountains. The house by the sea, and the one in the forest where I spent my summers, the realm of a mad, villainous king – my father. When I was drafted I discovered what it was like to have my own locker, after years of sharing wardrobe space with siblings. Perhaps for spite, one day I hid a python in our closet. The snake was a gift, but it didn’t last very long. The climate in Milan saw to that. And the lack of plants, maybe. No one in my family has ever had a green thumb.

When Kim and I began living together we were in a tiny flat in Brooklyn. I built a model city on an end table, perhaps Milan during wartime. I used flour to dust it with snow, winter, 1944. In an interior books were scattered on the floor, with torn pages, as if the Germans had searched the home of a writer. Those images became my first book, War Souvenir. Another book, Winter Stories, happened in the same way, but in another house, because we’d been evicted. Eventually we went back to Italy, to Anghiari. I made my first studio there, in an old barn.

When our son was seven we moved back to Milan, with only a mattress and two chairs. Over the years our present house has filled up with things, and what I have photographed is real. Lamps by Castiglioni and Noguchi, a Giacometti drawing, a vase by Sottsass, chairs by Gio Ponti, a photograph by Diane Arbus, a portrait of Marcel Duchamp playing chess, by Ugo Mulas. Now I feel at home.