Ubiquitous Influences

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Italian Journal volume 20. number IX. 2013

Ubiquitous Influences

Giacamo Puccini. Courtesy Puccini Foundation.

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on the cover Gabriel Biggi. NY LIGHT. Story on page 39.

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Italian Journal

IN THIS ISSUE Editor’s journal 5 contributors 7 NOTABLE 10

Ubiquitous Inf luences Claudia Palmira Acunto Editor Laura Giacalone Associate Editor Gianluca Marziani Ludovica Rossi Purini barbara zorzoli Columnists Tegan George maria vano Editorial Assistants Mauro benedetti Photography vito catalano Social Journal Photography

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Nobel Italians Silicon Savior Startups Here and There Meet the IT Innovators A Brief Meditation on Italian Photography 28 House and Impermanence 29 A Vision of Pasolini 32 manuli’s kaspar: hidden smash 33 Missing Fellini 34 De Chirico’s “Long American Shadow” 36 Machiavelli’s Prince After 500 Years 46 Italian journal columns: CONTEMPORARY ART: Studio America FASHION: Schiap Happy Photography: Light on bernini’s Fountains Diario Rome-ny: Architectural Crossover Literature: “It Lit” in Translation Social journal Face file: Fabiola gianotti

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EDITOR’S journal

interwoven I

t is essentially American to assimilate the influences of its myriad foreignborn communities and traditions while nonetheless individuating them. And one could say that Italian culture is “one of a kind” and not readily integrated.

Italianità in America has mostly resisted over-adaptation and watered-down versions of itself, creating an almost amorous symbiosis between the two.

Looking back on the last century especially, containing and cataloging the influences, subtle and gross, from the “boot” becomes increasingly difficult. At what point, to take a banal example, did espresso cease to be exclusively Italian?

Beyond food, cars and fashion, which are the most mainstream catch-alls of things Italian, architectural, cinematic, literate, and artistic influences abound.

Our theme is about ubiquity, the persistence of imagery and style that originate from a distinctively Mediterranean source. I recall a line by Shakespeare, who wove the ideal of Italy and its magical effect in several of his plays. This taken from a dialogue in King Richard II, whose ears prefer to hear “Report of fashions in proud Italy / Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation / Limps after in base imitation.”1 It is exciting to witness what transpires as Italian culture is noted and applauded during this year honoring its very presence in America. The collective understanding of what is best about Italy can surely have its own far-reaching effect – primarily back to its origin where optimism and pride might infuse a new generation of potential inventors, scholars and designers.

P.S. We are pleased to welcome Ludovica Rossi Purini and her column Diario Rome-NY (page 42) to Italian Journal.

CY TWOMBLY. Untitled (Bassano in Teverina), 1985. Acrylic, oil, spray paint on wooden panel. 73 1/2 x 73 1/2 inches. Gagosian Gallery.

1. William Shakespeare. King Richard II, Act Two, Scene One, line 21.

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contributors

Contributors Keith Evan GREEN

Keith Evan Green is “Creativity Professor” of Architecture and Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Clemson University (USA). He earned B.A., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.Arch. degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author of the monograph Gio Ponti and Carlo Mollino (Mellen Press, 2006; Japanese translation by Kajima Press, 2011).

James Johnson

James Johnson is Professor of History at Boston University, where he teaches courses on European Thought and Culture, the History of Boston, Music & Ideas, World War I, and Topics in Political and Social Thought. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (1995), and Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic (2011). As a pianist, he gives concert/lectures regularly in the Boston area on themes in the cultural history of music.

Ara H. Merjian

Ara H. Merjian is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies and Art History at NYU. He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City (Yale University Press, 2014), and is researching a new book, Heretical Aesthetics: Pier Paolo Pasolini against the Avant-Garde, for which he recently won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant as well as a Barbieri Endowment Grant in Modern Italian History.

Patrick Rumble

Patrick Rumble is Professor and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Allegories of Contamination: Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life (Toronto, 1996) and co-editor (with Bart Testa) of Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto, 1994). He is currently working on a book on the art cinema in Italy.

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8 Contributors

contributors Pasquale Verdicchio

Pasquale Verdicchio teaches Italian film, literature & cultural studies in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. As a translator he published the works of Pasolini, Merini, Caproni, Porta, and Zanzotto among others.

His own writings of poetry, reviews, criticism, and photography have been published in journals and in book form by a variety of presses. His books include Devils in Paradise: Writings on Post-Emigrant Cultures (Guernica Editions, 1998), Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), and Looters, Photographers, and Thieves (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2011); his most recent poetry collection is This Nothing’s Place, which was awarded the 2010 Bressani Prize. He is the recipient of several grants including the California Council for the Humanities for research in the preservation of Italian history and culture in San Diego. He is also a founding member and Vice President of the San Diego Italian Film Festival.

Marguerite Waller

Marguerite Waller is Chair of the Women’s Studies Department and Professor of Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies at U.C. Riverside. She has published extensively on Italian, transnational, and postcolonial cinema, and co-edited Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives (University of Toronto, 2002), and Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Routledge, 2012). Her book Dialogue and Difference (Palgrave Macmillan 2005) explores the epistemological complexities of encounter.

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contributors

Italian Journal columnists Laura GIACALONE

Laura Giacalone is a journalist and editor-in-chief of the Italian quarterly Filmaker’s Magazine, and works as a contributing editor and editorial consultant for a number of bilingual art magazines and publishing houses. In London she has worked as a writer and editorial assistant for Phaidon Press, contributing to the three-volume book Phaidon Design Classics (2006). She has translated into Italian the American novels Paper Fish (Pesci di carta, 2006) by Tina De Rosa and Shattered (La finestra sul bosco, 2010) by Karen Robards, and a variety of academic papers, screenplays and feature articles for international publications. Her world is made of words, and she loves it.

Gianluca MARZIANI

Critic and curator based in Rome, Italy, Marziani focuses on the visual arts. He is the artistic director of the Palazzo Collicola Arti Visive in Spoleto and the artistic director of the Rocco Guglielmo foundation. He is the curator of the Terna award and participates in the Rai5 television program “Personal Shopper.” For the IED Roma, he runs a visual arts program. He has curated many shows in both galleries and museums, is the author of two theoretical books and numerous catalogs. He writes about art for all media imaginable. His website is www.gianlucamarziani.com.

Ludovica ROSSI PURINI

Ludovica Rossi Purini was born in Rome, Italy. Ms. Purini has built collaborations and concert series with the Italian Embassy in Washington D.C., the American Academy in Rome, the U.S. Embassies to Italy and the Holy See, Stony Brook University, several world-class conductors, orchestras and chamber music groups and many other important cultural institutions and venues. She is founder and president of the not-for-profit cultural association Compagnia per la Musica in Roma, and has been the President of the Honorary Patrons Committee for Claudio Abbado and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, member of the Executive Board of the Philharmonic Academy of Rome, a Supporting Patron Associate of the Santa Cecilia National Academy in Rome, a Knight of the Keyboard Charitable Trust and sits on the Board of the American Friends of the Budapest Festival Orchestra - among many other appointments. Most recently she became a member of the International Board of the American Foundation Project Rebirth and was appointed as advisor to the Center of Italian Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. She is currently working as creator and director of an international project entitled Rome Rebirth that will take place for the first time in Rome in 2013. Ms. Purini has received notable honors from various cultural foundations and institutions, including a recent award from the City of Rome, in recognition of her commitment to the Arts.

Barbara Zorzoli

Barbara Zorzoli is a journalist and movie critic, radio and TV host, writer... and an actress for fun. She says she lives ‘up in the air’ between Genoa (her birthplace) and London (where she interviews actors/actresses and directors, attends premieres and visits movie sets). She is a contributing editor for Vogue Italia, the Italian Vanity Fair, Film doc and many other cinema magazines. She is a correspondent for the world’s most important international film festivals. She also writes about soundtracks for www.colonnesonore.net. Thanks to her passion for musicals she wrote the booklets for the entire DVD collection dedicated to Fred Astaire (Fred Astaire Collection, Edizioni Master, 2007). As movie critic she gives cinema lessons (in Genoa at Palazzo Ducale and The Space Cinema Porto Antico). This year, she is a member of the Genova Film Festival jury (July 2-8).

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Notable Fendi’s Latest Makeover: Rome’s Iconic Fountain I

talian fashion house Fendi is donating 2.12 million euros to the restoration of the iconic Trevi Fountain in Rome.

Located in the historic center of the city, the beautiful Baroque fountain is badly in need of repairs. In the summer of 2012, chunks of stone and plaster started to fall from the fountain due to the snow and ice of the previous winter, and it became clear that a thorough restoration was more urgent than previously thought.

The fountain, named “Trevi” because it is at the end of three streets (or tre vie in Italian) marks the end of the Acqua Vergine aqueduct. Located in 19 B.C.E., this is one of the most ancient aqueducts in Rome. In 1629, Pope Urban VIII commissioned the prominent architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini to design a more grandiose fountain than the existing one. However, he died soon afterwards and the

Karl Lagerfeld, Silvia Venturini Fendi, Pietro Beccari and Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno

plans were postponed until 1732, when Nicola Salvi designed a new fountain with elements of Bernini’s original plan. The Trevi Fountain so known and loved today was completed in 1762.

shoulder will return to Rome someday.

The fountain also serves as the backdrop of many movies, such as Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck’s Roman Holiday and Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

The Trevi is one of the most famous tourist venues in Rome, with millions flocking to it each year to throw coins in. It is estimated that 3,000 euros are thrown into the fountain each day. Legend says that anyone who throws a coin with their right hand over their left

Fendi joins several other Italian brands in restoration of monuments.

Recently, leather company Tod’s is paying for the restoration of the Coliseum, and fashion house Diesel is restoring the Rialto Bridge in Venice. The restoration is estimated to take 20 months. n

New Institute Established for Artist Mimmo Rotella T

he widow and daughter of the late Italian pop artist and poet Mimmo Rotella have established an institute in Milan which, together with the Rotella Foundation in Torino, will authenticate the Calabrese artist’s works, organize exhibitions, grant copyrights, and create an updated catalogue. Rotella, famous for décollage and psychogeographics made from torn advertisements found on the streets of Italy, was invited by Parisian art critic Pierre Restany to the Nouveau Réalisme movement in 1961, and this is the main categorization of his art. Due to the spike in popularity and value of post-war art, there has recently been a problem with forgeries of his paintings, and up to six are suspected to be fakes by prosecutors (The Art Newspaper, November 2011). Rotella died in Milan in 2006.

Rotella paintings are increasing in value since the millennium, and usually fetch between 30,000 and 40,000 pounds at auction. The 1962 Con Un Sorriso (pictured below) fetched a record 509,600 at Sotheby’s in 2003. n Mimmo Rotella. Con un sorriso [With a smile], 1962. Decollage on canvas. 60.6 x 52 inches.

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Courtesy of classicfm.com

Notable Muti Receives 2013 Premio Giustiniano, IAF’s Carusi Awarded Special Mention T

he fact that 2013 is the Verdi bicentennial makes it all the more fitting that Riccardo Muti won this year’s Premio Giustiniano, Ravenna’s top prize for arts and culture.

Muti is arguably the most famous contemporary Italian conductor, and has always considered Verdi a muse and an inspiration, recently releasing a book about him. Muti has been the music director for La Scala in Milan, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He is also a regular guest conductor for the New York Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Vienna Philharmonic, and has led opera festivals in Salzburg, Ravenna, Rome, London, and Munich. He is known and loved the world over for his fresh interpretations and his fierce passion for Italian music and opera.

“Exactly 10 years ago, I first performed for you at Carnegie Hall wih the IAF” - Nazzareno Carusi One of the main reasons given why Muti was chosen for this prize was for his “beautiful intuition” in creating the Luigi Cherubini youth orchestra in 2004, located in Ravenna.

This orchestra, which Muti stills leads, brings together youth musicians from all over Italy in a prestigious summer residency setting where they can expand their love of music and fine arts. Over 600 people apply each year.

The committee of the Premio Giustiniano also gave a special mention to IAF pianist Nazzareno Carusi. A native of the Abruzzo region, Carusi has been performing publically since he was 10 years old. He is the winner of several important awards such as the Weissenberg Preis in Switzerland and the NFMC Competition in Buffalo, New York, but feels that his true career was launched with an IAF performance in Carnegie Hall. He said “Exactly 10 years ago, I first performed for you at Carnegie Hall. I will never forget those emotions and the sense of possibility that the Italian Academy Foundation gave me, changing the course of my career with this concert.” Since then the Italian national radio company RAI has called him “one of the biggest Italian musicians today,” and the Washington Post congratulated him for always providing “an evening of breathtaking artistry.” n

Violinist Nicola Benedetti Debuts in Rome W

orld-renowned violin virtuoso Nicola Benedetti debuted in Rome this March. The Scottish-born daughter of Italian immigrants started playing at age four, and by the age of eight had auditioned for and made the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland.

By age nine, she had passed all eight grades of musical examinations. By 16, she had studied under Yehudi Menuhin, won BBC’s Young Musician of the Year and signed with a record label.

One of the youngest recipients of the honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Glasgow Caledonian University in 2007, she has received two more honorary degrees since then. Now, at the age of 25, she has released seven albums, performed with Andrea Bocelli and Rod Stewart and played for British royalty twice.

She plays the extraordinary Gariel Stradivarius made in 1717, worth approximately 6.3 million pounds, that is on loan from her patron, banker Jonathan Moulds.

Benedetti is known for her friendliness and for blending classical, pop, old, new, famous and obscure. The Silver Violin, her most recent album, ranges from tangoes by Gardel to Schindler’s List by John Williams.

She identifies very strongly with her Italian heritag. Her Roman debut was at Università la Sapienza, in the Piazza Aldo Moro. n

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Notable Compasso D’Oro Celebrates Italian Design Excellence C

onsidered the Oscar of Italian design, as well as an authoritative barometer of the state of the cultural debate on industrial design itself, the Compasso d’Oro award is the major acknowledgement of Italian design and enjoys a high reputation throughout the world, so much so that London’s prestigious Phaidon Press has selected it among the top 999 design classics of all time.

On the occasion of the Year of Italian Culture in the United States, the design icons awarded with the Compasso d’Oro have been at the center of a series of exhibitions organized in New York and Chicago by the Italian Industrial Design Association (ADI).

Originally born from a Gio Ponti idea, the award was set up in 1954 by the La Rinascente department store in Milan, as a way of promoting industrial design in Italy after the end of World War II. To represent this new awareness of Italian design, Albe Steiner, graphic designer and consultant for La Rinascente, chose the compass, invented by Adalbert Goeringer in 1893 to measure the golden section, as a symbol for the award. The logo of the prize was therefore established, quickly followed by a three-dimensional version realized by the architects Alberto Rosselli and Marco Zanuso. What in this traditional iconography was an emblem of harmony and perfect proportion has today become a design classic in itself: an icon that represents technical, functional and aesthetic quality and innovation.

Initially organized by La Rinascente on an annual basis, from 1958–67 the award was managed jointly with ADI, the Italian Association for Industrial Design. Since 1964 the award has been entrusted exclusively to ADI. The prize is currently assigned every three years by an international jury, who make a secondary selection following the initial list of candidates made by the Permanent Design Observatory, a committee of journalists, critics, and specialists, established in 1998. Since 1954 nearly 2000 products have been given awards or honorable mentions and the range of products taken into consideration has been widely extended: not only consumer goods like furniture and household items, but also work tools and graphic and Web design. This shift is marked by the change in the name of the prize itself, which now rewards ‘industrial design’, rather than just ‘product aesthetics’. Thanks to the exhibitions promoted by ADI around the world, the prize has acquired an international reputation for excellence, and its logo is now more than ever an icon of the strong international affirmation and recognition of Italian design.n - Laura Giacalone

SELECTION OF PRODUCTS AWARDED WITH THE COMPASSO D’ORO PRIZE FROM THE 1950S TO THE PRESENT.

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Notable Sol LeWitt in Naples Materdei Stop M

Sol Lewitt. Access passageway to even and uneven numbered platform, Materdei. Wall drawings, Painting. Courtesy of Metro Napoli.

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he Gucci loafer, one of the most iconic shoes to ever be “Made in Italy,” turns 60 this year. In 1953, Gucci transformed the concept of the loafer, or “mocassino” with the release of its own version. This did more than simply make the Gucci brand name famous–the loafer became synonymous with the brand.

The timeless shoes are just as beautiful, popular, and loved today as they were 60 years ago, and are considered not only a trademark of Gucci, but of Italy as well.

To celebrate, Gucci is launching a new interpretation of the old style, called “Collezione 1953,” as well as an exhibit

at the Gucci Museo in Firenze that opens in late February. The new loafers feature the traditional horse-bit leather and brass buckles, but add a bit of a modern twist in the increased comfort and flexibility of the shoe. As always, these shoes are made only by artisans with the highest levels of expertise, as the craftsmanship is extremely difficult and is passed down through the generations to those with appropriate talent.

Countless celebrities and people all over the world have worn and loved Gucci loafers through the decades, including Clark Gable, Brad Pitt in “Fight Club,” and Fred Astaire. In the mid1960s the collection was expanded to include women’s styles, such as those worn by Jodie Foster in “Taxi Driver,” and the 2013 collection will be no different. Gucci’s unique ability to immortalize the loafer is evident from the past 60 years, and will certainly continue to be over the next 60. n

Photo courtesy of Sarah Geller.

The Timeless Gucci Loafer Turns 60

any are familiar with the dual aim of the construction of the new MetroNapoli: easing urban transportation woes while providing a small escape from “the real world” through art. Five of the city’s metro stations have been turned into “art stations” showcasing the genius of modern artists all over the world.

Contributors include New Yorker Karim Rashid (featured in Italian Journal Volume 20:7) and South African William Kentridge (featured in Italian Journal Volume 20:8) as well as a host of others, many Italian. The terminals are ablaze with colors, images, and interesting architecture that highlights the history of Naples as well as the personal lives of the artists and architects involved.

Each station has its own theme, character, and liveliness, and what used to be a drab metro station is now a cultural hotspot.

The Materdei station, planned by architect Atelier Mendini, features artwork from Sandro Chia, Luigi Serafini, and Domenico Bianchi. However, the highlight of this bustling station is the central corridor, covered in the vibrant “Wall Drawings,” by Sol LeWitt. The corridor ends in a fiberglass sculpture by LeWitt called “Splotches” which is similarly colorful and cheery. LeWitt, an American artist known as “father of minimal art”, lived for about a decade in Spoleto in the 1980s and maintained ties with Italy even after leaving. His art at Materdei station was one of his last projects, as he died from cancer complications shortly afterwards. n

French actor Alain Delon sports Gucci loafers in 1963.

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Innovation

Nobel Italians compiled by Tegan GEORGE, page 18 Silicon Savior by Laura GIACALONE, page 21 Startups Here and There by Laura GIACALONE, page 23 Meet the IT Innovators by Laura GIACALONE, page 25

Ubiquitous Inf luences Photography

A Brief Meditation on Italian Photography

by Pasquale VERDICCHIO, page 24

Art and Architecture

House and Impermanence by Keith Evan GREEN, page 29 De Chirico’s Long American Shadow by Ara Merjian, page 36 Studio America by Gianluca MARZIANI, page 39 Architectural Crossover by Ludovica ROSSI PURINI, page 42

Film

A Vision of Pasolini by patrick RUMBLE, page 32 Manuli’s Kaspar, Hidden Smash by Laura GIACALONE, page 33 Missing Fellini by Marguerite WALLER, page 34

Literature

Machiavelli’s Prince After 500 Years by James Johnson, page 46 “It Lit” in Translation by Laura GIACALONE, page 47

Fashion

Schiap Happy by Barbara ZORZOLI, page 44

Gastone Biggi. new york market day, 2011. Industrial painting. 39 1/3 x 31 1/2 inches.

18 ubiquitous influences: innovation

Nobel Italians

compiled by Tegan GEORGE

Chemistry

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1. Giulio Natta: 1963 Born in Imperia, Italy in 1903, Giulio Natta studied at the Politecnico di Milano and passed the exams to become a professor in 1927. In 1963, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Karl Ziegler for their combined work on high polymers, or chemical compounds with repeated structural units. They also discovered a catalyst used in polymer synthesis called the Ziegler-Natta catalyst.

Physics 2. Guglielmo Marconi: 1909 Marconi, the father of long-distance radio transmission, was an Italian inventor often given credit for the invention of the radio, one of the most revolutionizing technologies the world has ever known. In Great Britain, he founded the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, which commercialized the radio and made it accessible to greater audiences. In addition to the 1909 Nobel Prize, Marconi was ennobled in Italy, becoming Marchese Marconi in 1924 and traveling all over the world testing out radios while the company he created continued to innovate. He died in 1937 of a heart attack, and radios worldwide observed two minutes of silence in his honor.

3. Enrico Fermi: 1938 Fermi, or “the father of the atomic bomb,” is one of the most famous particle physicists that ever lived due to his work on the Manhattan Project and the first nuclear reactor (Chicago Pile-1), as well as his discoveries related to quantum theory and induced radioactivity. He is held in high esteem by other physicists, as he is seen as one of the rare few physicists to excel both theoretically and experimentally. He immigrated permanently to the United States in 1938 because of the new racial laws in Italy that affected his Jewish-born wife, and after the war he was appointed to General Advisory Committee, the council that acted as advisers on the use of nuclear energy to the Atomic Energy Commission, a very prestigious job. He was extremely against the development of a hydrogen bomb for moral and technical reasons, and questioned the ability of society to know how to handle the responsibility attached to nuclear power. Today, many awards, scholarships, and research facilities are named after Fermi, as he is responsible for leaps and bounds in physics and science as a whole.

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4. Emilio G. Segrè: 1959 Segrè is best-known for his discovery of anti-protons, the subatomic anti-particle. He studied under Enrico Fermi at the university level, and worked as a professor until he had to relocate to the United States in 1938 because of his Sephardic Jewish upbringing. He discovered several elements while he worked at the Lawrence Research Laboratory at UCLA-Berkeley, such as astatine and technetium. Many of these were later used to construct the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which he worked on as a group leader for the Manhattan Project. Additionally, he had artistic pursuits – his avid amateur photography and his biography of Fermi, which he wrote before returning to Rome in 1974, where he remained until his death in 1989 from a heart attack.

5. Carlo Rubbia: 1984 Rubbia, a particle physicist and inventor, received a Nobel Prize in 1984 for his discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), one of the premier physics facilities in the world, that houses the Large Hadron Collider. The W and Z particles are intermediate vector bosons that are part of the process of radioactive decay. Today, he focuses on the problem of depleted energy supplies, and researches future possibilities for renewable, cleaner energy. So far, he has discovered a way to concentrate solar energy that is currently being explored for commercial use. He also has an asteroid named after him, the Asteroid 8398 Rubbia.

6. Riccardo Giacconi: 2002 Born in Genoa, Giacconi received his degree from the University of Milan before moving to the United States to pursue a career in particle physics. He laid the foundations for x-ray astronomy and received the 2002 Nobel Prize for his fundamental contributions to modern astrophysics. He is currently a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and has been a professor there since 1982. He has also worked on and directed various space observatory telescopes, such as Hubble, Chandra, and the European Southern Observatory.

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ubiquitous influences: innovation 19

Prize winners throughout history: a story of achievement Peace

Economics

7. Ernesto Teodoro Moneta: 1907

11. Franco Modigliani: 1985

Moneta was a revolutionary soldier, journalist, and nationalist who later became a pacifist, which won him the 1907 Nobel Peace Prize. When he was young, he participated in the 5 Days of Milan against Austrian rule as well as Garibaldi’s Expedition of the 1000. Despite the fact that he was incredibly nationalistic, he still considered himself a pacifist and founded the Lombard Association for Peace and Arbitration in 1887, which envisioned a future of disarmament and a League of Nations-type organization.

Born in Rome in 1918, Franco Modigliani left Italy in 1939 because of his Jewish origins and anti-fascist leanings. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1946, where he was a professor of Neo-Keynesian economics from 1942 until his death.

He spent most of his career (1962-2003) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he formulated the Modigliani-Miller theorem of corporate finance, the life-cycle hypothesis, and the MPS model, and co-authored several textbooks.

12. Salvatore Quasimodo: 1959 7

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Literature 8. Giusuè Carducci: 1906 The first ever Italian to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, Carducci is one of the most influential Italian poets, often referred to as the official national poet of modern Italy. In addition to poetry, he wrote 20 volumes worth of prose, served in the Italian Senate, and worked as a professor of Italian and Greek for many years, but poetry is what he is best known for. Carducci was also an excellent translator, and translated many works by Goethe and Heine, as well as Book 9 of Homer’s Iliad into Italian. He died the year after receiving the Nobel, at age 71.

Considered one of the foremost poets of the 20th century, Quasimodo was also an engineer and a draughtsman, and originally only wrote as a side job. After moving several times and working in several fields to make ends meet, Quasimodo decided to devote himself entirely to writing when he moved to Milan in 1938. He became a member of the hermetic movement of poetry, which is known to be very difficult and obscure. He also was very vocally anti-Fascist, and eventually joined the Italian Communist Party in 1945. After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1959, his poems were translated into many languages and he traveled around Europe and the United States often until his death in 1968 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

13. Eugenio Montale: 1975

Born in Sardinia in 1871, Deledda completed elementary school and was trained by a private tutor afterwards until she moved on to studying literature alone. Famous for her blend of prose and poetry, her work often focuses on themes of love, pain, and death and the ties people have to places and feelings.

Considered the greatest lyric poet since Giacomo Leopardi, Montale also excelled at prose, editing, and translating. Despite the fact that he studied accounting, Montale proved himself to be a self-taught man through his mastery of the fields of philosophy, opera singing, and writing. Alongside his journals and poetry anthologies, Montale was also a culture columnist for Corriere della Sera, one of the most famous Italian newspapers, for many years, as well as a reporter abroad.

10. Luigi Pirandello: 1934

14. Dario Fo: 1997

Pirandello wore many hats: playwright, novelist, professor, poet, dramatist, short story writer, and youth revolutionary. His upperclass Sicilian family supported the Italian unification movement (Risorgimento) fiercely, and when he was 13, he joined Garibaldi’s Expedition of the 1000, following him all the way to Caterina. However, unification proved to be a huge failure in the eyes of many, and Pirandello expressed much of this betrayal and disappointment in his works. After relocating first to Bonn and then to Rome, Pirandello taught at the university and wrote newspaper columns and novels on the side. During World War I, his fame spread from Italy to London and during Italian Fascism, his public support of Mussolini caused his fame to explode on a worldwide scale. He died in 1936, shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1934.

Fo is a Varese-born playwright, satirist, theatre director, and composer who has revived classic Italian commedia dell’arte with his wife Franca Rame in the theatre that they own and operate in Milan. Commedia dell’arte is a type of theatre performance that originated in Italy in the 16th century. Originally it was performed outside and utilized masks and stock characters that improvised their lines and represented various levels of Italian society. Fo’s revamping features themes such as criticisms of the Catholic Church, the conflict in the Middle East, organized crime, political corruption and murders. They are often performed outside of Italy, and Fo encourages the actors to restyle them to reflect current problems in the country they are performed in. He received the Nobel Prize in 1997 for his take on this type of theater. Fo and his wife are also very politically active, and have run for office several times.

9. Grazia Deledda: 1926

20 ubiquitous influences: innovation

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Physiology and Medicine 15. Camillo Golgi: 1906

18. Renato Dulbecco: 1975

Golgi was born in the region of Lombardy, in a town that is now called Cortena Golgi in his honor. The physician and pathologist dedicated most of his life to studying the central nervous system.

He discovered a tendon sensory organ that is named after him (the Golgi receptor), a region of cells in the cerebellum called the Golgi cells, and the Golgi enzyme, among other things. These discoveries changed the understanding of scientists of the human body. He developed a tissue staining technique that is called the Golgi method, and was named a senator by King Umberto I in 1900.

Virologist Dulbecco won the 1975 Nobel for his work on oncoviruses, or viruses that can cause cancer (such as the human papillomavirus). He often worked under Giuseppe Levi and with two other Italian Physiology and Medicine Nobel winners, Rita LeviMontalcini and Salvador Luria. Initially, he worked on the polio virus at Caltech, but was very drawn to studying cancer. In 1986, he was among the scientists that launched the Human Genome Project, the initiative to map the 20,000 to 25,000 genes of the human genome. He continued researching cancer cells and breast cancer until his death in 2012 at age 97.

16. Daniel Bovet: 1957

19. Rita Levi-Montalcini: 1986

Swiss-born Italian Bovet is best known for his discovery of antihistamines, but his work in pharmacology in general earned him the 1957 Nobel. He also worked on the development of chemotherapy, studied the sympathetic nervous system, and led a study that concluded that smoking tobacco cigarettes increased intelligence.

He was a professor at multiple universities, and also the head of the National Research Council until he retired.

Born in Turin in 1909, Levi-Montalcini was the oldest living Nobel laureate until her death in 2012 at age 103. She is also the first laureate to reach a 100th birthday. Despite the fact that she received her doctorate in 1936 and commenced working under Giuseppe Levi, she could not work during World War II due to her Sephardic Jewish family origins, and instead conducted her laboratory experiments from home. The neurologist won the Nobel for her discovery of the NGF, or nerve growth factor, a small protein responsible for the survival of certain target neurons, which she discovered during her 30-year tenure at Washington University in St. Louis in the United States. She also served as a Senator for Life for the Italian Senate and was the 1987 recipient of the National Medal of Science.

17. Salvador Luria: 1969 Microbiologist Luria was born in Turin to a Sephardic Jewish family, and fled Fascist Italy in 1940 for New York under a Rockefeller fellowship from Giuseppe Levi. Together with Max Delbrück, he studied the genetic structure of viruses, and concluded that bacterial resistance to viruses is genetically inherited, following Darwinian (not Lamarckian, as previously thought) principles. He worked at Indiana University, the University of Illinois, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and collaborated on many research experiments through the years, including E. coli, DNA, and enzyme studies. Interestingly, one of his graduate students was James D. Watson, who later was to discover the structure of DNA with Frances Crick. Luria died in 1991 in Massachusetts of a heart attack.

20. Mario Capecchi: 2007 Geneticist Capecchi won the 2007 Nobel for his creation of “knockout mice”, mice that have been created with certain genes “knocked out”, or replaced with an artificial piece of DNA. They have been used in studies regarding obesity, anxiety, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes, among others, and are very widely used. Capecchi graduated from Antioch College, MIT, and Harvard, and has been a distinguished professor at the University of Utah since 1973.

ubiquitous influences: innovation

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silicon savior Italian Journal interviews Marco Marinucci on his new venture

by Laura GIACALONE

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ome to many of the world’s largest technology corporations as well as thousands of small startups, Silicon Valley is the place where the future is written. It is no accident that former Google manager and dynamic leader Marco Marinucci has decided to start his new (ad)venture – as he likes to call it – exactly from there. After more than 20 years spent between digital publishing, artificial intelligence research, VoIP, e-commerce, e-learning and ticketing, in 2007 he created Mind the Bridge, a non-profit foundation based in San Francisco, with the aim of connecting the most innovative Italian startups with Silicon Valley’s partners and investors. Today, Mind the Bridge is a successful startup accelerator and seed investment fund; it also runs a startup school, which graduates more than 50 entrepreneurs per year, and organizes tens of events attended by thousands. The annual Italian Innovation Day, a milestone of the Year of Italian Culture in the United States, is among its most successful initiatives, bringing together the best of Italian technology and innovation. Since 2013 Mind the Bridge has also been operating in other SouthEuropean countries, becoming the bridge to Silicon Valley for international founders.

LAURA GIACALONE: What inspired you to create Mind the Bridge?

MARCO MARINUCCI: The initial spark came from the awareness that a number of valuable people and projects in Italy struggle to emerge and fulfill their potential, whereas here in Silicon Valley there is an ecosystem that supports them and helps them succeed. A number of Italians who have moved here for professional reasons have become incredibly successful and are considered as the pillars of the history of innovation and technology in Silicon Valley and in the world, while in Italy they are totally invisible and unknown. Mind the Bridge came to life in 2007 as a place of aggregation for the Italian community in the United States, attracting exceptionally talented people who have made the most of both cultures. Permeated by a ‘give back’ spirit, the objective of this non-profit foundation was to make the dynamics existing in Silicon Valley available to Italian professionals and give some international inspiration to Italy – because today, if you want to develop a successful technological project, you necessarily have to come out of your local environment.”

“economics and history teach us that the periods of crisis are those in which the greatest ideas, projects and companies emerge, from Google to Yahoo.”

LG: Mind the Bridge operates as an international scouting agent in a variety of Mediterranean countries, which are currently affected by a deep economic crisis. Is there a connection between the crisis and creativity of a country?

MM: Economics and history teach us that the periods of crisis are those in which the greatest ideas, projects and companies emerge, from Google to Yahoo. Crisis creates the conditions for entrepreneurial success – this is a fact. Today we are witnessing a polarization between two economies: that of South-European countries, deeply affected by economic recession, and that of Silicon Valley, which is registering the highest peak of the last 15 years. This gap is today particularly evident. On the one side, South-European countries need to find new opportunities for growth. In this context, it probably makes more sense for people to create their own job rather than look for one. Our motto, which we printed on thousands of T-shirts, is indeed ‘Job Creator’. On the other side, it is physiological for successful companies in Silicon Valley to look across the borders and find new talent. The bottleneck to the growth of leading companies such as Google, Facebook, Cisco or Twitter is exactly that: they have plenty of economic resources but need new highly skilled human resources, which are the key to success for any business in the marketplace today.”

LG: It is the opposite of what happens in Italy, a vast supply of unexploited talent and little economic resources…

MM: Exactly. That’s why these kinds of bridges are interesting for both economies: American startups find it difficult to attract highly skilled professionals, because most of them have already been absorbed by big companies. If you consider that the initial wage of a newly hired developer is 120 to 150 thousand dollars (before taxes) per year, it becomes clear how difficult it is, even for bigger companies, to have enough personnel of such kind. That’s why it is important to create structures and projects that serve as a bridge between the companies in Silicon Valley and talented

22 Strapline view of The exhibition “Sexy Before Apple: The Italian Experience in Silicon Valley”, curated

by Paolo Pontoniere and Alex Bochannek at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

professionals from countries such as Spain, Italy or Greece. That’s our added value today.

LG: In a moment when startups find it increasingly difficult to access capital, do you think that non-traditional financing channels, such as crowdfunding, might be a suitable solution?

MM: The idea that there is no access to capital is unfounded.

There are a lot of private capitals in Italy, most of which are actually not invested in technological startups. The problem in Italy, and Europe in general, is that companies do not invest in innovation. Investors are not willing to employ their funds in technological startups unable to provide them with short- or medium-term returns. Why should they do it? They are not philanthropists. In Italy, even venture capital funds, which are more likely to invest in early stage companies, are hardly interested in doing so, because they have little potential for economic return. That’s largely because, among Italian companies, there is not a strong culture of acquisition. A company like Google acquires hundreds of companies a year, and most of them are one- to three-year-old startups.

That’s exactly what creates a return on investment. Instruments like crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are becoming increasingly popular, because they lower the barriers to entry for ‘passionate’ rather than professional investors. This has pros and cons. Market observers often divide investors into ‘smart money’ and ‘dumb money.’ Ideally, companies look for ‘smart money’ – that is, investors providing not only financial support, but also access to opportunities and business networks: smart money can introduce you to buyers, customers and other investors. This is something that crowdfunding cannot offer, because it exclusively relies on small contributions from a multitude of individuals. This is all you can get. Both things can actually work together, so they are not mutually exclusive. There are innovative platforms today, such as AngelList, that allow non-professional investors to discover and compare the best available investment options by ‘following’ the activities of professional investors. You see what deals they are doing and, if you are interested, you can jump in. This is a revolutionary investment process.

LG: As the 2012 Survey of Italian startups shows, both in Italy and the United States, female entrepreneurship is less developed than male, although women have the highest educational levels. What is it possible to do to help women develop their projects?

MM: This is a problem in Italy as well as in other countries. In a multicultural society such as the United States, not only women but also minorities are sadly underrepresented at the entrepreneurial level, even if there are no explicit cultural barriers to their businesses. There are however organizations supporting female and minority entrepreneurship. One of the most relevant

is Women 2.0, a media company whose mission is to increase the number of female founders of technology startups, providing them with inspiration, information and education through their network.”

LG: In the post-war Italy, innovation was a powerful driver of economic growth and involved sectors that would later become the symbols of “Made in Italy”, from the design to the automobile industries. Today, the leading fields of innovation are mobile and web technologies. Where do you think innovation is going to take us in the future?

MM:Today there is an overproduction of startups in the mobile and web sectors, because the cost of starting a business in these fields is almost zero. Top startup accelerators such as 500 Startups or Y Combinator launch up to 400 startups every year. Today, you don’t have to wait years: six months are more than enough to decide whether it is worth it to go on with your business or it is better to start all over again with another one. And you do it quite easily, because the sum you have invested is relatively small. However, when it comes to getting more significant investments, the so-called ‘Series A round’, things become more difficult. To develop your business on a larger scale it might be necessary to have a capital of 3 to 5 million dollars, which is not easy to come by.

That’s why investors are more interested in products with a very low innovation level rather than focusing on highly innovative sectors, such as biomedical research. There’s a quick return on investment and the financial risk involved is kept to a minimum.”

LG: Innovating without innovating… What’s the challenge then?

MM: The real challenge today is to look for projects able to ‘change the world’, focusing on social ventures designed to achieve not financial but social return on investment. There is, for example, a project that brings text-messaging services into rural areas of Africa where doctors are only concentrated in a small number of hospitals. This application can save millions of lives. Another interesting example is Singularity University, a non-profit learning institution in Silicon Valley that looks for the most brilliant minds in the world, from Ethiopia to Bangladesh or Stanford, and brings them together for 3 months – people with different backgrounds and skill sets, from politics to neuroscience or aerospace engineering. With the support of top thinkers in Silicon Valley, such as Larry Page from Google or Peter Thiel from PayPal, this multicultural team focuses on a number of pre-established research areas in a variety of sectors (food industry, aerospace, medicine, and so on) to bring out the technological projects that will change the world in the next 15 years, having an impact on at least a billion people. The future of technology and innovation is therefore to address humanity’s grand challenges. n

ubiquitous influences: innovation 23

Startups: A contrast A look at new businesses in two countries, based on a survey by Mind the Bridge

by Laura GIACALONE

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t is generally very difficult to find current data on newly formed companies and their founders. Most official statistics refer to traditional businesses or are generally outdated by the time they are released, which makes it difficult for policymakers and other institutional players to have a better understanding of this phenomenon and address the needs of early-stage business owners.

Startups are nevertheless a reliable barometer of a country’s economic health, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, which have left a lasting mark on global economies.

In an effort to learn more about the challenges facing today’s entrepreneurs, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation – often referred to as the world’s largest foundation devoted to entrepreneurship – surveyed 1,431 business owners who formed their companies in 2012 through LegalZoom, a leading provider of personalized, affordable online legal solutions for families and small business.

The statistics collected are mostly consistent with the results

Age The majority of individuals who start companies in the United States are in their thirties and forties.

More than half of those in Italy (56%) are instead between 26 and 35 years old, with an average age of 33.

Gender About one-third of startup owners in the United States are women. The malefemale ratio is however more skewed toward males among companies reporting higher revenues.

Female entrepreneurship in Italy is surprisingly limited, accounting for only 11% of the total. However, in both countries, female business owners have higher education levels than men.

Education Education is one of the most relevant factors associated with the propensity to start a company. Bachelor’s degree is the highest qualification for 62% of American and 53% of Italian new entrepreneurs. Among the American respon-

of the 2012 survey conducted on a sample of 348 Italian startups

by Mind the Bridge – a non-profit foundation created by former Google manager Marco Marinucci – and the Research Centre for Innovation and Life Sciences Management (CRESIT) of Insubria University, Varese (Italy). A comparative study was presented by Prof. Alberto Onetti, Chairman of Mind the Bridge, on March 12, 2013, in Mountain View on the occasion of the Italian Innovation Day. Before starting to analyze the statistics of both countries, it is necessary to clarify what we mean by “startup”. As pointed out in the survey conducted by Mind the Bridge, the term specifically refers to “companies recently founded or entrepreneurial projects operating in innovative sectors, with solid plans for growth, and requiring capital injections in the early stages.”

The following figures interestingly show some common trends as well as significant differences between the U.S. and Italian startup ecosystems.

dents, 17% also have a master’s degree, and 8% a doctorate.

These percentages are higher in the Italian sample, with 42% having a master’s degree and 11% a Ph.D. or MBA. Studying abroad (especially in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, France and Switzerland) is also a frequent trait in the Italian startuppers’ profile (13% of the sample).

Prior Experience The majority of entrepreneurs (57% in the U.S. vs. 80% in Italy) report having at least half a dozen years of prior industry or work experience before starting their present business. “Serial entrepreneurs” – that is, those who had previously started a company – are 44% in the U.S. and 23% in Italy, confirming that the role of an entrepreneur requires a high level of knowledge and field experience.

Incubation period More than one-third of U.S. respondents reported spending over a year, and in some cases more than three years, work-

ing on their business ideas prior to forming a legal entity. In fact, only 9% spent less than a month on the idea before legally forming their businesses.

Also due to the difficulty in collecting the capital needed for the implementation of the business idea, the majority of Italian startups (59%) are entrepreneurial projects (“wannabe startups”), which are not “structured” nor built as a legal entity yet.

Business Activity In the United States, consulting (11.6%) is the most common business activity, followed by service-based activities (6.6%), technology (5.5%), real estate (5.4%), business services (5.2%), retail (5.1%), construction (3.9%), home services (3.3%), entertainment (3.2%), and sales (3.0%).

Most of the businesses in Italy focus on the Web (49.1%) and ICT (21.8%) sectors; only 4.8% deals with consumer products and around 3.6% with electronics and machinery. A minor role is played by clean technologies (1.2%) and biotech

24 ubiquitous influences: innovation

Alberto onetti, chairman of mind the bridge.

Most businesses in Italy focus on the Web (49.1%) and ICT (21.8%) sectors; only 4.8% deals with consumer products and around 3.6% with electronics and machinery. industry (0.6%), probably because these sectors require a larger volume of investments compared to Web-based businesses. The remaining 19% operates in other sectors, mainly services.

Funding The great majority (80%) of early-stage business owners in the United States used their own money to start their companies. Only 20% received funds from outside investors, family members, or resorted to bank or home equity loans.

Italian startups base their early development on resources collected through external financing. The most widespread instrument to raise funds is the so-called “bootstrapping” (58%), also known as the 3F-model: “family, friends and fools”; 8% had access to grants, 34% received funds from outside investors.

Employees In the United States, 70% of the businesses report no employees other than the owner, while one-quarter (26%) have between 1 and 4 employees.

In Italy, startups are not a “one man band”, but are built around a group of 2 to 3 founders or shareholders, of age ranging between 26 and 35 years, and employ an average from 4 to 5 employees.

Challenges and Barriers Forty percent of the Kauffman survey’s respondents said they did not face general business difficulties. Of those who selected one, 55% cited the “unpredictability of overall business conditions” as a major difficulty, while 45% cited lack of access to credit. When they were asked about policy barriers, respondents cited

a range of issues, such as high taxes, tax complexity and licensing regulations.

Bureaucratic difficulties and continued economic uncertainties are also among the greatest challenges for Italian startuppers, whose major difficulty is the access to capital (69%). Money is not the only problem in the early-stage startup creation. More than 50% of respondents are also seeking for strategic partners who can help them develop their business idea.

Capital and skills, along with a more “startup-friendly” cultural and regulatory environment, therefore emerge as the most vital component of entrepreneurial success. n [Data source: Kauffman Foundation and LegalZoom Startup Index 2012 & Mind the Bridge Survey 2012]

ubiquitous influences: innovation

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Meet the it. innovators A list of the most promising award-winning startups presented at the Italian Innovation Day 2013, the annual event organized by Mind the Bridge in partnership with IB&II – Italian Business & Investment Initiative, Consulate General of Italy in San Francisco and the Italian Cultural Institute.

Atooma is a mobile toolkit that allows the user to easily create a customized set of mini-apps. It lets you set up conditional events — an “if” — that will automatically trigger simple actions — a “do” — based on things like time, location, your favorite app, email, and so on. It is a contextual app that is aware of your location and the time of day, so it actually makes your smartphone smarter. www.atooma.com Bad Seed Entertainment is an indie game development company focused on creating console-quality mobile games and apps for iOS and Android platforms. Bad Seed recently launched Sheep Up!, an award-winning game for the iPhone and iPad that challenges the user to guide sheep from the bottom of a box of old toys to the open top and to freedom. www.badseedentertainment.com Map2app is a browser-based platform designed to easily create tourist guides that can be located on multiple mobile devices. Via the platform, authors can create points of interests, group them in categories and create professional tourist guides that can be sold on app stores. www.map2app.com in3Dgallery is a 3D visual presentation tool for sharing ideas, products and concepts in a real time 3D virtual space. The easy-to-use 3DUI and engaging themes make it the perfect companion for entrepreneurs, creative individuals and enterprises looking to astonish their audience. in3Dgallery is cross-platform: web, Facebook and mobile for a hassle-free sharing experience. www.in3dgallery.com Curious Hat aims to create immersive explorations that engage children with the environment around them and stimulate their creativity and ingenuity, while simultaneously enhancing their senses through the use of mobile devices. www.curioushat.com Pick1 is the new standard in marketing, an all-in-one solution for retargeting and real-time market research. It’s a ‘freebase’ for opinions and even for the users social profile. Pick1 allows you to: start knowing your audience better, dig into the big data and users’ social graph and create super-targeted ADV campaign based on your users’ opinions. www.pick1.com TOK.tv lets you talk to your friends while watching TV. The first target is live sports: while you watch baseball on TV with an iPad on your lap, you can invite friends to your virtual living room. It is a fully voice-enabled (no texting or typing, just screaming for home runs) second screen TV companion iPad app. The aim is to revolutionize the way we enjoy TV, to make TV social again. www.tok.tv Myze is a smart shopping companion that ensures that consumers maximize the value they obtain from their credit cards and loyalty programs. Myze guarantees that consumers don’t miss out on the best cash rewards, rebates, airline points or discounts. Our personalized, location-based service guarantees a hassle-free shopping experience, automatically informing the user of the best credit card to use at the point of purchase. www.myze.co

26 ubiquitous influences: photography

Tina Modotti. Mother and Child, Tehuantepec, c.1929.

ubiquitous influences: photography

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a brief meditation on italian photography Medium for a visual culture

by Pasquale VERDICCHIO

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iven the impressive cultural heritage on constant display along the length and breadth of the peninsula, it seems almost banal to say that Italian culture is highly visual. Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), considered to be the first “modern” intellectual, gives an unprecedented, detailed description of the human eye as an instrument of visualization and encoding in one of his poems that is as “technologically” accurate as any contemporary description of a photo camera might be today.

As my recent book Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2011) suggests, whether we are talking about Italian fashion, design, architecture, or the long list of visual artists classical and contemporary, the seduction of the visual plays a central role in Italian life. Photography, as a relatively young medium, has evolved by leaps and bounds and is now available in myriad digital formats that go from laptops, to tablets, to phones, to pen-cameras.

While it has become all-important in documenting everyday life, its cultural legacy in Italy has been to provide a visual vocabulary for what has come to be know as italianità. Whatever one’s feelings regarding this essentializing expression of national traits, it is enough to say in this context that it represents a set of parameters championed by some and contested by others since the birth of the Italian nation. It is therefore important that photography was put at the service of this task soon after Unification by a number of individual photographers and agencies, among which the most important is arguably that of the Fratelli Alinari. Theirs is a particularly important contribution at a time when Florence was, for a short time (1865-1871), capital of the nation.

That so many of our writers, among them Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia, Vincenzo Consolo, Gianni Celati, and Lalla Romano, with her “photographic novels”, have at some point written about photography is a further indication of the Italian fascination with figural representation and its creative potential. At an earlier time, other writers, engaged in an attempt to represent their most immediate social environment through what we know as Verismo and Realismo, took up photography as a parallel activity to their writing. Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, for example, exchanged ideas about photography’s representational possibilities, as well as on the medium’s value for their “realist” writing.

This penchant for the visual, well-represented throughout the breadth of Italian cultural history, easily suggests that Italian culture is convincingly visual. The popular expression fare bella figura (to cut a beautiful figure), provides a useful entry-point through which to consider the importance of appearances in the context of national discourse, both in a supportive role to the emerging nation in the late 1800s as well as in today’s Italian self-imaging. It is in such occasions that photography reveals its complex role as an instrument of social practice.

The Alinari Archives, by far the most extensive private photographic archive of major national importance, were in large part responsible for the elaboration and maintenance of a national image. Their cataloguing of landscapes, art treasures, architecture, and the diverse customs and populations of the peninsula is unparalleled. Alinari photographs helped define Italy in the imaginary of Grand Tourists, as testified by their inclusion in many travel books and their mention in literary texts, such as in E. M. Forster’s Room With a View.

Giorgio Sommer.Spaghetti Eaters, ca. 1886.

Contemporary Italian photography lists many names that represent the variety of uses of the medium. Fashion photography, advertising, fine art, are all well-represented, and of course any list in a limited space such as this is bound to exclude too many names. Gabriele Basilico, Letizia Battaglia, Luca Campigotto, Franco Fontana, Luigi Ghirri, Mimmo Jodice and Enzo Sellerio comprise a very short list. To this I would add the influential name of the more globally known Mario Giacometti, and those of two contemporaries of the Alinari, foreigners who lived and worked in Italy, Giorgio Sommer and the Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden. To these, the name of another well-known and influential photographer must be added, Tina Modotti. Modotti, an Italian expatriate who lived most of her life abroad in the U.S. and Mexico, and produced most of her photographs in the latter, stands at the pinnacle of photographic history despite her short career.

28 ubiquitous influences: photography

Mimmo Jodice and Luigi Ghirriare are representative of a photography that explores the artifacts of human habitation, past and present. The Neapolitan Jodice states that “at the end of the seventies my relationship to the city changed.

My uneasiness became internalized and became a silent protest. My photographs showed an empty and rarefied city and the people, who were once central to my photography, disappeared.”1 Ghirri’s lens is cast on the abandonment of the lived environment to itself, in a search for previously unseen suggestions regarding the artifacts of human culture.

Finally, Italian photography evolves through the ages from a simple tool of artistic experimentation, to a tool of social transformation and definition, to an instrument of anthropological documentation and classification, to one of activism and artistic expression. The Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia, whose main body of work includes the documentation of the ills of the city of Palermo and the infestation of its social, political, and cultural spheres by the Mafia, makes a case for the panoramic view that photography provides. “A me interessano in genere i Sud del mondo” (79),2 offers an insight into how casting our gaze on the local might offer a way in which to see the world around us through the lens of the familiar. n

1 Jodice in Lo sguardo dal Sud, Mauro. p. 22 2 ibid., p. 79.

top: Giovanni Verdicchio.

Artisan.

Above: Giovanni Verga. Peasants, Tébidi (Sicily), 1897.

Right: Tina modotti.

Roses, mexico, 1924.

ubiquitous influences:art and architecture

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house and impermanence Milanese architect Gio Ponti’s unforgettably philosophical bent

by Keith Evan GREEN “The house is never finished” – Gio Ponti’s architectural fables

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n ‘architect-artist’ true to his name, Gio Ponti (1891-1979, Milan) created connections between architecture, culture and industry, both inside and outside Italy. In bridging various expressive tendencies, Ponti assumed a number of roles himself: architect, industrial designer, set designer, painter, editor, academic and organizer of the Milan triennial exhibitions. Although Ponti developed a sympathetic rapport with creative individuals like Carlo Mollino and Giorgio de Chirico, his expression, freely drawn from far-reaching sources, was personal, pluralistic and poetic.

Ponti’s most exemplary achievement remains, perhaps, his butterfly-like residence for the Planchart family (Caracas, 1955).

Ponti envisioned this house to be like his life: an encompassing artistic project containing and transforming fundamental life-lessons. Architecture nevertheless remained for Ponti an unrequited love, an unfinished house, a dream yet to be realized.

Ponti’s statement that “The house is never finished” implies that the house he designed was never fully that vital and encompassing home, that domus he tirelessly sought and desired. Living in a state of impermanence, the architect, being human, could only accomplish so much. In a letter to Anala Planchart, written

by Ponti more than ten years after the completion of the Villa

Villa Planchart. Reproduced with permission from the Gio Ponti Archives – Milano.

30 ubiquitous influences:art and architecture

“Enchantment - a useless thing, but as indispensable as bread.”

-Gio Ponti

house into human values be considered as an activity of metaphor? Isn’t this merely a matter of linguistic imagery?”5 Bachelard, himself, answered no: “the imagination Gio Ponti, view of The patio of villa planchart from the living cannot be content with a reduction which room window with ceramics by Fausto Melotti. would make the image a subordinate means of expressions: it demands on the contrary, that images be lived directly, that Planchart, the architect confessed, “I am trying to write a book they be taken as sudden events in life.”6 called ‘All I have is my life’. This will be a book of thanksgiving Bachelard’s words imply that the architectural “fables” that Ponti and acknowledgment. […] For my part, I have done what I could; envisioned were fantasies that must not only be dreamt but lived. […] I have offered [my architecture] with sincerity.”1 In Ponti’s In this way, the “fabulous” architecture of the Villa Planchart and sensitive adaptation of the Villa Planchart to the lightness of a countless other works by Gio Ponti was constructed by the archiCaracas hill-top lies a deeper understanding of the human conditect with figures drawn from life, destined to suggest something tion, for which, as Ponti described, “there is no solution… the of a “miracle” in the course of the everyday. Given the challenges future renews the problem.”2 And so, as Ponti wrote in ‘Amate and opportunities of living today, there is much to discover from l’Architettura - Love Architecture’ – “the moment of architecture dwelling, a moment or two, in Gio Ponti’s timeless abode. n awaits us still.”

For Ponti, the problem of defining domus reflected the difficulties inherent in human existence, in everyday living. Particularly after the devastation of World War II, such assuring architectural references as formal rules and historical forms failed to provide architecture with a proper foundation.3 Such antiquated concepts as architectural “Beauty” must be supplanted by a “beauty” defined by the sensibility of the individual, a “beauty” that, as Ponti suggested, now came “with effort, with sorrow, with pain, and with uncertainty.”4 For Ponti, the only meaningful domus human beings are capable of attaining is the fable we tell ourselves. Ponti communicated his fable with a language that strained at the limits of the expressible, employing infinitely precise tactics to make “ecstatic” (to use a favorite word of Ponti) the mingled miracles of architecture and our impossible expectations for it. In the same years that Ponti wandered through a yet realized Villa Planchart, Gaston Bachelard pondered whether, “in this dynamic rivalry between house and universe […] can this transposition of the being of a

Notes 1 G. Ponti (“Ponti, Lisa Licitra”), letter to Anala Planchart (August 30, 1974), quoted in Fulvio Irace, “Corrispondenze: La villa Planchart di Gio Ponti a Caracas,” Lotus 60 (1988) p. 85.

2 Ibid., p. 235.

3 Ibid., p. 93.

4 G. Ponti (“Ponti, Lisa Licitra”), In Praise of Architecture, trans. G. Seppina and M. Salvadori (New York: F. W. Dodge, 1960) p. 186.

5 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas. (Boston: Beacon: 1969) p. 47.

6 Ibid., p. 47.

ubiquitous influences:art and architecture 31

Letter by gio ponti, courtesy gio ponti archives.

32 ubiquitous influences: film

A vision Of Pasolini A look at his multi-talents and legacy

by Patrick RUMBLE

P

ier Paolo Pasolini is widely recognized as one of Italy’s most important cultural figures since the Second World War, producing a remarkable body of work since the 1940s, as a writer, poet, dramatist, and filmmaker – perhaps best known for such films as Accattone (1960) and Salò (1975), his classic novel A Violent Life (1955), and the remarkable poems found in The Ashes of Gramsci (1957).

He was also one of Italy’s most controversial voices – expressing himself as a gay, Catholic Marxist – in the heated intellectual debates that took place from the 1950s on, writing frequently for mainstream newspapers and magazines about current affairs in Italy and beyond. And in spite of his violent assassination in November of 1975 – a crime that to this day remains shrouded in some mystery – Pasolini has remained a huge presence in the cultural and political life of Italy.

Moreover, judging from the frequency of scholarly conferences devoted to his literary work and full-scale retrospectives of his films, held in major cities across the world – most recently, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in December of 2012 and at the British Film Institute in London in the spring of 2013 – Pasolini’s voice and influence surely extend across the globe. Nevertheless, the question of Pasolini’s legacy has proven to be complicated, and has found many diverse answers over the decades since his death. At symposia dedicated to Pasolini in the 1980s and 1990s, held in Toronto, Chicago, London, and elsewhere, the pessimistic leitmotiv running through discussions of Pasolini’s

writers, poets, and filmmakers have likewise located themselves in a Pasolinian tradition of artistic engagement, now offering us reason for greater optimism than was once had with regard to Pasolini’s legacy.

legacy was that he had no heirs – with possible exceptions of the filmmakers Sergio Citti, Marco Risi, or perhaps Nanni Moretti (who dedicated a remarkable episode of his 1993 film Dear Diary to Pasolini’s memory). Indeed, it was remarked that, for generations of filmmakers, writers and dramatists that came of age after his murder, the death of Pasolini represented the loss of any strong intellectual tradition against which to measure oneself intellectually and artistically. According to the Neapolitan film and theatre director Mario Martone, with the loss of Pasolini, the new generations of filmmakers emerging since the 1970s found themselves working in the absence of strong interlocutors – they were cultural orphans, cani sciolti, heirs awaiting an inheritance that was ever denied.

Indeed, it was in response to this sensation of aesthetic and intellectual orphanage that Martone undertook a major collective project of cultural and artistic renewal organized around Pasolini’s work. In 2003, Martone initiated a large project for the theatre in which he invited dramatists, actors, film and videomakers, photographers, and poets, to compose new works for live performance, based on Pasolini’s last, unfinished novel Petrolio.

The Petrolio Project resulted in an ambitious program of performances held between November, 2003 and February, 2004, including work by a wide variety of artists and theatre groups, focusing on the sorts of political, environmental, and moral issues that concerned Pasolini the most, and inspired by Pasolini’s exemplary style of cultural engagement. Performances were held in various venues in Naples and environs. Significantly, however, Martone arranged for several of the performances to be held in the old Officina ItalSider plant at Bagnoli, a factory whose closure came to symbolize the process of de-industrialization in Italy since the 1970s – a process that troubled Pasolini greatly in so much of his work and continues to concern many, as the world experiences the challenging effects of economic globalization. The Petrolio Project clearly signaled the continuing importance of Pasolini’s message, and his presence – as a point of reference, an ethical foundation, an intellectual basis – for the next generations of writers and artists.

ubiquitous influences: film

pasolini with maria callas on the set of medea.

Manuli’s KASPAR: hidden Smash A

Other writers, poets, and filmmakers have likewise located themselves in a Pasolinian tradition of artistic engagement, now offering us reason for greater optimism than was once had with regard to Pasolini’s legacy. Certainly, in the cinema, Pasolini has paved the way for the exciting work of such Italian filmmakers as Bernardo and Giuseppe Bertolucci, Gianni Amelio, Nanni Moretti, Mario Martone, Daniele Cipri and Franco Maresco, Pappi Corsicato, Marco Tullio Giordana, Matteo Garrone, and Antonio Capuano; while outside Italy, Pasolini’s impact is readily discerned in the work of such internationally renowned filmmakers as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martin Scorsese, Derek Jarman, Gus Van Sant, and the later films of Jean-Luc Godard. His literary influence is also clearly discerned in the work of Roberto Saviano, Tiziano Scarpa, Aurelio Picca, Simona Vinci, Walter Siti and the late Elio Pagliarani (whose poems dedicated to Florence’s radical 15th Century cleric Savonarola’s sermons against greed and corruption were offered as a homage to Pasolini) – but the list of writers strongly influenced by Pasolini threatens become very long, indeed. And though often overlooked, Pasolini’s influence on the work of philosophers has been enormous, as seen clearly in the impact of his thought on Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Giorgio Agamben and, perhaps most of all, Gilles Deleuze, whose philosophy of cinema was developed in dialogue with essays Pasolini began to write about film starting in the 1960s. Certainly, it is safe to say that Pasolini remains a centrally important figure in the scholarly community worldwide, as reflected, for example, in the contributions found in the journal Studi pasoliniani and in the number of books published each year, throughout the world and in many languages, devoted to the Friulan poet and filmmaker.

Thus, while it may not have been possible for commentators to discern the extent of Pasolini’s legacy twenty or so years ago, things now seem much clearer in this regard. It is largely on account of his literary writing and his impressive body of films – his continuing appeal to new generations of readers and spectators, and the central importance his work has attained for writers and filmmakers following after him – that we are able clearly to discern the challenging legacy that he has left to us, and one that will surely endure in spite of the violent elimination of this exemplary artist and thinker, assassinated in the prime of his life, whose work survives as an example of a hard-won and fiercely defended freedom. n

fter collecting a number of prizes in the most prestigious film festivals in Europe, The Legend of Kaspar Hauser, the brilliant art-house film by Italian director Davide Manuli – starring Vincent Gallo, Silvia Calderoni, Elisa Sednaoui, Claudia Gerini, Fabrizio Gifuni and Marco Lampis – lands in the United States (see Italian Journal 8: Cinematic Italy). After the screenings at the Seattle International Film Festival and Open Roads in New York in June 2012, the movie triumphed as the “Best Experimental Feature” at the Arizona Underground Film Festival in September, and conquered the Prize of the Jury at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival in February 2013. A post-apocalyptic western, the film rewrites the legend of the enfant sauvage and turns it into the electronic symphony of a metaphorical nowhere land.

Released in Italy in June 2013, Kaspar is currently looking for theatrical distribution in the U.S. -Laura Giacalone

Film still from the legend of kaspar hauser

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34 ubiquitous influences: film

Missing Fellini

An American fascination

by Marguerite WALLER

A

film that will now never be made was going to fill in the story of the forty-eight hours during which Federico Fellini went missing in L.A. just before he received the Foreign Film Oscar for Nights of Cabiria in l958. Sadly, Henry Bromell, a New Yorker-turned-television writer (Northern Exposure, Homicide, I’ll Fly Away, Chicago Hope, Brotherhood, Rubicon, Homeland), died suddenly of a heart attack just as he was due to direct his own script, Fellini Black and White, in which Fellini encounters a Black jazz musician with whom he spends those two days exploring the counter cultures of late 50s Los Angeles.

Bromell is among the most recent of a long line of American directors who have made no secret of their love of Fellini. Woody Allen, Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, just to mention the most obvious, have found multiple ways to celebrate Fellini’s impact on their film language no less than on their metaphysical preoccupations. The renaissance of American filmmaking in the 1970s was a direct legacy of Fellini’s films of the 60s.

That Bromell, an A-list cultural producer in 21st century Hollywood, felt that the capstone of his career should be a film conjuring up the mystery of Fellini’s own development suggests something more and other than a relation of influence as we usually think of it. The relationship between Fellini and his heirs seems not to be “Oedipal”; it’s not a fatherson rivalry, and, in fact, includes many women—not only Fellini’s own assistant director on 8 1/2, Lina Wertmüller, but also pioneers of British and American feminist cinema, Sally Potter and Sophia Coppola. Fellini’s cinema, as the French

philosopher of film Gilles Deleuze realized in the mid 1980s, is a cinema not of mastery but of encounter. Fellini helped script Roberto Rosselini’s filmic exploration of the forced encounter between Italy and the U.S. in the closing months of World War II, and in many ways, Fellini’s films have never stopped amplifying the six episodes of Rossellini’s austerely baroque Paisan.

The American fascination with Fellini, then, has to do not only with the seduction of the Italian director’s immensely powerful and complex cinematic language, but with the use of that fluency to make visible, audible and tactile the spaces created which incommensurable worlds, cultures, and consciousnesses collide—productively disorienting spaces that the Marcellos, Guidos, and Pippos in Fellini’s universe expend most of their time and effort trying to avoid. The often cited oneiric quality of Fellini’s films, their famous “Felliniesque” quality, has to do with their attempts to materialize on screen what can hardly be thought, let alone documented within ordinary consciousness. Like jazz, Fellini’s filmmaking strays out of familiar neighborhoods. His films include some of the first and the most profound cinematic treatments of difference—differences of gender, race, generation, religion, sexuality, and class (not just the immiserated but the affluent and the wealthy). Spectators often miss or misread these penetrating analyses because of Fellini’s empathy for even the most impermeable of his characters.

There is always hope in Fellini’s films, not because he was an optimist but because he was a realist. The transformative encounter that changes everything in the space of a moment can happen to anyone

at any time. Guido’s conviction that his project is a failure just before the end of 8 ½ becomes the moment when he can finally begin the film. In the mockumentary fiction of Fellini’s penultimate film, Intervista, the moment when the “Fellini” within the film admits that his attempt to adapt Kafka’s Amerika to the screen has degenerated into kitsch, is the moment that impels him to leave the studio for the film’s climactic scene of encounter between past and present, east and west, in the secluded suburban living room of the no longer glamorous movie star, Anita Ekberg. Fellini’s abdication of mastery, his insistence on the richness of the encounter rather than the seduction of the intact and glamorous, continues to make him one of the most positive resources for U.S. filmmakers, particularly those seeking their own subterranean paths through and beyond the illusions of mastery.

Perhaps the most surprising and unusual route taken by Fellini’s films into the American cultural imaginary has been via the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Fellini’s film language is central to Deleuze’s landmark cinema theory books Cinema 1, The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Since these books were translated into English in the late 1980s, they have transformed cinema studies so that in courses taught across the country, thousands of students are now being challenged to imagine spatialities and temporalities other than those captured by their GPS systems and digital clocks and to think about how images can enable thought and signify multidimensionally.

Fellini’s films have by now become a lens through which transnational, postcolonial, and revolutionary filmmakers

ubiquitous influences: film

8½ (1960) by Federico Fellini

can very precisely chart their own passages among disparate conceptual, emotional, economic, and spiritual realities.

To expand the frame beyond the U.S., Cuban director Tomás Guttierez Alea’s Up to a Certain Point (1983) features a “revolutionary” playwright who has to recapitulate several levels of the downward spiral of aspiring journalist Marcello in La dolce vita before he can begin to perceive his own, counterrevolutionary machismo. Hungarian director Ibolya Fekete’s Bolshe vita (1996) celebrates the creativity of the moment when Soviet occupation ceased and the hegemony of the neoliberal marketplace had not yet taken its place in Eastern Europe. This moment may have been over in a flash, as she says in the film, but its evanescence does not make the psychic and emotional experiences it allowed any the less “real” and revealing.n

La dolce vita (1960) by Federico Fellini

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36 ubiquitous influences:art and architecture

De Chirico’s “Long American Shadow” The artist’s influence is detected in a myriad of modern works

by Ara H. MERJIAN

A

n episode of HBO’s popular period drama, Boardwalk Empire, finds the character Angela Darmody (Aleksa Palladino) having painted a young woman in an empty square. Flanked by a receding arcade, her hands at her sides, the figure stares toward a horizon marked by a few lone trees. The image catches the attention of Richard Harrow (Jack Huston), a disfigured World War I marksman, who recognizes in its melancholy something familiar: “There was an artist I saw in Paris,” he remarks to Angela upon seeing her work. “He does cityscapes. Very stark.

No people.” She replies knowingly: “De Chirico.” She gently adds that the artist “also did figures who look like mannequins,” alluding to Richard’s own reconstructed face, half of which he lost in the war, and which he now covers with a tin prosthesis, colored to match his skin.

Painted in Paris and Ferrara in the mid-1910s, several of Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings like The Seer (1914-15) indeed recall the prosthetic bodies that came to populate Europe’s cities in the wake of the Great War. Perched on a stage-like rostrum like a shop window prophet, The Seer epitomizes de Chirico’s Nietzsche-inspired vow “to see everything, even man, in its quality of thing.”

In their paintings and collages from the late 1910s, Dadaists like George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, and Raoul Hausmann took up the mannequin motif even more aggressively, finding in de Chirico’s stilted anatomies the models for an uncanny inhumanism – precisely the kind of pathos evoked a century later in Richard Harrow’s affectless visage, with its whiff of wartime horrors. The AMC series Mad Men likewise recently turned to de Chirico’s mannequins as touchstones for philosophical reflection. A promotional poster from last season reveals the unflappable Don Draper plunged in ex-

istential reverie before a pair of shop front mannequins, plainly inspired by Metaphysical precedent. With these latest televised citations, the painter’s “Long American Shadow” – to recall Robert Rosenblum’s landmark essay on de Chirico’s stateside influence – has decidedly stretched into the new millennium.

It was at Alfred Stieglitz’s legendary 291 Gallery on Fifth Avenue that his work first encountered an American audience. De Chirico’s Parisian art dealer, Paul Guillaume, sent to a group exhibition the freshly completed canvas, The General’s Illness – a striking urban still life that has remained at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum since the 1930s and influenced generations of painters. Already in 1936, a cover for the journal Art Front invoked a stylized, antiquarian shop window, setting into relief the role of everyday urbanism in even de Chirico’s most archaic imagery. In essays like “La Metafisica dell’America” and “I was in New York,” the painter himself acknowledged the same rapports between pictorial space and architectural intuition.

His own visit to Manhattan in the 1930s occasioned comparisons of the city to a kind of shop window at large – reminiscent of an “immense museum of strangeness,” as he put it in some of his earliest writings. De Chirico’s backing by important dealers like Julien Levy and Alfred Barnes meant that, along with the more prominent reception of his work among the Surrealists in France, his painting enjoyed a wide circulation on American shores as well.

Along with solemn allusions – whether to mechanized prosthetics or the frequent affectlessness of modern urbanism – the legacies of Metaphysical painting echo in less serious circles. A Halloween episode of The Simpsons (“Treehouse of

Horror”) finds Bart reciting fun-house terrors, as the shadow of Marge’s beehive hairdo creeps – like one of de Chirico’s trademark shadows – up the wall of an abandoned cityscape. The action-adventure game “Ico” for the Sony Playstation takes Metaphysical paintings like Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) and The Nostalgia of the Infinite (1912-13) as the inspirations for its playful cover of an improbable topography. Ron De Maris’s poem “De Chirico at the Mall” (2000), meanwhile, mischievously imagines de Chirico “fingering the gloves in the lady’s section,” updating Metaphysical imagery to the latter-day dystopia of American consumerism. Featuring popular commodities in incongruous juxtaposition, paintings like The Song of Love (1914) and The Amusements of a Young Girl (1915) already mix a proto-Pop iconography with more esoteric allusions.

De Chirico’s scenes of abandoned piazze and wayward objects appear, in fact, shot through with both levity and terror. Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, for example, depicts a young girl blithely rolling a hoop, seemingly oblivious to a looming carriage, reminiscent of a empty hearse. The Evil Genius of a King, from the same year, presents an urban still life of unidentified objects, suggesting at once colored toys and ominous, incantatory instruments. The paintings’ ambivalence – between anxiety and surprise, menace and revelation – has thus lent

ubiquitous influences:art and architecture 37

opposite page: Boardwalk Empire, HBO, Season Two. left: Joel Peter Witkin. Waiting for de Chirico in the Artist’s Section of Purgatory, New Mexico, 1994. gelatin silver print. 29 7/8 x 32 1/2 inches

Art Front, November 1936

John Baldessari. installation view of Double Bill: ... and de Chirico, 2012. Varnished Inkjet print on canvas with acrylic, oil paint, and oil stick. 73-1/4 x 54 inches. Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles.

38 ubiquitous influences:art and architecture

top row: The Simpsons, “Treehouse of Horror IV,” October 14, 1993; Kiss Me Kate, MGM Studios, 1953. BOttom row: Edward Hopper. Office in a Small City, 1953, Oil on canvas, 28 x 40 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. David Salle. Endives, 2000, oil and acrylic on canvas and linen, 48 x 68 inches. Lehmann Maupin.

itself to wide-ranging expropriations, and the American context proves no exception. O. Louis Guglielmi’s brooding cityscapes transpose Metaphysical architecture into a notably – though still elusively – American vernacular, just as Edward Hopper’s empty streets and remote houses draw upon the Italian painter’s evacuated urbanism. The same year as Hopper painted the stripped geometries of Office in a Small City (1953), George Sidney’s cinematic adaptation of Kiss Me Kate used Metaphysical painting, instead, as an archetype of benign, jaunty Italianità.

De Chirico renounced his Metaphysical style after 1919 – except, that is, to pastiche his early work for several decades after. His half-hearted abandonment of modernism in favor of a “return to the craft” left fellow artists and most critics cold, and it is his early work that has most notably influenced twentiethcentury art and urbanism. Still, his efforts from subsequent decades – whether pedantic neoclassicism, an equine neoBaroque, or a fleshy Renoir-like sensualism – have borne out their share of influence on post-war practices, from the late figuration of Philip Guston to the short-lived “‘Bad’ Painting” movement, launched in the 1970s by curator Marcia Tucker. Even de Chirico’s infamous selfserializations – which he stubbornly plied under the improbable aegis of “craft” – struck Andy Warhol as a worthy foil to

the latter’s machinic reproductions. At once at its center and on its margins, de Chirico’s eccentric place in the trajectory of twentieth-century modernism has ensured his relevance for a post-modern era in which cynicism and savvy often prove indistinguishable.

More contemporary American practices reveal some wide-ranging appeals to his legacy – appeals not simply to subject matter, but the larger conceptual stakes and formal strategies of Metaphysical imagery. David Salle, a painter associated with the return to figuration in the 1980s (considered by some critics a reprisal of de Chirico’s reactionary “return to the craft”) excerpts a late Metaphysical painting in his Salami with Landscape (2002).

Next to some flattened, day-glo foliage, the citation of de Chirico’s still life distills Salle’s charateristic, heterogenous imagery to a more discreet juxtaposition – more spare and selective than the chaotic overlays of his previous work. Salle’s (inexplicably titled) Endives (2000) likewise corrals a pair of shadow-casting artichokes next to quadrants of a cartoon-like mountainscape and textured abstraction.

A master of the photographically morbid, Joel-Peter Witkin reproduces a crosssection of Metaphysical iconography in his 1994 montage, Waiting for de Chirico in the Artist’s Section of Purgatory, New Mexico. Seamlessly incorporated into alongside these are fragments from Picasso’s Guernica, a mannequin figure by Carlo

Carrà, as well as a jumble of unrelated objects – all of which appear to occupy the same fictional space, unified in its accomodation of cast shadows. In a similar vein, the recent Double Bill series by the conceptual artist John Baldessari displaces some of de Chirico’s familiar motifs (wayward artichokes, title-less books) into compositions by other modern masters.

Like much of Baldessari’s previous work, Double Bill’s visual hybridity makes use of found imagery – in this instance appropriated from the history of art itself.

The casual crossings of these very different examples thus draw more profoundly upon Metaphysical painting and its insouciant hybridizations: of modern chimneys and ancient galleys, classical statuary and contemporary urbanism.

They suggest that the painter’s legacy is not reducible to an iconographic repertoire, but rather comprises a living, pictorial idiom – rather than a series of particular articulations, a means of reconciling them effortlessly. De Chirico’s notion of an “immense museum of strangeness” suggests a dimension in which aesthetic revelation and actual materiality might become interchangeable. Though he considered painting the ultimate arbiter of metaphysical profundity, his work has nevertheless resonated for artists assailing the boundaries between art and objecthood. The conceptual artist Daniel Buren once referred to the installations by the Arte Povera artist Yannis Kounnelis as “de Chirico in three dimensions.” The New York-based artist Adam Putnam seems to have taken some of his cues from that idea. His recent Untitled (2012) confers upon a painting like The Anxious Journey (1913) whorls of plywood, the cadence of real shadows, an actual space into which we might step – with all the anxiety and exhilaration such an inhabitation might entail. n

ubiquitous influences:art and architecture

39

contemporary art

Studio America Contemporary Italian painters and their works abroad

by Gianluca MARZIANI

T

he question seems simple: who are the most influential Italian artists in the American context? The answer can also be simple, if we limit the list to include only the giants that the world envies Italy for. If instead we want to test the influences on the present (at the moment that the events occur) or their influences beyond their giant status (in a context outside of their irreplaceable names), it is therefore necessary to define a suitable criterion, a measurement of incisiveness that doesn’t stop with history or the market, but touches on the figurative conscience of the work, the background and backstage of the events, the hidden inspirations, and the deepest linguistic intuitions.

Imagine if Robert Rauschenberg hadn’t come to Italy in the 1950s, where he saw the work of Alberto Burri, or if Cy Twombly hadn’t discovered the works of Gastone Novelli in Rome, or even if Richard Serra hadn’t lived through such significant experiences in Rome. Small revelations, unexpected flashes, persistent visions: the conscience of our view is constructed of multiple elements, evident or invisible, but nevertheless enduring. We know well how definitively Futurism has molded art history, but it is not as clear-cut how much American post-war art owes to the role of Rome in the 1950s and 1960s, reaffirming the complexity of the ties between our Capital and New York, between the cities that symbolize the Old World and the New World, between the majesty of ruin and the sustained impact of steel.

The concept of these across-the-board influences is an aspect that is not limited to success or to economic weight, but regards the woven iconography of the work, human exchanges, private events, the shadowy parts. Here the privileged relations that determine true influences are born, where we discover that the deep

Gastone Biggi. Partitura NewYorkese, 2013.

Industrial Painting. 74 3/4 x 39 1/3 inches.

lives of artists are molded only by other artists.

We open this American journey with GASTONE BIGGI, class of 1925, author of a recent series dedicated to the city of New York. Palazzo Collicola Arti Visive, the museum that is re-launching Spoleto on the contemporary circuit, has recently presented the whole series, be-

fore the New Yorker phase next autumn (in an important museum in the city that we won’t mention, pending definitive dates.) The artist has paid homage to the metropolis with a poetic cipher, dense with private and collective memories, a melting pot of influences, ties, cross-references, homages, allusions, and contaminations. A beautiful manage-

40

Giacamo Puccini. Courtesy Puccini Foundation.

Gastone Biggi. new york light, 2011. Industrial painting.

74 3/4 x 39 1/3 inches.

ubiquitous influences:art and architecture

41

The concept of these across-the-board influences is an aspect that is not limited to success or to economic weight, but regards the woven iconography of the work, human exchanges, private events, the shadowy parts. ment of complexity and a special sense of color are felt in the subject matter, with the subtle lure of the names that have rendered the Big Apple unique.

Everything is seen through the lens of a pictorial code that is between abstract art and depiction, where this “abstract realism” that Biggi himself theorized in his writings is manifested. New York becomes drip painting, minimalist geometry, graffiti, expressionist sabre, Africanism, geometric module, uprightness and glimmer, contrast and harmony, metallic dissonance and musicality… Within the works fragments are perceived like poetic particles of an orchestral painting, a polygamy of the gesture that arches into the chromatic spectrum and makes points, lines, and curves dance... it wasn’t easy to understand New York using the silent weapon of color, yet Biggi has written a long story through a series of canvases where the outfield voice is that of the artist in love, crazily in love with this unique metropolis. Striking. Inimitable.

If we look at the results of the art system today, the three Italians that spur the most interest in the American setting are MAURIZIO CATTELAN, FRANCESCO VEZZOLI and RUDOLF STINGEL. They have passed the threshold of the major museums and of the collections of authors and world fairs, returning a presence on the global contemporary scene to Italy. Three different artists with one common nature: using hybrid language to define their visions, realizing the right experimental directions, overturning genres in a version that is of their own making. Using personal methods, they are indicating tendencies and giving a starting point that the United States recognizes with intelligence and appropriate respect. All three remain Europeans in their way of conceptualizing opera, the

complexity of its installation, its dialectic nature; but they don’t lose conscience of innovations, of the progress of the media and the progress of communication mechanisms.

One thing still distinguishes Italian art: it’s an essential value, that is, an iconographic quality, a methodic construction of the work, the plastic quality of detail, and meticulousness as an aesthetic structure and conceptual driver.

Don’t believe those who sing the praises of global art, feeding a homogeneousness that doesn’t get at the necessary genius loci, the importance of roots and the sense of belonging to a particular history.

Italian artists still have a clear code for the architectural design of the picture, a sense of the historical flow that connects Giotto to Tano Festa, Piero della Francesca to Franco Angeli, il Bronzino to Domenico Gnoli, Michelangelo to Mario Schifano. Art remains a massive horizontal flow, where the past releases inspiring waste on the present, thus feeding the tenacity of innate quality, a gift that lingers over the best artists of the local panorama.

ALBERTO DI FABIO is a precise example of an Italian artist that has obtained a constant presence on the Gagosian team. His Oriental charts and canvases tell the story of the cellular microcosm as well as that of the astronomical macro-world, giving science an ethical code that flies across figurative refinery, mixing the mosaics of Ravenna and Baroque decorations, Pucci and Ferragamo, Oriental art and Alighiero Boetti.

The discourse is similar for STEFANO ARIENTI. For years one of the artists of Lehmann Maupin, he also is a methodical visual thinker that has found in charts and in the levity of touch his personal stylistic code. Fragility and control are

two themes that interest the American public, intrigued by dimensions of the world gathered and reflected, in a figurative space that has solid ethical references and evokes the fundamental values of American culture. Fragility is a sign of tenacity and resistance, and a point of fallibility that resists and confirms memories with its conservation.

Instead, on a different front is pop-surrealist painter NICOLA VERLATO. His principal galleries are called Jonathan Levine (New York) and Merry Karnowski (Los Angeles), references for anyone who is interested in investigating new figurative forms and the most outstanding experimentations between design and painting, explained by magazines such as Juxtapoz and Hi-Fructose. It is interesting to note that Verlato embodies a sort of maximalist painting which seems based on Salvador Dalí and Robert Longo, also including the double conscience of a European memory that touches on its new culture. It’s a confirmation, on one side, of how heterogeneous American tastes are; and on the other side, of how much artists of his esteem have ties (albeit indirect ones) with American culture, capturing themes and events for their fundamental style.

In conclusion, beyond a market where Italy is outside of the podium, we can affirm that Italian art maintains a precise nature and a value of belonging that American culture regards with curiosity and respect. Now is the golden moment for Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Alighiero Boetti, Enrico Castellani… shortly, a fever will grow around Salvatore Scarpitta, Agostino Bonalumi, Mimmo Rotella, Pino Pascali, Luigi Ontani… and after a few years, maybe, we can hope to touch on a few of the other “young people” that are so passionate today. n

42 diario Rome-NY

Diario Rome-NY

architectural crossover Q&A with Architect Franco Purini

by Ludovica Rossi PURINI LUDOVICA ROSSI PURINI: In what way can we talk about the contribution of Italian architects to the culture of architecture in the United States?

FRANCO PURINI: Italian architecture has profoundly influenced the development of American architecture, whether it’s in a direct or an indirect way. It’s a testimony of the works of many of the great American architects of the past century. Only one example is really necessary: the strong analogy between the Guggenheim of New York, by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the stairs of the Vatican Museums, by Giuseppe Momo, who the American architect visited in 1939.

LRP: What exactly do you mean when you refer to the indirect contribution Italian architecture made to the development of the architectural aesthetic of the United States?

FP: At the end of the 1800s the celebrated American studio McKim, Mead, and White– who signed dozens of important projects, notably the American Academy in Rome– imposed a stylistic cipher that clearly is inspired by the grand Greco-Roman classical models and that is based upon a revaluing of the Vitruvian principles and on the deep understanding of the works of Italian architects of the 1500s. Throughout the 1900s this relationship between studios and the profound analyses of Italian classical architecture is brought before numerous great American architects, of whom I primarily cite Robert Venturi– whose fundamental 1966 text Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture– perhaps would never have been written if the author had not produced important studies on Italian architecture from the 1500s to the 1900s. Another scion of great Italian tradition is also Peter Eisenmann, who recognizes in Giuseppe Terragni his inspiration. Eisenmann particularly was the principal animator of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies of New York, a tried and true laboratory of the architectural aesthetics on contemporary urban studies, in which other famous architects and Italian architecture theorists, such as Manfredo Tafuri, were very active. Another American architect who owes much to Italian architecture is Steven Holl. At the be-

ginning of his activity, he was very influenced by his stay in Rome, where he gained his understanding of Classical and Baroque architecture of the capital beyond the studies conducted and discovered by Italian architects.

LRP: What exactly do you mean by the expression ‘consider themselves heirs to the huge Italian tradition of architecture’?

FP: First off I refer to the degree to which some of the greatest American architects of this past century have used Italian architecture and its masters as essential models of architectural aesthetics whilst imagining contemporary architectural scenarios. It’s enough only to think of Charles Moore, whose Piazza di Italia in New Orleans celebrates that same myth of classical architecture, and who, together with Robert Venturi, is rightly considered one of the great innovators of postmodernism. Secondly, it’s important to figure in the value of Italian tradition in architecture the fact that many important architectural faculties in American universities have had and continue to have a seat in Rome, therefore contributing to the creation of a sort of osmotic relationship between the different cultures of the projects.

LRP: Can this instead serve to sketch direct lines where the direct contribution of Italian architecture in the United States is defined?

FP: The work of Pietro Belluschi is very important in this sense.

He transferred to study in the United States one year after his high school graduation in Rome. As an architect he signed nu-

[Renzo piano’s] formal measure, strongly conceptual, that does not concede at all to fashion or media spectacles, is a durable emblem of the most authentic character of Italian architecture.

43 Photo by Michel Denancé

diario Rome-NY

Renzo Piano Building workshop. The Morgan LIbrary, New york, atrium view.

merous projects, among which are the PanAm Building in New York (now called the MetLife Building), designed together with Walter Gropius and Emery Roth & Sons, and the Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.

Another Americanized architect is Romaldo Giurgola, who in the 1970s (before transferring to Australia to design the amplification of the Capital of the country, Canberra) was the author of very advanced projects. The same goes for Bruno Zevi, one of the most important and influential historians of architecture on a world scale in the second half of the 20th century, who graduated from Harvard with Walter Gropius. More recently Gino Valle, who designed the seat of the Banca Commerciale Italiana in New York at the beginning of the 1980s, inspired through his great attention to contexts. Among the most direct contributors we remember Paolo Soleri, an Italian architect that studied in Turin, and later worked with Frank Lloyd Wright.

With his interventions to the Arcosanti in Arizona, he gave life to a utopian city, where the ideal of a life in harmony with nature is united with the willingness to create spaces that are complex and innovative. In the 1970s Vittorio Giorgini, Lauretta Vinciarelli, Paola Iacucci, and Alessandra Latour were important Italian educators at the Facoltà di Architettura of New York. These

Left: giuseppe Momo. Vatican Staircase. Above: Frank Lloyd Wright, Guggenheim Museum New york, interior.

personalities acted to transmit the Italian subject matter, but also the American one. In current history, the contribution given by Renzo Piano to American architecture is surely more significant.

Effectively, American projects such as the buildings of the New York Times and Morgan Library are highly visible reaffirmations of the Genovese architect’s synthetic and elegant signs inspired by his great attention to the context. His formal measure, strongly conceptual, that does not concede at all to fashion or media spectacles, is a durable emblem of the most authentic character of Italian architecture. n

44 Fashion

Schiap Happy

by Barbara ZORZOLI

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lsa Schiaparelli, “Schiap” to friends (born in Rome on September 10, 1890), was an innovative woman and fashion designer and had a lot of “firsts” in the fashion industry. Her first collection in 1927, in fact, consisted of sweaters adorned with surrealist trompe l’oeil images – a theme that was to become Schiaparelli’s trademark (featured in American Vogue).

She is noted for introducing many styles and techniques into the fashion history. She was the first to use brightly colored zippers, appearing on her sportswear in 1930. In 1933 she introduced the Pagoda sleeve (a broad-shouldered sleeve), and in 1935 visible zippers on her evening dresses (her “The Evening Suit” became a standard among fashionably dressed women). She was also the first to adorn clothes with detailed, brooch-like buttons.

Schiap was also known for experimenting with new materials, including rayon, vinyl and cellophane. In 1932 she introduced a new and exquisite synthetic “peau d’ange” jersey, called Jersarelli, and she was the first to employ the initial cellulose acetate, Setilose, in 1934.

Schiap became well-known for her collaborations with artists such as Salvador Dalí, and the outrageous, original designs they created together, simply known as “Shoe Hat” and “Lobster Dress” (created in the spring of 1937, this white organdy gown caused a sensation when it appeared in American Vogue, modeled

by Wallis Simpson).

She also started to create new collections every year. In fact, she believed that the prêt-à-porter and large-scale production were the future of fashion. Each collection had a theme and a specific inspiration. This is how her greater contribution to the modern fashion industry was born: the fashion show, a presentation of new collections with art and music, and tall, thin models (Elsa actually believed that the androgynous figures were more suitable for clothing).

Startling colors became a hallmark of Schiaparelli that created the color “shocking pink” (bright shade of fuchsia) by adding magenta to pink. The color ‘pink’ dominated the whole collection of 1936 and nowadays is associated with women’s clothing and lingerie brands like Victoria’s Secret. Elsa Schiaparelli died in 1973, but her revolutionary approach continues to influence the fashion world of today… and Carrie Bradshaw’s iconic Sex and the City outfits! n

The designer who invented modern fashion shows and “shocking pink” – Elsa Schiaparelli

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46 ubiquitous influences: literature

Machiavelli’s prince After 500 Years

by James JOHNSON

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iccolò Machiavelli’s Prince is perhaps the purest anatomy of power ever written. The book follows its declared intent in stark terms without fear or hesitation: to show rulers how to succeed in the world as it is, not as it should be. Its only criterion is success. If goodness, justice, and honesty help you succeed, use them. If not, neglect them. It is more important to appear good, just, or honest than to be so. One should not hesitate to lie, deceive, and if need be kill in order to maintain power.

Cultivate enemies, Machiavelli advises, so you can intimidate others by crushing them publicly. Do not avoid cruelty: just be sure it is well-used. If you need to injure someone, don’t do it in a minor way, which risks revenge. Do it in a way that cannot be answered.

The Prince, written 500 years ago, has been called the first modern view of politics. It teaches that power underlies human relations and that the state and its laws are human fabrications for human ends. It is relentlessly secular. Depending on your point of view, Machiavelli is either a cynic or a realist. “Anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal,” he writes, “will soon discover he has been taught how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.” It is “normal and natural,” The Prince teaches, to take what does not belong to you. Its view of human nature is unqualified. Humans are ungrateful, fickle, deceptive, cowardly, and greedy.

A common reading is to dismiss the book as a handbook for tyrants. An effigy of Machiavelli was burned by the Jesuits in 1559, the same year the Pope included it on the Index of Prohibited Books. The English Cardinal Reginald Pole said The Prince was written “by Satan’s hand.” In the twentieth century, Machiavelli was called a teacher of evil and associated with the Nazis.

Yet careful readers have noted critical silences in The Prince. It is wholly absent of moral evaluation, for instance. Must we read it as endorsing such techniques or merely listing what should be done if a ruler wishes to keep power? Must we read Machiavelli’s own convictions into his recommendations or can we judge the work strictly on the effectiveness of its strategies? The Prince is silent about whether there are moral laws that transcend the naked pursuit of power or the laws of particular states. It is silent about the status of what we call universal rights.

Thinking through these silences takes us away from Renaissance Italy into today’s global politics. So-called realists in the field of International Relations argue that no law other than power governs the affairs of states. “At their worst,” states the writer David Fromkin in The Independence of Nations, “states are beasts that roam the jungles of world politics, killing when they are hungry, and obeying no laws but those of their own nature.” Reading The Prince today forces us to think seriously about the grounds for our own convictions – about whether rules of ethics apply in the jungle of world politics.

We may recall the means Slobodon Milosevic employed in the 1990s in the name of Greater Serbia, which included mass murder, deportations, rape as a weapon of war, and political assassination. We may think of things done in the name of national security: perhaps one hundred thousand killed in the Iraq invasion, water-boarding, the collateral damage of schools and homes incurred in drone strikes against terrorists. The Prince should force us to work out exactly why, if we truly believe it, the raw pursuit of power is not the only argument in questions of statecraft.

Seen in his own time, Machiavelli does not particularly resemble a “teacher of evil.” A voracious reader as a child, he grew up in a family that valued learning over wealth. He was a scholar, poet, and playwright. He walked with books by Dante, Petrarch and Ovid tucked under his arm. He engaged in imaginary conversations with the ancients. He was fiercely loyal to his city of Florence, as a member of its government for 14 years, an eloquent defender of the Republic, and an unwavering advocate of an independent and civically engaged citizenry. He wrote The Prince for a very particular reason. The Republic had just fallen, the Medici were restored to power, and Machiavelli was out of a job. He presented the book to the new ruler to recommend himself for employment. It is easily conceivable that he was offering a masterful work of strategy without actually endorsing it. If so, the gesture was exquisitely Machiavellian.

It would be wrong to say that The Prince is all things to all people, but over the past 500 years it has been many more things to many more kinds of people than its simple tone would suggest. It is now one of the most-assigned books of any taught in university.

Those who have taught it know that it can still cause outrage, and scholars who write about it continue to find new aspects to explore. The dominant reading today, however, may be neither outrage nor original insight. It may be complacent acceptance, one that flatters itself for being so worldly and sophisticated. We’re not shocked, we tell ourselves, we can take it in stride, and – who knows? – we might find some useful tips. Here are titles of some recently published books: Management and Machiavelli: A Prescription for Success in Your Business; The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women; and A Child’s Machiavelli: A Primer on Power.

The truth is, we should not be so complacent about this book.

After 500 years, it is still potent and possibly dangerous. It is still rich in its silences and deceptively simple. Most of all, it is unsparing in making us ask ourselves fundamental questions about the place of power in human relations and questions of right and wrong.n

literature

literature

“It Lit” in translation

by Laura GIACALONE

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he perception of Italian culture abroad is mostly anchored to the country’s great artistic and literary heritage, to the extent that Italy is more clearly understood and celebrated for what it once was, than what it is now. If we restrict our field of observation to the book market, we can see how the authors translated and distributed abroad actually contribute to shaping the identity and perception of a given culture. In this sense, an interesting indicator of the international relevance of the Italian cultural production is provided by the statistics on the translations of Italian titles and the sales of publication rights to foreign publishers.

The most complete source of information about translations in the world is the Index Translationum, an international bibliography of translations created in Geneva by the League of Nations in 1932, and now under the aegis of UNESCO. According to this Index, Italian is the 5th most translated language in the world after English, French, German and Russian.

The selling of publishing rights for Italian titles is indeed a flourishing market. A survey conducted by Doxa on behalf of the Italian Trade Commission (ICE), in collaboration with the Italian Publishers Association (AIE), shows that between 2001 and 2007 there was a significant rise in the sales of Italian book rights abroad. The growth was evident across the whole industry, in particular among small publishing houses: in 2007, 74 sold rights from their own authors compared to 39 in 2001 (+89.7%); among larger publishing houses, 135 sold rights compared to 86 in 2001 (+57%).

In the same years, the number of Italian titles sold abroad almost doubled, rising from 1,800 to 3,490 (+93.9%). On average, Italian publishers sell abroad the rights for about 17 titles per year (among those published by them).

Europe represents their principal outlet market. The greatest part of Italian publishing rights (77%) is indeed sold in European countries, mostly in Spain, France, Germany and Poland. The years between 2001 and 2007, however, saw a significant rebalancing in the relative weight of the various markets, with Asia and Russia almost doubling their shares.

The United States is ranked 5th in the Index’s list of the top 10 countries publishing translations from Italian (which is the 6th most translated language in the country). According to AIE, the Italian books translated into English and distributed in the United States every year are approximately 150.

What genres of books are exported? The first striking element emerging from the statistics is the great variety of the titles sold to foreign publishers: “other genres” alone accounts for 8-10% of titles exported. Between 2001 and 2007, the sale of rights for Italian novelists (602 titles) grew by 157.3%; children’s books record-

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Umberto Eco Italo Calvino Dante Alighieri Carlo Collodi Emilio Salgari Alberto Moravia Gianni Rodari Pope John Paul II Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini Niccolò Machiavelli.

ed a growth of +106.6% (1,004 titles sold); and the sale of nonfiction titles grew by +440% (973 titles). Interestingly, publishing of art and illustrated books is the only segment where the sale of rights in 2007 outnumbered purchases: 616 titles (+80% over 2001) for which rights were sold, as against 264 bought (-19.8%).

What about the authors? According to the Index Translationum, the top 10 Italian authors translated in the world are, in order of ranking: Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Dante Alighieri, Carlo Collodi, Emilio Salgari, Alberto Moravia, Gianni Rodari, Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and Niccolò Machiavelli.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs actively supports the promotion of Italian language and culture abroad through grants and awards assigned to foreign publishers or translators who significantly contribute to the diffusion of Italian books in foreign languages. Special attention is paid to scientific publications and lesser-known literary works. The sum available is approximately 430,000€ annually and provides financing for the translation of more than 100 works per year.

In addition to the incentives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, others are granted by the Ministry of Culture, which awards a National Translation Prize, and the Publishing Department of the Prime Minister’s Office.

Among the Italian books translated and distributed in the United States from 2006 to the present – thanks to the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – are classics such as Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti and Zibaldone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Primo Levi’s Complete Works (Norton and Company), and the Anthology of Italian Poetry from Pasolini to 2000 (Agincourt Press), but also interesting contemporary writers such as Carlo Lucarelli (Via delle Oche, Europa Editions), Giancarlo De Cataldo (The Father and the Foreigner, Europa Editions), Alessandro Piperno (The Worst Intentions, Europa Editions), Massimo Carlotto (The Fugitive, Europa Editions), Elena Ferrante (The Days of Abandonment, Europa Editions) and many others.

Public grants, the promotional activities of Italian publishers, the outstanding work of foreign translators, and the enduring interest that the Italian cultural production continues to excite worldwide have allowed an increasing number of new Italian authors to find their way to the bookshops in many countries, contributing to enriching the perception and appreciation of Italian culture abroad. n Special thanks to AIE, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Literature Across Frontiers and ISTAT for providing valuable information and statistics for this article

48 photography

light on

Bernini’s Fountains photography by Mauro Benedetti

Bernini’s Trevi Fountain in the heart of Rome became a modern icon with La Dolce Vita. Here captured at night, its eternally-flowing waters and flickering lights inspire thousands to whisper their heart’s desires at its edge....

Meanwhile in Piazza Navona (opposite), a fierce sea creature hovers over tide of the “Four Rivers.”

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50 Social journal

Social Journal

The IAF Participates in Recent Events...

Venetian Heritage Gala Venetian Heritage is among the excellent non-profits that work to preserve that city’s Italian cultural institutions. The 2013 Gala at New York’s Pershing Square Center paid homage to another type of Italian “institution” – Federico Fellini.

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1. Isabella Rossellini 2. Lee Radziwell 3. Silvia Fendi and Giovanna Battaglia (Photo by Steve Eichner) 4. IAF Chairman Hon. Stefano Acunto, Carole Haarmann Acunto, Phillip Clark and Ines Theodoli Clark 5. Diane Lane.

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La Fondazione’s La Notte Gala La Fondazione “Friends of the Italian Cultural Institute of New York” presented a gala evening featuring the Italian jeweler Mario Buccellati and centered upon its first prize given to Maestro Riccardo Muti.

From Left: Dott. Riccardo Viale, Director ICC; famed designer Massimo Vignelli; hosts with honoree (right) Riccardo Muti; Mario Buccellati and models.

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Social journal

Social Journal The Futurist Imagination at the Pope Center Contemporary Futurist artist Edward Giobbi’s works were displayed recently together with the seminal Futurist collection of Carole and Steve Acunto at the Westchester Italian Cultural Center. The show comprising a total of nearly 50 works, 12 works by Giobbi, 38 from the Acunto collection, received critical acclaim for its scope and depth, joined with a display of Italian sport cars, the emblem of the speed and dynamism the futurists embraced in the early part of the 20th century.

1.Hon. Francis A. Nicolai, Chairman Emeritus of the Westchester Italian Cultural Center; Hon. Stefano Acunto, Artist Edward Giobbi, Hon. Michael Martino, Treasurer of Board of the Westchester Italian Cultural Center.

2. Ed and Ellie Giobbi in front of the artist’s most recent work.

3. Hon. Francis A. Nicolai, Chairman Emeritus of the Westchester Italian Cultural Center with Mrs. Carole Acunto.

4. Ed Giobbi and Steve Acunto during a panel on Italian Futurism.

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Aldo Ragone Performs Beethoven at IAF Reception

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1. Aniello and Susy Musella 2. Pianist Aldo Ragone 3. Mr. David Gamrasni and Dr. Natalia Meimaris 4. Aldo Ragone with Mrs. Acunto and Ludovica Rossi Purini 5. Antonio and Cynthia Ciappina 6. Don Arcadio Casillas, Mr. & Mrs. Gerald Mintz and IAF Trustee Kim Brizzolara.

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52 Social journal

Social Journal Just Ancient Loops Screening The highly praised film Just Ancient Loops by Bill Morrison was shown in an exclusive screening event featuring a live performance by cellist Maya Beiser, who played the music composed for the film by Michael Harrison.

IAF’s Capolavori produced the work. A short panel discussion and reception followed the screening.

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1. (Left to Right) Olson Rohdes, General Manager Capolavori Productions, Steve Acunto, Chairman, Maya Beiser, cellist, Bill Morrison, the film’s creator, Michael Harrison, the composer, Stewart Isacoff, author and MC for the evening’s events.

2. The panelists; 3. Maya Beiser with an image from the film behind her; 4. Dott. Berardo Paradiso, Dr. Caren Heller, Consul General Natalia Quintavalle, Loyse Paradiso, Dr. Fabrizio Michelassi; 5. Barbara Winston and Maria Rosa DeCastro; 6. Lila Prounis and Dr. Karen Burke.

La Scuola Gala at Cipriani

At La Scuola d’Italia Guglielmo Marconi, participants included Italian singer Jovanotti, seated left, C.G. Natalia Quintavalle, and, standing, IAF Chairman Steve Acunto and Ludovica Rossi Purini, Chairman of the Compagnia per la Musica in Roma.

At Tiro a Segno

The Nassau Physicians’ Foundation honored Dr. David Battinelli (left) and Dr. Barbara Ross-Lee (second from right), sister of singer Diana Ross, with its Physician of Distinction award. Dr. Bilha Chesner Fish, Chairman of the NPF and Dr. David Levine posed with the two winners at New York’s legendary Tiro A Segno Club.

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Social journal

Social Journal Capolavori Productions presents The Red and the Black Premiering in Times Square’s Theater at Saint Clement’s, Deloss Brown’s adaptation of Stendhal’s classic Le rouge et le noir, the actors, crew and opening night guests gather for a reception following the first performance.

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1. Onstage: Brian Linden and Krista Adams; 2. Lucas Wells and Jeremy Johnson; 3. The cast receives applause; 4. (Left to right) author Deloss Brown, costume designer Lux Haac, Mrs. Carole Acunto, General Manager, Olson Rohdes, IAF Chairman, Steve Acunto; 5. Italian Journal editor Claudia Palmira Acunto with Lucas Wells and Mrs. Carole Acunto; 6. Stars Jessica Myhr and Krista Adams Santilli with Steve Acunto; 7. Bruce and Barbara Winston with feature writer Marcy McDonald.

Metropolitan Opera Backstage IACC Award

Consul General Quintavalle and IAF Chairman, Steve Acunto, flank tenor Vittorio Grigolo following his opening performance of Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera in May.

Baronessa Mariuccia Zerilli-Marimò received the Italian American Chamber of Commerce’s 2013 Award, presented by Chamber President Claudio Bozzo. Founder of the renowned Casa Italiana ZerilliMarimò, she was applauded by more than 500 guests aboard the Mediterranean Shipping Company flag ship Poesia for her extensive work in promoting Italian culture in the U.S.

54 face file

face file fabiola gianotti

by Tegan GEORGE talians who have impacted the world bring to mind either Renaissance masters, ancient statesmen or contemporary entertainers and designers, like Roberto Benigni, Sofia Loren, Giorgio Armani, or Guccio Gucci. We don’t, however, often think of physicists. This changed after December 19, 2012, when Milanese physicist Fabiola Gianotti was named runnerup for Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Why is this significant? For starters, Gianotti is a woman in a competitive, male-dominated field. She is not merely involved in modern physics, but instead dominates the field as one of the head scientists at CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research.) She is the spokesperson and coordinator for ATLAS and the Large Hadron Collider, which is the largest particle detector ever built at 27 kilometers in length. She was given this position after being elected by 3000 of her peers, hailing from 38 different countries. Gianotti has been instrumental in finding what is believed to be the Higgs Boson, or “God particle,” that scientists have been pursuing for almost a century. Her everyday work is said to be “the world’s largest science experiment.” In a nutshell, Fabiola Gianotti is extraordinary.

Gianotti was born in 1962 and received her PhD in subnuclear physics from the University of Milan. Physics was not always her passion – in fact, while she was growing up, it wasn’t even something she considered. In high school she chose a track that focused on literature, art history, philosophy and ancient Latin and Greek. It was her passion for philosophy that led her directly to physics. “I had this curiosity that pushed me towards the fundamental questions,” she told CNN in July of 2012. “Philosophy is a discipline that at least asks the fundamental questions, but physics also tries, and often can give an answer. Perhaps not the final answer, perhaps just a little step forward, but I liked it immediately.” Maybe this is what makes Gianotti so special – the way she sees physics as a form of art, claiming that the two things really are closer than everyone thinks. “Art is based on very clear, mathematical principles like proportion and harmony. At the same time, physicists need to be inventive, to have ideas, to have some fantasy.”

This fresh approach to science, coupled with the absolutely awe-inspiring rise and evolution of technology, has led to an amount of success and discovery that could not have even been dreamed of twenty years ago. Most notably, CERN scientists believe that the Large Hadron Collider has found the Higgs Boson. If this is true, it will irreversibly change not only the field of physics, but also the way we understand the nature of the universe. Scientists have been seeking the Higgs Boson for almost 100 years, hoping that it would prove the theory that particles acquire their masses from an invisible field that stretches through all of space, called the Higgs Field. Without something to give particles mass, there would be no stars, no

Photo by Claudia Marcelloni

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planets, and no life as we know it, and the Higgs Boson is the closest scientists have come to predicting what this mass may be. This discovery would not only solve the question of mass, but would also provide definitive insight into the nature of the universe, and potentially even the fate of the Earth and other planets. It has been nicknamed the “God particle” (much to the chagrin of many scientists) because it has the potential to answer most of the questions scientists still have about the universe by showing them the cosmic glue that holds it together.

At risk of sounding trite, it is easy to see how this discovery will be life-changing. If the Higgs Boson is not what they think it is, the scientists at CERN will start over, forming a new theory from scratch. However, if it is everything it has the potential to be, the path of science and the way not only physicists, but all human beings, see the universe will be absolutely revolutionized.

Of course Gianotti is ecstatic to solve this mystery, but something truly endearing about her is that she does not consider the Higgs Boson and ATLAS the only appealing part of her job. To her, what the other colliders do is equally fascinating and equally important. Today, 17,000 of the world’s 30,000 particle accelerators are used for medical purposes, such as cancer research. She says that the human part of science, the “human adventure” aspect, is what really drives her passion, and as long as Fabiola Gianotti is at CERN, who knows what leaps and bounds science and humankind will make. It’s easy to see how much it already has. n

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56 Strapline