Imaginarea Weekly

A romantic getaway from Brexit. Last week an article in The Times announced an agreement between Italy and the United Kingdom regarding a special “digital nomad visa” which will allow freelance UK citizens to work in the boot-shaped peninsula for a year. But it isn’t just the customs red tape that begs a parallel between this Grand Tour of the Third Millennium and that of the 18th century: there’s a clear sentimental driving force too, an urge to escape from grey clouds into bright sunshine… facilitated by the contemporary ‘cloud’. The British newspaper promises a “slice of la dolce vita”: even in getaways, there’s just no getting away from the Italian food stereotype. Luckily, history takes care of spreading pollen around. In the 1800s Mary Shelley kept a diary covering her journey to Italy which seems to fit neatly inside the perfect picture-postcard format: she wrote about the Italian secret society whose members advocated liberal and patriotic ideas (i.e. the “Carbonari – not to be confused with “Carbonara”, the popular Roman egg-and-bacon pasta dish which, incidentally, had its annual “Carbonara Day” celebration two days ago, on April 6th), political uprisings, and the underground culture that flourished in Austria-ruled Italy. Therefore, dear English nomads, come one, come all… and tell us something about ourselves that we don’t already know. The Vespa ride, followed by a stop under the nearest bell-tower to pluck the petals off a daisy and perform the “loves-me/loves-me-not” routine, are on us: not all Italian stereotypes wither.

If the parts precede the whole, in Italy these three identical consonants in 2022 (which, incidentally, has treble twos) seem to suggest the name of film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, this year being the centenary of his birth. But as the PPP trio dances before our eyes, the mind boggles with other possibilities… The first word that comes to our boggling mind is Pompeii which was discovered exactly on 1 April 1748 under the reign of Charles of Bourbon. This King of Naples was Spanish (and indeed was later to become Charles III of Spain), but also half Italian. His mother was the Italian noblewoman Elisabetta Farnese who left him an inheritance of paintings by Titian, Raphael and many other great Masters of the Renaissance. King Charles moved them from his mother’s Duchy of Parma, to the Palace of Capodimonte in Naples: after all, they all belonged to him and he could take them wherever he wished. Today, 80 of these masterpieces are going back ‘home’ for a short stint and will be on display at an exhibition on the Farnese family at the Complesso della Pilotta (the Pilotta Palace in Parma). Our second “P” is, therefore, a line drawn between the two cities. We’ll put our third between the first two like double-sided tape. The story goes that one day, just before he left for Spain, Charles personally found an ancient ring in the digs at Pompeii and symbolically left it behind. In so doing, and somewhat involuntarily, the King laid the foundations for what we now call heritage sites. Pompeii, Parma and Heritage – which in Italian we call “Patrimonio” (whence the word “Patrimony”) and is hence our third “P”. A nice story that the other PPP might have been interested to hear about. All perfectly true. Not to mention the “P” of our “Pesce d’aprile”, or April Fish, the aquatic symbol of April Fool’s Day in Italy. A “sticky” fish if ever there was one, getting ready to unroll and wish you all a happy April 1st!

What are the clearest examples that language offers on the relationship between form and function? The words that indicate parents: because daddy (or mummy for that matter), is a word that is born of a mini outburst of syllabic joy by the palate. So, what gender is “daddy”? There’s an open vowel ending that makes it sound feminine, but the same applies to the “Papa” who sits on the Throne of St Peter in Rome… and be it fair or not, the Popes have always belonged – with one possible (legendary) exception – to the non-fair sex. We like to think that each parent can be “sui generis”, as the Romans would have said: i.e. in a class of their own, mixing form and function as they feel fit. The handiwork depicted above may have you in stitches of laughter: could it be an electrician – male or female as “they” may be – doing the knitting? Don’t throw a fit, we’re just playing with words and images here, having fun with a pun or two. And hopefully, regardless of the gender of the knitter, there’ll be no dropped stitches and the garment will be a perfect fit. Even a philosopher like Wittgenstein once said that a serious work could be written entirely in jokes. Alas, such lightness is nowhere to be found in the ongoing debate on the development of gender-neutral language. Regardless of how we feel about the matter, let’s just bear in mind that languages themselves are unperturbed. Like regal divinities reclining languidly on their divans, in the past they have stolen and borrowed from other languages – all the while remaining unfazed in their comfort zone. “She” and “He” have joined forces to become “They”. So even if the day honouring fatherhood is not being celebrated tomorrow in your part of the world, as it is in Italy, with gender-free spontaneity we’d like to say “Happy Father’s Day”… wherever they are!

The Venice Carnival ended quite recently and if designer Alessandro Mendini had been able to realise his Ponte dell’Accademia project (Biennale 1980), it would have been like a rococo whorl across the lagoon waters, or like a mask in a film by Fellini. Mendini reminds us of those scenographers who wrap things in fabric, following the hidden thread of a suggestion, dainty and tongue-in-cheek at the same time. We find such a suggestion in his Proust armchair (1978) which invites us to sit down, as if we were the Sun King, on Paul Signac’s dots. Instead, let’s walk down to Vulcan’s forge (as it were) where, more or less in the same years, another designer was convinced that work itself (conceived as a hotchpotch of materials, textures and noises), could enter, lock, stock, and barrel, into a new world of design; literally, like a snail into its shell. Here, then, is Marco Zanuso with his Lady, the armchair padded with the polyurethane of those cars that, in 1951, Italians were already hoping to buy. Two radically different concepts of living and of the home. For Mendini, all stilettos and lace, it’s a place where one is allowed to be “lazy only on Saturday mornings”: this is what he writes in the songs of Architettura Sussurrante, a record produced with Italian pop group Matia Bazar in 1983, and of which it seems that MoMA has a copy… Zanuso, on the other hand, just couldn’t fathom the thought of home that was sluggish in zeal and in 1956 received the “Compasso d’Oro” industrial design award for his Borletti sewing machine. Between the two of them, the tailor and the costumer, they went on to win ten such awards. Tomorrow, Saturday morning, we can choose whether it’s going to be a postmodernist, or as yet a still a modernist, weekend. The opportunity to square the circle is given to us by an exhibition that opened a few days ago at the ADI Design Museum. Obviously, under the protection of blessed laziness.

An article published in Italian daily La Stampa in 2007 applied the image of the “knight’s move” to what was, at the time, the relationship between Minsk and Moscow; it left few doubts as to who the strategist was. Facebook had already been in existence for a few years (2004) yet was still timid vis-à-vis the ‘senior’ media. In 1940, while the Germans were invading Paris, Marc Bloch stopped to ponder upon history. Feeling the need to “defend” it, he put all his material on the scales, also weighing up the importance of what he called “voluntary”testimonies, such as, for example, newspaper articles. This was invaluable material for an historian, but only in appearance: their main interest lay more in what they implied than in what they actually said. And what is transpiring from the dozens, hundreds, thousands of testimonies that are hitting us these days, minute-by-minute? Unbridled fragmentation and emotionality. Perhaps today’s readers (and tomorrow’s historians) could do with somewhat more‘organic’ information; cleaner, as it were, to avoid getting unhorsed in the galaxy founded by Mr “Z”. And talking about letters, here then, is the challenge for the media on this particular chessboard: allow the knight / reader their signature ‘move’: “L”-shaped (like the“L”in Liberty), a free movement of thought within a certain perimeter. Ready to draw that “L”with your well-sharpened lances?

Unlike the beautiful voice of Tosca who she sings these words in her famous aria, this week has brought us the ugly rumble of war. However we’ll stick to the subject we had originally intended to look at and grant ourselves poetic licence to remind you that the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is gearing up to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its peaceful occupation of the Basque city. The celebrations’ highpoint will be next October but in the meantime the ‘Bilbao bill boards’ feature an exhibition on Jean Dubuffet (which opens today), and another which showcases the finest movements that were launched between the two world wars: Fauvism, Cubism, the “School of Paris” and Surrealism. While the names of Italian artists Modigliani and De Chirico are included in the above, it does seem odd that Futurism has been so blatantly excluded. After all, Frank Gehry’s building itself is a living tribute to Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a bronze sculpture by Umberto Boccioni, the most perceptive and European of the artists who helped shape the Italian movement. Boccioni died prematurely at the age of 34 during World War I. A reminder that sounds harsh to the ear, especially on a week like this when that dreaded word has reared its ghastly head. So why are we focusing on the Guggenheim Museum’s birthday (and Frank Gehry’s too, seeing as its iconic architect turns 92 in three days’ time)? Because it’s a reminder of the importance of clear cuts and alternative forms of nourishment – the museum has meant both for Bilbao’s economy. And to see European artists (including Russians and Ukrainians) housed side-by-side under the same roof brings home the idea of Europe as a safe nest: a small comfort zone – despite everything.

This cap has a name and surname, one that loves minute details, sleepless nights and drugs. Yet, today isn’t Sherlock Holmes Day. Let’s instead introduce Gilbert Keith Chesterton, just in case his name doesn’t ring a bell straight away: he was almost a contemporary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and, like him, was born in late May under the sun sign of Gemini – though he wasn’t his twin but, rather, his alter ego. The same can be said about the detectives that sprang from the two authors’ respective imaginations. Holmes was a charismatic mentor while the protagonist of the Father Brown stories was an unassuming priest. Yet that is exactly how Chesterton tricks us. While the gentleman who lives at 221B Baker Street is the doyen of deductive reasoning, Father Brown excels at inductive logic. Emotions: it’s precisely these that ultimately give the criminals away – and, mind you, for the clergyman, they were by no means common thieves. The finer ones are those who think too much and that is where Father Brown takes his pleasure; he digs deep for oil, but gives his interlocutors the impression that he’s using a bucket and spade. In conclusion, if Holmes could find the tiniest of flaws in the weave of the warp, Father Brown tends to look for a hidden darn. Which hat are we going to put on today, a deerstalker or a saturno? Never underestimate the role of emotions, they could turn us inside out, or round and round like the ringed planet.

Porto Venere (which in Italian means “Port Venus”) is a pearl in the Ligurian Sea, bathed not only by the Goddess of Love after whom it is named, but also by the exhaustion of poet Lord Byron when he swam the stretch of sea separating it from the small coastal town of Lerici. Byron championed Luddism, an English popular movement whose members were notorious for destroying the looms and textile machinery introduced by the Industrial Revolution, considering them a threat to skilled craftsmanship. Paradoxically, the daughter that Lord Byron never knew, Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), is instead considered the mother of computer programming. Her special talent lay in an ability to grasp that an algorithm could go beyond numbers, generating symbols, words, and even notes. However, as Ada pointed out, it would never be imaginative, because it would always rely on a human brain in order to function. Thus, the daughter of a poet created a device that, in order to work, would always need poetry. Seeing as Valentine’s Day is in three days’ time, this seems a perfect preamble to the subject of love. “What’s in a name?” one might well ask; in Ada’s case,“love” and “lace” – not just the delicate, weblike fabric which the Luddites defended, but also the sturdy cords used to lace-up those boxing-gloves she supposedly had to don in order to assert herself in the “ring” of mathematics. Hers was a short-lived life, spent in what was then exclusively a man’s world. Today is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science : a love that history tried hard to complicate and render as intricate as bobbin lace.

Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And the fact that today is the day-after isn’t a good reason to forget everything. To switch our sensibilities on and off as if they were devices, to change our moods according to what happens to be on offer there, is one of the limitations of this day and age. We’d like to tell you a story about ballerinas who survived the Holocaust, or about composer Olivier Messiaen who, at the age of 32 and while interned in the prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, wrote and performed his ”Quartet for the End of Time”… Indeed, there must be a way of avoiding our memory faculty turning into sporadic or intermittent memories; of providing ourselves with stumbling blocks which we can inadvertently bump into all the year round. That’s why, in order to ensure we do remember, we’re going to grant ourselves a somewhat “unpoetic” license by calling memory a zipper: a gateway between the past and the present, so that we don’t impassively wave yesterday goodbye. Name Day St Thomas Aquinas

Florence is a shining city: one of its bridges is dedicated to goldsmiths and, traditionally, the feast day everyone looks forward to is St John’s Tide (24 June) when the Baptistery’s Silver Altar (which is kept under nitrogen for the rest of the year) is shown to worshippers. This treasure, which took more than a century to create (1367-1483), is made from 200 kilograms of silver and an almost inestimable number of panels and statues. It features the workmanship of numerous artists, including Antonio del Pollaiolo, Verrocchio (Leonardo’s master) and Michelozzo. Just 700 metres away, at Palazzo Strozzi, we find a different kind of lustre, one that radiates from a modern alloy. Jeff Koons’ steel does not need to be viewed by candlelight as do the shadowy niches chiselled in between the various saints on the Silver Altar (let’s try to imagine how a 14th-century worshipper would have scrutinised them…) Koons’ rabbits, dogs and Venuses, on the other hand, are like mirrors in which we can see our own reflections. “The slick, spotless, smooth, and spick-and-span is the hallmark of our times. It’s what Jeff Koons’s sculptures, iPhones, and Brazilian waxing have in common (…) There is nothing in it to interpret, decipher, or think out. It’s an art of the ‘like.’”This comment was written by South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han in 2019. But the fact is that the iconic American artist pulled the “aesthetic of the slick” out of his hat twenty years before the Apple phone emerged. Art can be a forerunner of acts yet to be played out. Oh, and by the way, many happy returns, Jeff Koons as you prepare to face your “third act”. But no worries: we shan’t breathe a word! Name Day St Agnes