I went to Libya several times, but the first time was in the late seventies. King Idris Al Senussi, dethroned by a coup d’état of Captain Gaddafi about ten years earlier, was living in exile in Cairo, the Italians were driven away and the country was in a rather delicate social and political status. But […]

18 July 1935 Despite the weather, the rain and the grey skies – almost as a bad omen – were the backdrop of the upcoming German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring. More than 300,000 spectators and the highest authorities of the Reich, including the Führer, crowded the grandstands and edges of the racetrack under thousands […]

I travelled here and there; sette paia di scarpe ho consumate, di tutto ferro per voi ritrovare (Carducci, “I Cipressi”). Yes, I traveled all over and searched here and there; among an infinite number of shops and Brocante wineries everywhere, amid dust and dirt, risking all sorts of infection more than flea bites; I searched […]

Ah! … randomly looking at old photographs. Sometimes, in a moment, you find yourself in a past that was not forgotten, but set aside and far away, yet able to awaken smiles and enthusiasm again. Thirty-four years have passed, I just counted them. One morning, Mimmo Magro, a dear friend who was then Director of […]

The watercolour paintings of Roesler Franz tell the story of a nineteenth-century Rome, ancient, romantic and certainly disappeared, “memories of a passing era”, evidence of what it “was” and that preceded the great radical changes imposed by a new urban structure, rational, social and modern. In 1870, in addition to Raffaele Cadorna’s Bersaglieri and Second […]