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 […]

In the fifties, the world was re-emerging from the senseless and horrendous conflict that almost destroyed it and life resumed with enthusiasm but above all with tenacity and will not only thanks to the Marshall Plan but also to regained freedom and renewed optimism. Construction sites in Italy popped up everywhere. The bulldozers worked day […]

About 40 years ago, in the middle of the Tuscan countryside near Montalcino, the birth-town of the magnificent Brunello wine, I ended up by chance in a cave of sorts with a sign in front that said “workshop”. Inside, in the midst of filth, there was a little bit of everything: a disassembled old tractor, […]

More than 20 years ago, I spent an entire afternoon in what in the past was defined as the “Italian Eastern Africa”. Except I was not in Asmara or Addis Ababa but I was in Milan, near Piazza Cinque Giornate. I went to meet Gian Battista Guidotti, the true and only, Nuvolari’s co-pilot in the […]