Italy, I will always love you
(Version translated into Italian) Italy was, for many, your first foreign country . You arrived by bus, you ate pizza down the street (down the street!) and spent half a reel of 24 photos on the Piazza della Signoria . On the way back, no one was the same person who left home. With luck, even unrequited loves had arisen. Everything was perfect on that trip . For poetic justice Italy should be the first country we travel to when we can.
Italy is larger than life . It is above everything: the passage of time, its rulers and of its own intensity . It is above other places, although it is unpopular to write it and even think about it. A country from which they have left the Giotto, Mastroianni, Nino Rota, Masaccio, Prada, Caravaggio and the parmiggiano can look down on the rest of the world; and it doesn't. these weeks she, who is ungovernable It shows discipline. Unintentionally, she gives us lessons.
She has always done it: lessons on how to dress, how to respect heritage, how to enjoy eating, how to sell one's own, how to tell yourself . Now, in addition, she teaches us civics . We'll be back to thank her for everything she's given us since those first end-of-year trips, when the world seemed like a freshly painted place, ready to go.
These days, the empty images of the St. Mark's Square in Venice they look like a Chirico . The cities seem photographed by Ballester . Rome looks like a scene from Expensive Daily . that movie of Nani Moretti is one of the many love letters that Italians have dedicated to their country. In her, Moretti tours the city on a Vespa in the middle of Ferragosto , when she is deserted. Everything about her seems beautiful Spinacetus , a neighborhood made ugly by many. “It's not so bad Spinaceto” she says tenderly. At one point in the film, the protagonist goes to visit the place where they murdered Pasolini . It is an ordinary and abandoned soccer field of the outskirts of rome and everything at that moment exudes poetry. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and blah-blah-blah.
When we return to Rome we will follow in the footsteps of Moretti at the same time, followed in the footsteps of Pasolini and we will invent new routes. We will fill the streets and squares again until we complain, with a Spritz in hand.
We will return to Italy, Spritz in hand
Those tours will be full of noise , because Italy is always rowdy. Few sensations more unsettling than the silence of something noisy. Now Italy shuts up or sings for a while a day . Everything is silence. We miss the bustle, the traffic (who was going to tell us) and the physical and visual noise of the country.
The revelry of the thousands of tourists from the Trevi Fountain . Meanwhile we will see again the scene of The Dolce Life in what anita ekberg he discovers her, with a white cat on her blonde hair and bathes in her screaming “Marcello, Marcello, come here” . A day will come when we will put on the same astonished face when he appears before our eyes, even if we are not wearing the black Ekberg dress and our Marcello is not so much Marcello.
So we will imagine Fellini sitting in his director's chair and Broken boy in the background . There are worse consolations.
anita ekberg
Now is the time to travel without suitcase or ticket . Let's background Battiato in this search for a momentary center of gravity and we will continue traveling Rome , this time with William Wyler background and your Holidays in Rome . Okay, he's American, but what a win he has always stopped us from going to that city. Thanks to him, to Audrey Hepburn and Gregory we have traveled it to put our hand in the mouth of truth , we wanted lick an ice cream in the Plaza de España and, kamikazes, we rented a Vespa.
Holidays in Rome
The cinema can seriously harm health, especially if it forces us to move around Italy. If we want a worldly Rome, the queen of worldliness, we can cling to Sorrentine . When we visit again we will go to the Priory of the Cavalieri of Malta to look at the dome of saint peter from the door lock Aventine Palace . We will also wait for all the tourists like us to leave (except us) and we will walk around Rome at night hoping to be invited to a party where women dance wearing maxi necklaces and a Martini sign can be seen in the background. The number of articles about Rome that will have been written with the title The Great Beauty . Dont blame anybody.
We can choose whoever we want to guide our steps: if it's Fellini, the trip will be urban and excessive ; if it's sorrentino it will be baroque and also fellinian ; Yes it is Visconti It will be, among many things, nostalgic . When we can get back to Venice we'll take a vaporetto to the Lido and walk around it imitating the languor of Marisa Berenson . If we choose Minguella , the trip will be sophisticated. With him, Ripley and friends will also be in the pieta , in Venice, which never runs out.
We'll take the appetizer , that civilized act, we will travel south, tour Positano and find a boat to get to Capri. In its Talented Mr Ripley the director invented a town, Mongibello , which would be like an extract and a sum of the towns of southern Italy. We'll keep track of Guadagnino if we look for one sexy italy . His films have become, in recent years, an involuntary travel guide through Italy.
Call me by your name
He takes us on a tour of Villa Necchii and he teaches us a Milan so high bourgeois and cold as amazingly dressed. And we continue with this director, thanks to whom we dream of a lazy summer in Pantelleria , sunburned, smeared in mud and watching time go by on the edge of a swimming pool. He too takes us on Call me by your name a Cream , a town outside of Milan, and he shows us an Italy without clichés but very Italian . There we will fantasize about dancing one night at a verbena.
When we travel to Italy again we have to propose to do it. A Guadagnino he likes the summer nights of the villages as much as we do. To prepare ourselves we can see the mambo scene of Bread, Love and Fantasy in which Gina Lollobrigida it eats the screen and the rest of the humans around it. We already have homework for these days: learn to dance the mambo.
Bread, love and fantasy
If we choose Rossellini as a tour guide, the trip will be intense . The Italian director shot one of the most important films in the history of cinema in the south of Italy and called it Travel in Italy . In it, Naples and the Costiera Amalfitana remove the marriage formed by Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders and, incidentally to all of us and what we think about the cinema and love.
this strange road movies it can also serve as a compass when we can return to Italy. We will do it with the same spirit that we discovered when we arrived by bus and with the extra food from the cinema. In Spain Rossellini's film was called I will Always Love You . That may be the title of this article, of this insufficient love letter to Italy. we will love you always.
Travel in Italy