How beautiful are the deserted squares and phantom monuments of “Italy is a wish”

Italy is a desire”, this title is a poem and in fact a poet wrote it, Davide Rondoni, and when I read it I immediately felt the echo of other poems, of other poets. The Pasolini of the “Gramsci’s Ashes”, faux communist truly enchanted: “While Italy prostrates / as inside the belly of an enormous / cicada, it opens wide white coasts”. And the Ditches of “Bread and Courage”, a fake immigrationist who was truly in love: “And yes, Italy seemed like a dream / stretched out to dry / it looked like an all too beautiful woman / who was there to be loved…”. With the next two lines almost porn: “he seemed to everyone too good / that she was there to be touched”. I then heard the echo of other poems, other songs and many photographs that incredibly seem to be all in the exhibition. Because I’m talking about one photography exhibition and I promise not to do it again (if I hate painting exhibitions let alone photography ones, incontinent technique). The full title promises completeness: “Italy is a wish. Photographs, landscapes and visions 1842-2022. The Alinari and Mufoco collections”. And the staging in the Cyclopean Scuderie del Quirinale completeness maintains.

Italy is a regret, first of all. For me, regret for the void or at least for human rarefaction is misanthropic. The first part of the exhibition is nourished by archives of the Alinari Foundation and remember the deserted squares that today are filled to bursting with tourists: Piazza del Popolo photographed by Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg in 1844, St. Peter’s Square photographed by Tommaso Cuccioni in 1855, Piazza della Signoria photographed by the Alinari Brothers in 1860… Silent beauty. Free spaces. Breathable cities. Where are the people? They are assumed to be working. In the nineteenth century people worked, they toiled from childhood to old age, without holidays and without pensions, there was hardly any Sunday. So it didn’t clutter up the squares. Today that there is the “mass seigneurial society” (Luca Ricolfi) the workers are a minority and all the others are on vacation, as demonstrated by the emblematic photos of Massimo Vitali. Which, however, are from the 21st century, the last rooms area, and so I have to go back in order not to leave out another remarkable 19th-century photo, indeed dated 1850, under the reign of Pius IX: the Pyramid of Caius Cestius captured by Pompeo Bondini in negative, with black sky and cypresses burned by the light. The same effect, however obtained with pictorial means, of a very recent painting by Daniele Galliano with the subject of Parma Cathedral. The very idea of ​​a monument as a specter and truly both the Pyramid and the Cathedral are the ghosts of what they once were, enigmatic apparitions, legacies of forgotten cults… Do not miss the wonderful photos without men and yet with sheep still from the early twentieth century, one of flocks grazing in front of the Claudio Aqueduct, the other under Castel del Monte. And coincidentally I write these lines a few kilometers from Frederick’s manor, today besieged by aliens in shorts, and I can only regret those sheep. I no longer have the heart to go back up there. If you want to see what Federico di Svevia’s castle was like, don’t come to Puglia: go to Rome. At the Stables, in Edith Arnaldi’s 1935 photo, the emperor seems to have recently passed away, while on Instagram and on site he is just a backdrop for selfies. I hate exhibitions but I hate tourism even more and “Italy is a wish” often fulfills my dream of an Italy without vacationers even in the second part, the more contemporary one with the photos from the Mufoco Collection (what a damn name: it would be the Museum of Contemporary Photography). Franco Fontana’s “Lucania” and “Puglia” which I didn’t like once, too graphic, but now it appears to me an oasis in the hubbub. “Stigliano, Matera” by Mario Cresci, to reiterate how photogenic the Lucanian landscape is. “Oviglio, Alessandria” by Vittore Fossati, the most beautiful rainbow of the eighties. “Follonica” by Olivo Barbieri, a pile of watermelons over which a party hovers but above all Luigi Ghirri, who as far as I am concerned was much more than a photographer, he was the master who taught me to see, therefore to love, therefore to desire the Po Valley. Gianni Celati wrote that Ghirri’s photographs “remove one of the most painful commonplaces, according to which the world is divided into interesting and banal aspects. Everything becomes interesting, that is, everything acquires the dignity of being”. You got it right: the dignity of being. Which is already something great but I have a further formula ready, and never mind if it looks like Heidegger: the revelation of Being. Which materializes in a small tree, a shutter, a slide for children, small things for the highest poetry. Ghirri’s images are obviously not lacking in the stables of the Quirinale as are those of pupils and admirers. I love them all. And how could it be otherwise? I desire and love all of Italy. Having said that, I allow myself a preference, hoping that no one gets jealous, and it is “Rimini” by Claude Nori, taken in 1983 of a girl playing beach tennis on the beach. Bathers are scarce, perhaps it’s the end of the day, and not even the opponent is there. There is only her, her momentum, her legs, her hair, her smile. Nori, French of Italian origin, is the photographer of youth and joy, a rare commodity. If I could make myself and my friend the reader a wish, it would be for a summer like this.

Then out on the sunny square of the Quirinale, teeming with tourists all without exception, with no escape, intent on photographing. They face in all directions, Palace, Obelisk, View of Rome, and it looks like a set by Massimo Vitali.

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• Camillo Langone

• He lives in Parma. He writes in newspapers and publishes books: the latest is “Excellent painters. Today’s Italian artists to know, admire and collect” (Marsilio).