In the sign of Margherita Sarfatti- Corriere.it

Condemned for loving too much. Margherita Sarfatti, born Grassini in Venice on 8 April 1880, first female art critic in Europe, writer, journalist, founder of the Novecento art group, serves the sentence of a romantic heroine: misunderstood by a world that she has embraced unconditionally. Of all these infatuations, in fact, the collective memory has privileged only one of hers, the most uncomfortable and bitter, but also the most inviting one to be fed to ideological alignments: first of all, she was Benito Mussolini’s lover. . Thus a man, desired, but tragically wrong, has obscured his figure and thoughts for decades, explains the Corriere della Sera journalist Micol Sarfatti in the new book Margherita Sarfatti. The lady of the future
(Giulio Perrone Publisher, pp. 92, And 15) in which he proposes to reconstruct the experience of his relative starting from the universe of passions that posterity has forgotten in a hurry.

The author’s father – Gino Sarfatti, one of the pioneers of Italian design – was the great-grandson of the lawyer Cesare Sarfatti, Margherita’s husband, who also assumed the surname when married in the cultural circles of the early twentieth century which she herself animated with a modernity and a relentless intellectual curiosity. Since she was a child, her descendant could only be fascinated by her. Growing up, this illustrious ancestor would have intrigued, made her proud, embarrassed, confronted with the complexity of a life, rejected, inspired and he will find himself sharing with her not only the initials, but – with due proportions – also the profession.

Sign of destiny, the dialogue between the two Sarfattis begins in an editorial office: the natural habitat in which both matured, albeit at different times. In December 2018, on the occasion of two exhibitions dedicated to Margherita’s artistic influence on the avant-gardes of the twenty-first century, Micol wrote a long article for 7, the Corriere della Sera magazine, at the time directed by Beppe Severgnini. Readers’ reaction will be immediate: emails, dissertations, manuscripts arrive at the journalist’s office. the beginning of a story of correspondences and rediscoveries: of all the love letters, lived with grace and eccentricity, that Margherita had written to the many nuances of her life.

First of all, the one dedicated to Venice. The bond with this city will never leave him: cradle of his childhood and scene of the first enchantments for art and beauty in general, spied from the stage of the La Fenice theater or in the surprising glimpses of the calli of the lagoon. Here he meets his masters, the noble diviners, as he defines them in the memoir Thing of the past (Cappelli, 1955) which Micol Sarfatti has dusted off with meticulous attention. Among them are professors such as the art critic Antonio Fradeletto, founder of what we know today as the Biennale, writers such as Antonio Fogazzaro, and other prominent figures of the culture of the time whom Margherita’s father, the Jew Amedeo Laudadio Grassini , lawyer and visionary entrepreneur, carefully selected for the home education of his daughter, whose stubborn and talented attraction he had sensed for knowledge.

Then come the epistles of maturity or the days in which Margherita begins to live an adult love, earthly and ideal, with Cesare Sarfatti whom she married in a civil ceremony in 1898, giving life to one of what we would today call power couple, a couple of power, not necessarily political. Their living room in calle del Rimedio will quickly become the meeting place for the intellectuals of the Venetian city: ideas, works of art, reflections and indignations enter their conjugal nest, destined to become a real intellectual partnership, among the most fruitful in the last century. The highest moments of the Sarfatti symposium will arrive in Milan, where the couple moved in 1902. With what was already then the capital of the future, Margherita will experience the longest, deepest and most exhausting love correspondence. Glorious and dramatic.

With rigorous philological care, Micol Sarfatti accompanies us in the rooms through which Margherita walks with a relaxed step towards tomorrowshows us the mirrors in which he sought the reflection of a timeless beauty, picks up the thread of speeches with which he entertained and held back cumbersome personalities, from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to Gabriele d’Annunzio. Even in the relationship with Benito Mussolini, she initially gave the cards. He roughs him up, culturally dominates him, educates him, places him in the environments that count and even knows how to make fun of him. You know him in the editorial staff of the newspaper Avanti!, with which she carried on the electrocution for socialism that had struck her since she was young. She could not have imagined that that fiery journalist would determine her future, even posthumously: they love each other like two dazed teenagers, they confront each other about the reality that in the 1920s was changing with a speed unimaginable even by futurists. But that same world that she saw overflowing with novelty and aesthetics becomes for him the arena of monstrous power. He abandons her, disowns her and forces her to move to South America to escape the racial laws to which she as a Jew could not escape, despite having loved the eyes of those who had promulgated them. the culminating and tragic act of an existential parable crossed by disparate loves, but flattened in the fatal abyss of only one, and perhaps not even the most relevant.

Yet, in this story regardless of the richness of the costumes that Margherita Sarfatti brought to the stage, a historical appeal arrives with this book that does it justice. In the author he finds an unexpected elective affinity which is expressed in the repudiation of easy positions, in the search for a complex and articulated truth. Margherita does it by challenging the conventions of her time, Micol by re-reading her figure beyond the clichés of our time. With the conviction that love letters addressed to a man cannot exhaust the story of a life made up of desires.