Life, miracles and death of Paolo Portoghesi, an architect who already dreamed of Borromini as a boy

We don’t know where to begin to remember Paolo Portoghesi, born in 1931 in Piazza dei Caprettari in Rome, that is close to the masterpiece of the most beloved architect, the Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza by Francesco Borromini. Rarely has the geolocation of a birth been more significant for a biography: already in his adolescent notebooks, Portoghesi was planning a book on the master from Ticino. His career is divided into two phases, two equally dazzling halves. After graduating with Guglielmo De Angelis d’Ossat in 1957, the first studies in the history of architecture were however dedicated to the masters of the Piedmontese Baroque because her mother, therefore Guarino Guarini and Bernardo Vittone, came from up there. Not even thirty years old, he receives enthusiastic letters from Giulio Carlo Argan, Bruno Zevi and even Rudolf Wittkower, all proposing him to collaborate. Together with Zevi he curates the great exhibition “Michelangiolo Architetto”, then solos the powerful volumes on Borromini and Baroque Rome for which he also takes the photographs climbing the bell towers and domes that were often dilapidated at the time. Pasolini buys them both and lets him know. When Azio Cascavilla made the documentary film “Utopia, utopia” in 1969 starring a bewildered and young Renato Nicolini, Portoghesi appears as already an affirmed and dandistic professor of Sapienza. After all, less than forty years old he has already written thousands of pages, organized exhibitions and conferences, and has already quarreled with Zevi because of his dangerous relationships with his nemesis, Luigi Moretti whose political ideas he did not share, but the furor Borrominian mathematicus – his first wife, Anna Cuzzer, was moreover a collaborator of Moretti as well as daughter of the high school mathematics teacher.

Professionally binds to the engineer Vittorio Gigliotti, together they build the Papanice building that Ettore Scola uses for Drama of jealousy (all details in cornaca) to illustrate the petit-bourgeois anguish of a brunette Monica Vitti reluctantly married to a butcher. The great Norwegian historian Christian Norberg-Schulz who lived in Rome in the 1970s dedicated more than one monograph to Portoghesi and Gigliotti, expanding their international echo under the banner of genius loci. Director of “Controspazio”, the unofficial organ of the Tendenza, he was also dean of architecture at the Milan Polytechnic between 1968 and 1976. Charles Jencks, author of the seminal The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977) invites the Roman architect to London thus flourishes a global anti-modern milieu which leads to the first international architecture exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 1980 when Portoghesi opens the Arsenale for the first time, filling it with wooden facades made by Cinecittà workers under the name of Strada Novissima. The year before he had helped his contemporary Aldo Rossi to build the Teatro del Mondo Floating, together they had inaugurated the season of ephemeral architecture. It is an editorial and professional triumph that leads him to create churches and squares. In 1982 he dedicated his second Biennial to Islamic architecture in parallel with the very long works for the great Roman mosque which everyone ideologically criticizes without ever visiting and which he silently borrominizes. The Psi to which he had been a member since 1961 promoted him to the presidency of the Biennale, favoring, among other things, the historic editions of Rossi in 1985 and the theatrical edition of Carmelo Bene in 1989, up to the fateful 1992. According to Manfredo Tafuri when asked what he was the postmodern, Portoghesi replied Bettino Craxi, for this reason he withdrew his salute and violently condemned him in the Storia dell’architettura italiana published by Einaudi.

Despite the success, the second part of Portuguese life, however, took place in a secluded town in Tuscia, in Calcata, which he helped to save and redevelop, creating a garden and a library, offering asylum to his favorite animals, namely the Bressonian peacocks and donkeys. Here he hosted Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Norberg-Schulz and other big names together with his second wife Giovanna Morabito with whom in the early 90s he had opened the Apollodoro Gallery and signed several books together. In Calcata Andrej Tarkovskij shot a scene of Nostalghia because only here is “the strong friendship of the time” perceptible, as one of the many poets he loved about him wrote, Libero De Libero in Valle. He died today at 92 years old.