Andrea Mecacci

Nostalgia for the future

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The designation of Pistoia as Italian Capital of Culture for 2017 causes us to reflect on the currency of some of the commonplaces that have come to define Italian beauty and style. The so-called “Made in Italy” brand – that strange formula that in a single breath comprises gastronomy, fashions, design, and culture in a broad sense – appears today as part of a strategy that both confirm clichés about Italy in the eyes of foreigners (and Italians themselves) and to causes us to cling to a past that is only just beginning to slip away.
For a period of roughly twenty years (the decades of the 1950s and 1960s), Italy created a cultural landscape of incomparable charm, so fascinating that today it seems that we are living in a mere copy of that moment, a grotesque imitation that relates to the past in the same way Las Vegas’s The Venetian hotel-casino relates to the real Italian city. To completely elucidate this confusing simile is not an easy task, so here it might be better to limit ourselves to the evocation of some suggestive themes. 
Pistoia is home to Francesco Freda (1925), one of the great, silent architects of that golden age. A master make-up artist, Freda has worked with directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Francesco Rosi, Pietro Germi, and  Ettore Scola, creating the make-up of icons such as Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. To speak to him for a moment is to have the sensation of almost touching the secret essence of that second Italian Renaissance. The dedication that Katherine Hepburn writes to him reveals this secret: “Your hand and your heart.” What is beauty if not the synthesis of artistry and passion, the hand that creates and the heart that loves? Maestro Fredo reminds us that beauty, for example that of a woman, does not reside in her appearance, but in her absence, in the impossible desire for that which is not present. He reminds us that beauty is not a formula that can always be applied, but a complex mingling of details, atmosphere, and attitude.
Is it possible to repeat the cultural achievements of that period? Strategies are various. But to repeat something is to unavoidably enter into the realm of the inauthentic, and the inauthentic always brings the danger of kitsch, a facile aesthetics that enriches nothing. Vintage is a poetics that runs close to this risk, but without ever falling into the banality of kitsch. Vintage is a taste, one could say a passion, for a past that tends toward the future, and makes of the present a terrain for aesthetic exploration. The objects and clothing of the past are reencountered and reassembled in a new dimension in which the old and the new sustain each other, and in which the aesthetic forms of the present and the past enter into reciprocal relation.
It’s not easy to overcome nostalgia. In order to do so sometimes we need a helping hand, another perspective that suggests, if not an easy solution, then at least a possible direction, allowing us to forget all the clichés of a country, her beauty at the same time magnificent and boorish, dazzling and deceiving. 
It’s not easy to overcome nostalgia, and the anecdotes of maestro Fredo only serve to reaffirm and strengthen an aesthetic nostalgia that even Goethe could not escape. And it is in the pages of Goethe’s Viaggio in Italia that we find a short episode that represents, in an almost definitive image, that which perhaps only exists in our aesthetic imagination. The German poet is in Naples in the year 1787. He is invited to a reception. A woman notices him, slowly seduces him, and leads him towards a window in the highest story of the building. It’s dark outside, but the moon has not set. The woman opens the shutters, letting Goethe see both the red streams of magma descending the slopes of Vesuvius, and her own face, illuminated by the lava and the moon of that unforgettable night. Italian beauty.