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Fotografare Parma
Twenty-seven of them arrived in Parma, as many as operas of Verdi. Plus one back-stage boy. They were blessed with three days of beautiful sunshine, limpidness only the month of May can bestow. Orange dawns, indigo sunsets, an ever-clear sky.
They roamed everywhere, photographed everything, were ushered into the city’s secret places, picturesque nooks and crannies, known only to the few. Free as the birds of the air, that neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns. And they made free with their model, who was at their disposal at all hours, day and night. Some immortalised her at sunrise, still unclothed and without make-up, or slightly sweaty in the early-summer afternoon heat. Some chose that twilight moment when the heady scent of lime-blossom emanates from avenues and parks and wafts, sweet and insinuating, among the buildings of the city centre. Others portrayed her at night, stretched out along the river, dozing gently.
When it was all over, the twenty-seven artists in quest of Parma’s soul - some members of Neos, others guests of the Travel Journalists’ Association or the Municipality – left us with 150 individual tesserae forming a single mosaic: a photographic portrait of the city, made by inquisitive professionals accustomed to moving from city to city, probing the heart and mind of each, disclosing secrets, exploding myths.
Here, then, is their portrait... bright and sunny, partly in colour, partly in black and white. Here is Parma, with her many faces, her unique flavours, smells, highlights and shadows.
At first sight, the reporters’ picture is one of an austere old lady, bearing the weight of the centuries. A city of ancient bricks darkened by the years, with the occasional splash of bright marble to remind us of her glory days. It is true: brick is the very soul of Parma. Baked clay was the first material that came to hand for building the city. Here you have it, course upon course, in a photograph of the Gothic church of St Francis, seized by Napoleon, who turned it into a prison. Paolo Negri’s wonderful image, a masterly study in light and shade, restores its identity as a focus of faith and prayer.
Here are the millions of bricks used to build the Pilotta Palace, the gloomy, imposing residence of the Farnese family; the geometric forms of the Church of the Annunciation, its lithe beauty shaped in clay; the Bixio Barriera (gate), its terracotta parallelepipeds entrapped by Giulio Andreini in a spider’s web of trolley-bus cables; and the Church of Santa Maria del Quartiere, set against a cobalt-blue night sky by Luca Piola. The bricks of the houses in the Oltretorrente (across the river) area also feature, as do those of the dwellings overlooking the river, of an austere and plebeian beauty.
But during its two-thousand-year history, Parma has also been a city of extravagant wealth. This was certainly true in the Middle Ages, between 1000 and 1300, when it was home to Europe’s sharpest merchants; when its university attracted students from Flanders and Paris, England and Germany; when its troops annihilated the army of Emperor Frederick II; when its priests became popes or anti-popes; when the fairs of San Siro and Sant’Ercolano were the best attended in Europe; when its nobles served as chief magistrates of Cremona and Verona, Padua and Florence; when its woollens and fustians flooded the world’s markets.
At such times, the people of Parma wanted to display their economic might. No longer content with brick, for their Baptistery they insisted on pink Verona marble, which has the same white veins as local culatello or well-cured ham. Our twenty-seven photographers got more excited about this magical octagon than anything else. But each shot it in a different way. Anyone who has not visited it since the innocent days of childhood will have difficulty recognising their good old “panettone” in these stupendous images. With every change of camera, it changes its personality, like a character from Pirandello: now austere, now smiling, often bright and cheerful, sometimes inscrutable. You get the feeling that each reporter photographed his own soul, rather than a historical monument. You might say that the Baptistery is in the eye of the beholder.
Top quality marble was also used for the façade of the monastic church of St John the Evangelist, placed when the Farnese rulers had transformed Parma into a thriving duchy after two centuries of decadence. The sixteenth century was moving towards its end – goodness knows where - the Benedictine monks came by this marvellous stone: pink in the light of dawn and sunset, ochre in the sodium light of midday, white when reflecting the dazzle of snow.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, more marble decoration was added by the Bourbons. They acquired the lordship of Parma and Piacenza through the shrewdness of Elisabetta Farnese, queen of Spain, who, when her own family died out, formed an alliance with the powerful Franco-Spanish dynasty. Modelled by sculptor Jean-Baptiste Boudard and architect Ennemond-Alexandre Petitot, these marbles, photographed here by Daniele Pellegrini, embody the principles of the Enlightenment, which, per head of population, had more devotees in the “Petite Capitale” of Parma than in France itself. After Paris, Parma was the city with the most subscribers to Diderot and D’Alembert’s “Encyclopédie”.
Our photographers could hardly ignore these marbles, any more than they could ignore Antonio Canova’s sculptures of the duchy’s best loved ruler: Marie Louise of Austria, wife of the Emperor Napoleon. Eugenio Bersani photographed just one diminutive foot of her statue, but the royal tootsy is bathed in so pale and strange a light, and Canova’s workmanship is so perfect, that this small detail is enough to convey the greatness of the whole.
Each portrait not only records the chosen subject; it also embodies the mind and character of the person behind the camera. So this study of Parma reveals not only the city itself – intimate and secret or open and accessible – but also the personalities of those who scoured and explored its streets, entertained it in their minds and recreated it on paper and in print.
Who, then, are these Italian travel photographers? How do they go about their business? What is their cultural background? It is difficult to generalise. Each has his or her own personality, personal style, unique sensibility. We could perhaps split them into two groups, though the dividing line would be rather hazy. It depends on whether they were born before or after the “revolution”, before or after the post-war industrial boom, before or after the brief springtime of hope and optimism.
There are those who grew up when John XXIII was pope and John Fitzgerald Kennedy president of the U.S.A. “Empire”, the soundtrack of whose childhood and youth was a mixture of Elvis the Pelvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Pink Floyd and Rod Stewart; those who knew they would be richer and happier than their fathers; who believed that John Lennon, when he wrote “Imagine”, was a prophet, not an idle dreamer.
Then there are the others, born later, when the springtime was over, when the tanks had rolled into Prague, when the politicians had squandered the wealth created by this country where everything was easy and wonderful. They had to come to terms with Nixon and Paul VI, a pope as great as he was restless, divided and suffering, so different from the man of peasant stock from Bergamo who had preceded him, full of peace and reassurance. They had to suffer the transition from Nenni to Craxi, from De Gasperi to De Mita, from Togliatti to Occhetto. From certainty to doubt, from confidence to anxiety. They feared they would never be able to break free from their fathers. For years, Wojtyla tried to console, motivate, uphold them, but in vain.
Luigi Alfieri
They roamed everywhere, photographed everything, were ushered into the city’s secret places, picturesque nooks and crannies, known only to the few. Free as the birds of the air, that neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns. And they made free with their model, who was at their disposal at all hours, day and night. Some immortalised her at sunrise, still unclothed and without make-up, or slightly sweaty in the early-summer afternoon heat. Some chose that twilight moment when the heady scent of lime-blossom emanates from avenues and parks and wafts, sweet and insinuating, among the buildings of the city centre. Others portrayed her at night, stretched out along the river, dozing gently.
When it was all over, the twenty-seven artists in quest of Parma’s soul - some members of Neos, others guests of the Travel Journalists’ Association or the Municipality – left us with 150 individual tesserae forming a single mosaic: a photographic portrait of the city, made by inquisitive professionals accustomed to moving from city to city, probing the heart and mind of each, disclosing secrets, exploding myths.
Here, then, is their portrait... bright and sunny, partly in colour, partly in black and white. Here is Parma, with her many faces, her unique flavours, smells, highlights and shadows.
At first sight, the reporters’ picture is one of an austere old lady, bearing the weight of the centuries. A city of ancient bricks darkened by the years, with the occasional splash of bright marble to remind us of her glory days. It is true: brick is the very soul of Parma. Baked clay was the first material that came to hand for building the city. Here you have it, course upon course, in a photograph of the Gothic church of St Francis, seized by Napoleon, who turned it into a prison. Paolo Negri’s wonderful image, a masterly study in light and shade, restores its identity as a focus of faith and prayer.
Here are the millions of bricks used to build the Pilotta Palace, the gloomy, imposing residence of the Farnese family; the geometric forms of the Church of the Annunciation, its lithe beauty shaped in clay; the Bixio Barriera (gate), its terracotta parallelepipeds entrapped by Giulio Andreini in a spider’s web of trolley-bus cables; and the Church of Santa Maria del Quartiere, set against a cobalt-blue night sky by Luca Piola. The bricks of the houses in the Oltretorrente (across the river) area also feature, as do those of the dwellings overlooking the river, of an austere and plebeian beauty.
But during its two-thousand-year history, Parma has also been a city of extravagant wealth. This was certainly true in the Middle Ages, between 1000 and 1300, when it was home to Europe’s sharpest merchants; when its university attracted students from Flanders and Paris, England and Germany; when its troops annihilated the army of Emperor Frederick II; when its priests became popes or anti-popes; when the fairs of San Siro and Sant’Ercolano were the best attended in Europe; when its nobles served as chief magistrates of Cremona and Verona, Padua and Florence; when its woollens and fustians flooded the world’s markets.
At such times, the people of Parma wanted to display their economic might. No longer content with brick, for their Baptistery they insisted on pink Verona marble, which has the same white veins as local culatello or well-cured ham. Our twenty-seven photographers got more excited about this magical octagon than anything else. But each shot it in a different way. Anyone who has not visited it since the innocent days of childhood will have difficulty recognising their good old “panettone” in these stupendous images. With every change of camera, it changes its personality, like a character from Pirandello: now austere, now smiling, often bright and cheerful, sometimes inscrutable. You get the feeling that each reporter photographed his own soul, rather than a historical monument. You might say that the Baptistery is in the eye of the beholder.
Top quality marble was also used for the façade of the monastic church of St John the Evangelist, placed when the Farnese rulers had transformed Parma into a thriving duchy after two centuries of decadence. The sixteenth century was moving towards its end – goodness knows where - the Benedictine monks came by this marvellous stone: pink in the light of dawn and sunset, ochre in the sodium light of midday, white when reflecting the dazzle of snow.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, more marble decoration was added by the Bourbons. They acquired the lordship of Parma and Piacenza through the shrewdness of Elisabetta Farnese, queen of Spain, who, when her own family died out, formed an alliance with the powerful Franco-Spanish dynasty. Modelled by sculptor Jean-Baptiste Boudard and architect Ennemond-Alexandre Petitot, these marbles, photographed here by Daniele Pellegrini, embody the principles of the Enlightenment, which, per head of population, had more devotees in the “Petite Capitale” of Parma than in France itself. After Paris, Parma was the city with the most subscribers to Diderot and D’Alembert’s “Encyclopédie”.
Our photographers could hardly ignore these marbles, any more than they could ignore Antonio Canova’s sculptures of the duchy’s best loved ruler: Marie Louise of Austria, wife of the Emperor Napoleon. Eugenio Bersani photographed just one diminutive foot of her statue, but the royal tootsy is bathed in so pale and strange a light, and Canova’s workmanship is so perfect, that this small detail is enough to convey the greatness of the whole.
Each portrait not only records the chosen subject; it also embodies the mind and character of the person behind the camera. So this study of Parma reveals not only the city itself – intimate and secret or open and accessible – but also the personalities of those who scoured and explored its streets, entertained it in their minds and recreated it on paper and in print.
Who, then, are these Italian travel photographers? How do they go about their business? What is their cultural background? It is difficult to generalise. Each has his or her own personality, personal style, unique sensibility. We could perhaps split them into two groups, though the dividing line would be rather hazy. It depends on whether they were born before or after the “revolution”, before or after the post-war industrial boom, before or after the brief springtime of hope and optimism.
There are those who grew up when John XXIII was pope and John Fitzgerald Kennedy president of the U.S.A. “Empire”, the soundtrack of whose childhood and youth was a mixture of Elvis the Pelvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Pink Floyd and Rod Stewart; those who knew they would be richer and happier than their fathers; who believed that John Lennon, when he wrote “Imagine”, was a prophet, not an idle dreamer.
Then there are the others, born later, when the springtime was over, when the tanks had rolled into Prague, when the politicians had squandered the wealth created by this country where everything was easy and wonderful. They had to come to terms with Nixon and Paul VI, a pope as great as he was restless, divided and suffering, so different from the man of peasant stock from Bergamo who had preceded him, full of peace and reassurance. They had to suffer the transition from Nenni to Craxi, from De Gasperi to De Mita, from Togliatti to Occhetto. From certainty to doubt, from confidence to anxiety. They feared they would never be able to break free from their fathers. For years, Wojtyla tried to console, motivate, uphold them, but in vain.
Luigi Alfieri
