Best Posters, 2017

I was encouraged to begin the 2017 version of "the year's best posters" by a remark made by Larry David, the creator of the popular television comedy series, "Curb Your Enthusiasm."  Asked about the show going into still another season--its 10th--David responded: "When one has the opportunity to annoy someone, one should do so."

So I'll get to it--annoying someone, that is.  Here's the first poster of this year's bunch.  It's included not for any aesthetic reason, but because it was the most widely disseminated poster of the year.  Ubiquitous and unavoidable.  Note the use of English. Intimissimi is one of the largest Italian lingerie chains.

I hope I haven't lost all my female audience, because the annoying part is pretty much over.  Actually, I'm a moderately sensitive guy on gender issues (yes, it was required).  To prove it, here's a poster from Ostiense (probably November 2016):

Call for meeting at Forte Prenestino, an avant-garde leftist space.  Solidarity.
The second line is famous:  "If I can't dance it's not my revolution."

The following poster, too, uses the words/slogan/manifesto "Non una di meno" (literally "not one less," though perhaps better translated "no one (female) left behind").  It calls for a struggle (lotto) and a global strike by women ("if our lives are not valued, we strike"). 

I also have a sense of humor. I found this one in the Re di Roma area, walking around while Dianne was getting her hair done.

The next one's a mystery.  Found in Trastevere, it seems to advertise an art fair--or more likely takes issue with the "art market."  It presents artists as mere money grubbers with silly ideas (the cover of the book seems to identify the work of street artists with sandwiches: "nuove figurini panini"). Wish I could blow it up just a bit more. 

In any given year, most of the posters are political, and 2017 was no exception.  I was intrigued by this poster, featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., on a corner in the ethnically mixed neighborhood of Torpignattara. 

The same community yielded the rather dramatic poster below.  It identifies a number of issues--unemployment, "cementification" (paving over paradise), and the distribution of wealth--that make the quartieri invivibili "unlivable."  The line in black reads:  "He who does not revolt remains a slave (male or female)."

Whether leftist or rightist or beyond politics, some made the list because they're colorful or pretty.
Of the three posters immediately below, the first two are products of the radical right.  The third advertises the annual flower festival in Genzano di Roma, in the Colli Albani (a wonderful event). For an explanation of the torch poster, we recommend Paul Baxa's history of Acca Laurenzia. 

Lovely

There's still some interest in Communism.  Don't miss the new biography of Lenin!  Not such a nice guy, we hear. 

"Power to those who work and those who are unemployed.  All power to the proletariat."

The next one's another mystery.  I looked up "Etere" on the internet but was unable to make much progress.  I originally translated it "to be or not to be," but it's not clear that Etere (one meaning is "ether") means "to be," even in Latin.  Help me out here.

At the intersection of Via Po and Viale Regina Margherita

Opposition to the European Union, here depicted as the chains of servitude, has been a  major poster theme for years. 

Bill
For some previous editions, see:
2016
2014
2013
2012
etc.

Of revolution, idols, communists, and books: the opening of Feltrinellii's RED

The very crowded cafe' at RED - lots of folks
show up for free food and drink!

The recent opening of a new “concept” store for Italy’s largest book retailer, La Feltrinelli, overwhelmed us in several ways.  One was simply the enormous crowd that showed up promptly at 6 p.m. – for a bookstore!  Of course, Feltrinelli’s is trying to sell this as more than a bookstore, since retail book stores are an endangered species these days.  “RED” is designated by the book seller as “Read, Eat, Dream” (yes, in English) and includes a café serving full meals, a bar, and a garden patio – all off the very busy via del Corso, close to Piazza del Popolo; quite large by Italian standards but with a small store-front street presence.  Feltrinelli’s has many shops throughout Rome, in fact 2 more within half a mile of this one, and several of them have performance spaces where we have heard authors such as Erica Jong and musicians such as Roberto Gatto (Italy’s premier jazz drummer).  Clearly La Feltrinelli is trying to enhance the bookshop experience to get readers in the store (think Barnes & Noble/Starbucks combination – with more hype).  I, for one, hope they succeed.

Saviano in blue shirt, right, greeting his public. Carlo
 Feltrinelli in jacket and lighter blue shirt, smiling at the
 successful RED opening ("Do you like it?" he asked ME!)

Back to RED… it also overwhelmed us because CEO Carlo Feltrinelli was there himself (and promptly at 6) and was escorting perhaps Italy’s most famous current writer, Roberto Saviano, through the store.  Saviano wrote Gomorrah, a semi-(only)fictional indictment of the mafia (known there as the Camorra) south of Naples.  Gomorrah has been a best seller, a movie, and the making of an icon – Saviano himself, who has continued to be a dominant voice about Italy’s problems. (We ran into an American friend at the store opening – she said she just wanted to sit at a table near “my idol.”)  Saviano's fame might be understood as similar to that of Woodward and Bernstein in the heady days of the first publication of their Washington Post articles on the Watergate scandal. 

We contrast RED's opening day with a much quieter one, several years ago, when we went to a Richard Ford signing.  Carlo was there also, and we met him.  And Ford, because we were the only ones there for the signing.  

Ah, yes, chicken wings!

And then there’s the overwhelming concept of RED.  Okay, red has long been the color used in all of Feltrinelli’s logos and ads.  And so the store is named RED, with the flimsy “Read, Eat, Dream” tagline.  But, and here’s where it gets interesting, also handed out at the opening was a 30 page large-format pamphlet titled “At 40 years – in remembrance of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli” – Giangiacomo, the father of Carlo, indeed founded the bookstore enterprise.  And, no doubt, he was a giant in the publishing industry, starting his own house and being the first in the world to publish, for example, Pasternak, and specifically Doctor Zhivago.  The pamphlet includes a letter from Pasternak to Giangiacomo. 

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli

Giangiacomo’s story borders on the mythic.  He was born the son of a super-rich industrialist family and ended as a leftist militant, apparently killed while trying to blow up a high-voltage tower near Milan (but his death remains suspicious and many don’t buy this explanation).  His son, Carlo, has written a riveting book on his father that we recommend to RST readers:  Feltrinelli:  A Story of Riches, Revolution, and Violent Death.   So, indeed Giangiacomo was a “Red,” as in a Communist.  The first page of the pamphlet is Giangiacomo’s “autobiography” that he was required to write to gain admission to the Italian Communist party.  Giangiacomo’s image is displayed throughout the new RED store – pitching various items.  It is inconceivable to Americans that a market-dominant business would promote itself using Communist themes.  But this is Italy.  And RED. 

Dianne

Liberation Day in Rome

April 25 – today is Liberation Day, the day Italy celebrates its liberation from the Nazis. On this date in 1945, Milan and the other large cities of the north were considered liberated by (most agree) the partisans, as southern Italy already had been by the Allies.

But it might better be called Contestation Day. Over the years, the date has been reserved for leftist celebrations. But the right increasingly wants to contest the leftists’ view of Italy’s liberation, and specifically to contest the positive participation of partisans, communists, and whether these two groups overlap. Each year we watch the Italian politicians take strange - and often uncomfortable (even for them) - positions as the date nears. With the right wing in firm control of the nation (Prime Minister Berlusconi) and even cities as historically left as Rome (Mayor Alemanno), the issues dominate the media: who “controls” April 25 or takes center stage; did the partisans really liberate Italy, are there good and bad partisans, were the partisans all communists?

A few years ago we read about the possibility that Berlusconi wouldn’t even publicly acknowledge April 25; then – hot news! - he bussed a former partisan on the cheek. This year the headline-grabbing topic was where Berlusconi would present himself on April 25, and whether he and the right-wing parties would appropriate the holiday. One proposed setting for Berlusconi today was Onna—the small town near L’Aquila that was completely destroyed by the recent earthquake and, more to the point of April 25, was the scene of Nazi execution of 17 civilians in 1944.

The (acknowledged by most) diplomatic President (a largely figurehead position) of the country is former communist Napolitano, who manages to bring the meaning of the day back in focus. Don’t try to divide the partisans or minimize their role, he says.

A poster put up by Italy’s now small Communist Party announces: “without the Left, without Communists, there’s no liberation” (see photo).

The intensity of feeling that surrounds April 25 reveals how central the events of World War II remain for Italians, left and right. In contrast, Americans generally agree on the meaning of that conflict, yet remain bitterly divided over the war in Vietnam and, indeed, over the meaning and interpretation of the political, social, and cultural upheaval known as the “sixties.”

Rome the Second Time is the only guidebook we know of that discusses the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1943-44. One of the itineraries takes the Rome visitor to the site of several resistance actions, including Porta San Paolo, where the initial resistance was staged and today’s Rome Liberation Day activities unfold; via Rasella, where a German column was bombed by the partisans; and the SS torture chambers of via Tasso. Our book also takes you to the Fosse Ardeatine on the outskirts of Rome, where 335 men were executed and their bodies covered up in these Ardeatine caves, now a deeply moving memorial to the senseless murder of civilians.

Dianne