This is Rome .......... from 1960

I have never lost my fascination for Rome.

I have friends who long ago fell in love with Venice, others who keep going back to Florence and yet more who never cease talking about Paris, but for me it is Rome.

It started with an all consuming interest in Roman history and has been cemented over the years by visits to the Eternal City.

The place always amazes me and you never quite get away from that feeling that down every street there is a ruin, and around every corner a piazza.

And despite its magnificent buildings, wide avenues and frenetic pace it remains on a human scale.

Over the years I have invested in guide books, scholarly accounts of the city and picked up those free little maps full of adverts for pizzerias, car hire firms and taxis and recently I added This is Rome to the collection and it is one of my favourites.

Unlike the others it is aimed at children, was first published in 1960 and comes from a series written and illustrated by Miroslav Sasek.

Now I am a great fan of the books of Mr Sasek, partly because they are informative and written with a degree of wit but also because of the illustrations which are bold bright and imaginative.

So on one page there is a fine picture of the Pantheon with a bit of history, while on another a mix of motorbikes with the caption, “Rome is full of statues, but full of motorcycles too.  We prefer the statues, they are so much quieter.”

And it is those illustrations which do it for me.

The style is one you saw a lot of in the 1950s and 60s, which still look fresh today.

In the same series are books on Venice, London, New York, Paris and Edinburgh as well as Hong Kong San Francisco and Texas.

In time I think I will collect the lot after all if the ones on Rome and London are representative of the rest they will not only be fun to read, very informative but will provide me with some excellent pictures to look at.

Picture; Rome, 2009 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, remaining images from This is Italy, Miroslav Sasek, 1960, reprinted 2007

Sunday in Naples with Sophia Loren …….

This Sunday we sat down to watch Yesterday Today Tomorrow.*

My Wikipedia tells me that,“it is a 1963 comedy anthology film by Italian director Vittorio De Sica.

It stars Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. 

The film consists of three short stories about couples in different parts of Italy.” 

Now for Rosa the film was a hit, not least because the first story shot in Naples was where she was born and grew up, and the scenes were ones she was familiar with.

More so because she left the city just three years before the film was released.

For Tina and me all three stories resonated. Tina grew up just north of Milan and I have always been drawn back to Rome while both of us love Naples.

Moreover Tina and her siblings grew up speaking Neapolitan at home and “official Italian” at school, at work and to their friends.

So we all found something in the three stories.

And of course it underlined that marvel of technology that the three of could sit in our front room and watch an Italian movie beamed from a popular Italian T V station before swapping to the very popular In Sunday which takes over the whole of the afternoon and early evening on Rai 1, before switching late in the evening to BBC.

Location; 1963

Pictures; stills from Yesterday Today Tomorrow

* Ieri, oggi, domani, 1963

**Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesterday,_Today_and_Tomorrow

Little Tony, Rock and Roll and Italy in the 1960s

Little Tony in 1967

I came across one of those old faded newspapers yesterday from the 1950s with a story of a local Watch Committee* deploring the “effect of that American style of music commonly known as Rock and Roll on young people.”

And it made me think of the influence of the music, films and life style that we imported from America during the 20th century.

Now of course it had been going on for a long time before Bill Hayley and Elvis Presley strutted across the stage but the 1950s was when I was growing up and so it’s their music and all that went with it that I remember.

Rosa in Naples in 1961

And for Rosa growing up in Naples in the early 1950s the arrival of American culture was even more profound.  It was parodied in the Neapolitan song Tu vuò fà l'americano which gently pointed fun at a young Italian who wanted to look American by drinking whisky and soda, dancing to Rock ‘n Roll and smoking Camel cigarettes.

But the sting was that  this depended on his Italian parents to give him the money,

You want to dance rock and roll; 
You play baseball
But the money for the camels, 
Who give it to you??
Mamma’s handbag!

All of which I was reminded of with the announcement of the death of Little Tony who some had called Italy’s Elvis Presley.

“Born in 1941, Little Tony had a few hits in the UK in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the lead singer of Little Tony & His Brothers. He then returned to Italy where he pursued a successful career as a singer and actor.”**

Little Tony singing Il ragazzo col ciuffo in 1962

His first solo hit was Il ragazzo col ciuffo – The Guy with a Quiff  in 1962 and he went on to record a number of songs which sold over a million each.

And like many singers he made a successful  move into films starring in 20 films and began his own record company.

Watching clips from films and TV appearances there is no getting away from the American influence as in Il ragazzo col ciuffo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCyq3HyQAWQ

But for me it is the song Peggio Per Me - Worse For Me and the accompanying video which best shows not only the impact of American music but also the way it was taken over for an Italian audience of the 1960s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkxUXzjq8KU

I saw him on TV and enjoyed his performances. He died of lung cancer on May 27, 2013, at the age of 72.

Now for those who want more I shall pass you over to that excellent site Italian Chronicles**, and in particular Italy’s Elvis Bops off to Heaven***which was where I drew much of the material for this story.

Little Tony's site can be visited at http://www.littletony.it/

*Watch Committees were responsible for police forces from 1835 till 1964 and so to "appoint constables to preserve the peace."

** http://italychronicles.com/

***http://italychronicles.com/italys-elvis-bops-off-heaven/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ItalyChronicles+%28Italy+Chronicles%29&utm_content=Yahoo%21+Mail

Pictures; Rosa in Naples from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and Little Tony from Wikipedia Commons and You Tube

Travelling Italian history with La sposa

 Now I am the first to admit that television dramas are not the most reliable way to learn history, for all the obvious reasons.

But done well they can offer up something, and with the passage of time become historical pieces, showing us how thought about a period in the past.

And so, with that in mind on Sunday night we tuned into the three part drama La sposa [The Bride] which went out on Rai 1.

Sunday is not the most promising time to watch Italian TV, given that a big chunk of the afternoon and early evening is dominated by a series of light entertainment shows which seamlessly run into each other.

But La sposa promised to be something different.

It was according to the pre publicity, “a touching story about the personal and family growth of a woman and a poignant love story, which ….. is a series set in the past, but which speaks to the present. Faces topical issues like the female emancipation, the gender equality, and compliance with socio-cultural differences. A modern tale, whose protagonist is a courageous and strong female figure, a great example of tenacity and social redemption.

Italy, late 1960s. These were years of great changes and transformations, from customs to politics. But in some areas of the country archaic practices such as weddings by proxy, in which young Southern women are given in brides to Northern men, mostly farmers. This is it premise that triggers the story of La Sposa…”*

The practice of easing a family’s poverty or fulfilling a debt by selling off a child rolls down the centuries, but La sposa also highlights the economic disparities between the south and the north of Italy and the prejudice of some northern Italians to those from the south and is reflected in the Lega Nord [Northern League], which is a political party with an anti-south stance.  

And closer to home there is Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor Of Casterbridge written in 1886 which opens with the awful auction of Susan Henchard and her baby daughter at a country fair by her drunken husband.

So there is plenty of precedence for the story of La sposa.

The opening episode mixed the hard life in Calabria, and the strong family ties with the equally hard life in the north for the young woman who having exacted a pre-nuptial agreement that her future husband would “undertake to pay the debt, pay the rent, the studies of her brother Giuseppe and also organize the marriage of younger sister” is betrayed.

Well history it may be but it is also a drama with plenty of twists many of which reflect the Italy of the 1960s.

Location; Italy in the 1960s

Picture; Naples 2018, from the collection of Saul Simpson

* La sposa, Tonight on Rai 1 the First Episode of the New Fiction with Serena Rossi, Italy 24 News, Sunday January23rd, 2022

When in Naples …………… My Brilliant Friend ... the book and now the TV series

Naples is a city which both fascinates me and leaves me uneasy.

It is noisy, busy and fun to be in.

But it is also a place where you know things do not always go to plan, and where even now poverty has a tendency to busy itself.

Step off the main streets into those back alleys where the buildings rise from the ground into the sky and the light fights hard to penetrate, and it is easy to get lost.

Often the narrow streets lead off into even narrower streets and the blocks of apartments seem to challenge gravity.

The first time we visited, Simone and Rosa who were born there warned us to be careful, a warning it turned out to be without substance.

And yet like any city, you know where not to go, and which groups are best to avoid.

That said I love the city, and today I am rereading My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, about two young girls growing up in a working class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples.

Those who have never lived in such areas, or experienced the uncertainties of life where an accident or an illness to the main earner, can pitch a family into poverty or destitution, do sometimes romanticise life in such places.

But not so My Brilliant Friend which chronicles the violence, the hardships and the pettiness which was the backdrop to everyday life.  “I feel no nostalgia for our childhood” writes Elena, “it was full of violence.  Every sort of thing happened at home and outside, everyday".

And "It was a world full of words that killed,: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, tuberculosis, infection”

And while this was the 1950s, the memories of those who had died during the war along with those who succumbed to disease or accidents were everywhere.

Now, as a historian I find it a powerful account of that period in post war Italy when the prosperity of the North is still only a dream, and when many are driven to head for the great industrial cities of Milan and Turin to escape the grinding poverty.

But it is also a wonderful description of how people interacted, and in particular the two young girls Lila and Elena.

The translation is easy to read and just like the first time I am struggling to put it down.

Added to which I have just ordered up the TV series by the same name, the first of which was produced in 2018, and the follow up a year later.  As it happened we watched the series sometime ago, and it will be fun to look at it all over again.

Location; Naples,

Pictures; Naples, 2018-20, from the collection of Saul Simpson and Balzano

* My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, 2012, translated by Ann Goldstein

Little bits of history through the post …… Mr. Dante and a road

Now, collecting stamps and even better first day issues were something I only had a passing interest in.

Not so our Stella who pretty much collected lots of things, and this week I revisited her collection of stamps which were issued for the first time.

And as you do I was drawn to two from Italy.

The first and in some ways my favourite I came across was one issued in Rome for the 700th anniversary of the birth of the Italian poet Dante, which one source describes as “known for establishing the use of the vernacular in literature at a time when most poetry was written in Latin, making it accessible only to the most educated readers. 

His De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular) was one of the first scholarly defenses of the vernacular. His use of the Tuscan dialect for works such as The New Life (1295) and Divine Comedy helped establish the modern-day standardized Italian language, and set a precedent that important later Italian writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio would follow.

Dante was instrumental in establishing the literature of Italy, and his depictions of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven provided inspiration for the larger body of Western art.

He is cited as an influence on Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton and Alfred Tennyson, among many others. 

In addition, the first use of the interlocking three-line rhyme scheme, or the terza rima, is attributed to him. 

He is described as the "father" of the Italian language, and in Italy he is often referred to as il Sommo Poeta ("the Supreme Poet"). Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also called the tre corone ("three crowns") of Italian literature”.

All of just leaves me with the second which commemorated the 1962 Road Cycling World Championships held in Salò  in Italy on September 2nd.

That is it …….. more to follow.

Location; Italy

Pictures; first day of issue stamps, 1962 & 1965, from the collection of Stella Simpson

*Dante Alighieri, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri