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Tim Cawkwell

~ currently publishing my poetry and verse. Blog entries on film and painting going back to 2014. My main website is www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Tim Cawkwell

Tag Archives: Bassani

FERRARA MADE ME (3): the search for Antonioni’s tomb

03 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Antonioni, Italy, travel

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Antonioni, Bassani, Comacchio, Ferrara, James Cain, Visconti

In searching the internet in September, prior to my visit to Ferrara, I was pleased to come across a page inviting you to discover the places that had influenced Antonioni’s thinking, “the corners of the city bound to the life of the great director and his masterpieces such as Cronaca di un amore, Le amiche and Beyond the Clouds.”

I was particularly looking forward to a visit to the Antonioni museum at Corso Ercole 17, next to the Palazzo dei Diamanti, as flagged up in our Blue Guide to Northern Italy (12th edition, 2005), only to discover on my arrival that it was now closed, whether for lack of money or lack of interest I could not determine. We had to content ourselves during our walks and cycle rides in taking advantage of the map supplied by the internet site to see these places for ourselves.

I wrote about the Corso Ercole and Corso Rossetti shot used in Cronaca di un amore in my post of 12 October. But in an act of homage I went to see the family house at San Maurelio 10 in the south-east corner of the city, where Antonioni (born 1914) spent life from 1918 to 1929. I hired a bike at the shop at the Porta Romana and looking across the river there was the church of S Giorgio, the very same tower that can be seen in Visconti’s Ossessione. The film has a notable Ferrara episode, when Giovanna goes in search of the wayward Gino, and this still shows Gino jumping onto a lorry in the square very close to the Antonioni house.

oss-12

Did Antonioni witness the filming? It is possible, and the film must have made an impact, perhaps as much for the story as its pioneering realism. It is taken from James Cain’s novel ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’. Giorgio Bassani (whom Antonioni knew, see post of 20 October) translated it into Italian at the end of the war, and Antonioni used the skeleton of the story in Cronaca di un amore. There is something enticing about a film masterpiece being made so close to a house you had lived in. The house itself has a helpful plaque identifying it, and here’s what it looks like now across the piazza (San Maurelio 10 is at the near corner of this block).

ant-house-3

The other Antonioni house is at the via Brasavola 14 (no plaque this time). This is located in the dense streets that form the south-east quarter of the city, quite close to the Bassani family house at via Cisterno del Follo 1 and the Tennis Club Marfisa, where Bassani and he played tennis.

ant-house-4

Antonioni went to study at Bologna University and began to be drawn away from the city, so that the making of the first episode of Beyond the Clouds (1995) in Ferrara and nearby Comacchio was a homecoming of a kind. I knew that he was buried there.

On my last morning there, I just had time to rush to the Certosa Cemetery. On arriving, I was dismayed at the thought of finding the tomb in such a large place,

certosa

but a helpful office for the cemetery directed me to block M12 and gave me a map. I arrived, finally, at M12 and spent several minutes inspecting all the tomb slabs for his name. I was about to come away unrequited when I noticed a street of tomb-houses

certosa-cemy

and sure enough there was an Antonioni family mausoleum

ant-family-tomb

and peering in, I could see Michelangelo’s name.

ant-tomb-2

Quest accomplished, mind fulfilled, I rushed back in order to catch the train to Ravenna. Ferrara, I concluded, was a wonderful place.

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FERRARA MADE ME (2): GIORGIO BASSANI

20 Thursday Oct 2016

Tags

Auschwitz, Bassani, De Sica, Ferrara, Garden of the Finzi Continis, Holocaust films, Jewish cemeteries, Tennis Club Marfisa

Ferrara in the Romagna, Italy was the hometown not just of Antonioni (see previous post) but of the novelist Giorgio Bassani. Antonioni’s dates are 1912 to 2007, Bassani’s 1916 to 2000, so they are close contemporaries, even if not so close as to have been in the same class (assuming they went to the same school). However they did both play at Ferrara’s  Tennis Club Marfisa. I am uncertain about Antonioni’s tennis prowess, but Bassani’s name can still be seen on the championship trophy.

entry to Club Marfisa

The Tennis Club is still there at 44 Via Saffi (see photo), and thereby hangs a tale: for it is the expulsion of the Jews from the club under the racial laws of 1938 that provides one of the starting-points for Bassani’s novel ‘The Garden of the Finzi Continis’. The book is ostensibly a story about the narrator’s amorous pursuit of the elusive Micòl, but it is really a story about the degrading and destruction of Ferrarese Jewry under Fascism: Micòl flees from the narrator’s arms, and is disappeared into the inferno at Auschwitz. In 1938, some 57,000 Jews lived in Italy, and 8,000 of them were annihilated by the end of the war, around 150 of them from Ferrara.

Bassani was not one of them, a small gain to balance against the corkscrew pain of the larger loss. On the other hand, his survival is especially important, since he used his gifts to render witness to what one Jewish family in one Italian city suffered, the snatching away of their Italianità, of their home and roots, of all trace of identity, and in narrating the story of this one family he speaks for all the others. The family includes the clever, attractive, teasing, maddening Micòl who lives for the past and for the present; “for the future, in itself, she only harboured an abhorrence.”

Bassani’s novel was published in 1962, and found an international audience with the film of 1970. Bassani for his part kept his distance from it, even asking for his name to be removed from the credits. When you read the novel, you can see why: where it is delicately expressed, the film blunders about, and in doing so reduces it to a superficiality. Secondly, I have a particular thing about costume dramas: only the cleverest directors can deal with their inherent inauthenticity, a failure which the film exemplifies. Here is the group of young people waiting to enter the Finzi Contini house in order to play tennis: their hairstyles, their clothes, the colour quality of the film are meant to look like 1938, but all they do is evoke 1970. They look to me quintessentially inauthentic.

garden-fc-1

The director of the film Vittorio De Sica was a neorealist, whose Bicycle Thieves feels famously authentic, but he lacks the sensibility to register the subtlety and the melancholy of Bassani’s novel. Naturally, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1972, but then who needs the Oscars?

Bassani’s book is very much rooted in Ferrara, and where the names have not been changed by him, a number of the places mentioned – the wall at Montagnone, S.Maria in Vado, the Corso Ercole d’Este (whose poetry appealed to Antonioni too*), the Temple in the Via Mazzini in the heart of the old ghetto – can still be seen.

Worth a visit in particular is the Jewish cemetery at the end of the Via Dei Vigne. It contains the tomb of the Finzi Magrini

entry to Jewish cemetery

but in describing that of the fictional Finzi Contini near the opening of the book, Bassani in his fictionalising is not so much thinking of the Finzi Magrini one as of this tomb, “which could be mocked as ‘a monstrosity’”.

jc-2

Giorgio Bassani himself has a grave in the cemetery, which judging by the stones placed on it in acts of remembrance, is much visited.

Bassini gravestone
Bassani tomb: front . . .
Bassani tomb: front . . .
. . . and rear
. . . and rear

* When the narrator goes into the town at night Bassani writes: “There was no one, almost no one on the streets, and Corso Giovecca and Corso Ercole 1 d’Este, smooth, empty and of an almost salt-like whiteness, opened up in front of me like two huge ski-tracks.” Antonioni would have known what he is talking about in view of his use of such an image in Cronaca di un amore (see previous post).

Next post: the search for Antonioni’s tomb.

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Posted by Tim Cawkwell | Filed under Antonioni, cinema and culture, costume narratives, Italy, literature and film

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Ferrara made me (1): Antonioni

12 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Antonioni, cinema and culture, Italy, surrealism, travel

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Antonioni, Bassani, Castello Estense, Corso Rossetti, Cronaca di un amore, De Chirico, Ferrara

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature film of 1950, Una Cronaca di un amore (‘Story of a love affair’, but better in Italian), the private investigator commissioned by the husband of Paola Molon to find out more about her and her past, spends time in her home town of Ferrara. He goes to the liceo, Ferrara’s notable school,

cronaca-4

he goes to the tennis club to talk to the caretaker,

cronaca-4a

he is seen strolling along Corso Ercole I

cronaca-5a

then round the corner,

cronaca-5c

and the camera follows him to look up Corso Rossetti.

cronaca-7

This last shot is cinematic dead time because it tells us nothing about the story. On the other hand it tells us a great deal about its mood, and foreshadows the end, that this love story will lead to a fruitless, unconsummated, unredeemed end.

Antonioni was born (1918) and brought up in Ferrara, a city of long streets, high walls and the formidable Castello Estense, moat and all, at its centre.

castello-2     dscn8083

He went to the Liceo Ludovico Ariosto (on its old site, in Via Borgo dei Leoni);

old Liceo Ginnasio

he frequented the tennis club in Via Saffi (made famous in Giorgio Bassani’s novel, ‘The Garden of the Finzi Continis’);

Club Marfisa

he also must have liked to stroll up the Corso Ercole

Corso Ercole I

to the crossroads with Corso Rossetti, past the Palazzo dei Diamanti and the Palazzo Prosperi-Sacrati (below).

Pal. Prosperi Sacrati

Another important Ferrarese denizen in his mind must have been Giorgio De Chirico, who while not a native was invalided there from 1915 to 1918, and painted some notable pictures there. ‘Le Muse Inquietanti’ [s.v. Wikipedia] of 1918, for example, features the Castello Estense. His imagination made something quite new out of empty streets, shadowed porticos, statues in the piazza, and lone figures. The bleak absence of the ordinary living human must have informed Antonioni’s own imagining of cities, explored in several of his films, and most famously in the final sequence of L’Eclisse (1961).

The shot of Corso Rossetti in the winter light of an evening is powerfully imagined. This image

cronaca-6

is crucially different from the one above, since it shows a person stepping, like a figure from a De Chirico painting, into the building on the right, defined as much by his shadow as by his figure.

cronaca-6a

Intriguingly, it echoes the comments of English visitors found in the Blue Guide to the Romagna, which I was using on my visit. Hester Piozzi wrote in 1789: “My pen was just upon the point of praising its cleanliness . . . till I reflected there was nobody to dirty it.” In 1826, William Hazlitt wrote in his ‘Notes of a journey through France and Italy’: “You enjoy the most perfect solitude, that of a city which was once filled with ‘the busy hum of men’”; in his ‘Pictures from Italy’ of 1846, Charles Dickens described old Ferrara as “more solitary, more depopulated, more deserted than any city of the solemn brotherhood”.

It’s not like that now. Here is the Corso Rossetti from a position close to the one above. (If you took the photo from the middle of the road you risk being run over.)

Pal. dei Diamanti     Corso Rossetti

The extensive pedestrianisation of Ferrara, preserving cobbles where possible, and the high prevalence of bicycles preserve the poetry of the city but in parts that poetry has been put paid to by the ubiquity of the car whether driven or parked, and the fact that cobbles have given way to asphalt. The city seems to be economically prosperous and there are coachloads of tourists, indeed I was one myself, which drains the poetry of solitude away. I wonder if Antonioni ever regretted this.

Next post: ‘Ferrara made me (2): Giorgio Bassani’

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