The sublime kitsch of tourist Italy
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
La Nascita di Venere – The Birth of Venus – was painted around 1485 by Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, alias Sandro Botticelli. Most FT readers will be able to conjure a mind’s-eye image of the famous painting hanging in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Millions of others around the world haven’t the faintest idea what it’s called, let alone who painted it and when. That doesn’t mean they don’t recognise it when they see it, and understand what, in broad terms, it represents: Italy.
An idea as much as a place: not the first time this country – beloved, trammelled and commodified, the world’s favourite escape – has been described thus. More accurately, maybe, Italy is an orchestra of intersecting ideas: singular landscapes, a couple of thousand years of textbook-dominating history, and the unique representation of both across many centuries of art. Think of the Colosseum, and Brunelleschi’s Duomo. Or Michelangelo’s David, that perfect physique leaning so believably into its contrapposto; or Leonardo Da Vinci’s La Gioconda (the Mona Lisa, to your everyman), with her enigmatic subfusc of a smile.
The fact that Leonardo’s masterpiece has long been the property of the French Republic and hangs in the Louvre doesn’t make it any less definitively Italian. You come to understand this quickly, travelling the country. There she is, stamped on paper placemats at a beachside café in Puglia; there she is again, adorning the wall of a room in a three-star hotel in San Benedetto del Tronto. In Florence there’s a Banksy-style rendering of the Mona Lisa on the side of a shop – wearing, inexplicably, a scuba-diving mask (blockbuster fodder for social media, in a city the ’gramming masses flock to, much to its detriment).
She’s not alone. From Alto Adige to Reggio Calabria and countless points between, priceless and protected works of Italian art and architecture have acquired, thanks to the frequency with which they are imitated or replicated, a certain symbolism. They have permeated the contemporary aesthetic experience, finding their way into graphic design, products and the occasional ad-hoc, I-painted-this-on-the-wall-of-my-trattoria-myself tribute.
Stefan Giftthaler is half-German but was born and raised in northern Italy, which means he brings both an Italian formation and an outsider’s gaze to his life behind the lens. Exploring the length of the peninsula and its various islands (sometimes on assignment for HTSI), he has become intrigued by this phenomenon. “I began to reflect how often these kinds of artwork, shown so far outside the context for which they were originally created but so integrated into the contemporary Italian landscape, become pop-culture symbols. To see them you don’t need to go to a museum or a site; you can find them reproduced in a calendar at a restaurant, or on a petrol pump” – where the effect can be fluid or disruptive, earnest or ironic.
Outside a coffee bar in Sicily, you might find a bench for the smokers (they still have those here), flanked by cheap plaster pedestal ashtrays shaped like Doric capitals. Five or 10 miles down the road in Agrigento sits the source material: the Valley of the Temples, some of the best-preserved Greek architecture in the Mediterranean, 2,500 years old. Next to the till inside the bar, maybe there’s a display of refrigerator magnets or key chains, embossed with yet more columns, or a silhouette of Mount Etna in full molten-lava spate. Or something else entirely: the Colosseum, outlined in gold on red plastic; Botticelli’s Venus, perched on her half-shell. Does it matter that we are hundreds of miles from Rome and Tuscany? It does not. Sicily is a region; Italy, remember, is an orchestra of ideas, expressed across all manner of the sacred and profane, the ancient and the of-today. For their part, Italians seem to live as easily with their tat as they do their icons; perhaps a bit inured, surrounded as they are by so many of each, to both.
“Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city,” wrote the late (American-born) literary critic Anatole Broyard. The version of the poem he was thinking of almost certainly didn’t include the lollipops iced with sugar likenesses of Pope Francis that today line the windows of shops around the Piazza della Rotonda; but there they are, along with bins of little plastic Colosseums and Pantheons, stacked conveniently by the doors. Some who travel here cringe at the kitsch of it all; some laugh. Some, remembering the first time they saw the Pantheon – the first time they stood inside the most perfect man-made space on Earth, the sun slanting a column of yellow light down through its oculus to a marble floor encircled by a 2,000-year-old wall – might be surprised to find themselves moved, maybe almost to tears. Seen in the right spirit, that’s the point. The kitsch, however cringey, still pays homage to the essence of the icon, and so to what’s iconic – what lives in our ideas – about Italy. Which has a certain poetry of its own.
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