PAOLO DI PAOLO. Mondo perduto curated by Giovanna Calvenzi

A previously unseen exploration of the contradictions and hopes of the of the '50s and '60s, narrated through more than 250 images of the greats of the worlds of film, art, culture and fashion and ordinary people

17 April – 1 September 2019 | MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts

Main Sponsor: Gucci www.maxxi.art

Rome, 16 April 2019. He was the best loved photographer of Mario Pannunzio’s magazine Il Mondo, in which, over the course of 14 years, he published 573 photos, reporting on Italy and the world. He portrayed film stars, writers, artists, the nobility and ordinary people. Famously, he explored the Italian coastline with Pier Paolo Pasolini, documenting Italian vacations.

Paolo Di Paolo (from Larino, Molise, class of 1925) was an extraordinary chronicler of the Italy of the ‘50s and ‘60s who recorded with delicacy, rigour and skill the country that was being reforged from the ashes of the Second World War.

MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, is dedicating a major exhibition to him and his extraordinary life. PAOLO DI PAOLO. Mondo perduto is curated by Giovanna Calvenzi and sponsored by Gucci. The exhibition is part of the museum’s growing photography programme, fostered by Giovanna Melandri, President of the MAXXI Foundation (17th April - 30th June 2019).

The exhibition features more than 250 images, many of which are previously unseen, part of an immense archive (250,000 negatives, contact sheets, prints and slides) found by chance by his daughter Silvia in a cellar around 20 years ago.

Shortly after the closure of Il Mondo in 1966, Paolo Di Paolo, feeling that he was “no longer in tune with the times, with the society that was coming into being”, abandoned his camera and at little more than 40 years old returned to his philosophical studies and the publishing world, launching a collaboration with the Carabinieri, for which he curated around 20 books and 43 calendars. Di Paolo turned over a new leaf and his wonderful, inestimable archive ended up forgotten in a cellar.

His daughter’s discovery and the interest of Alessandro Michele, Creative Director at Gucci, and that of the President of MAXXI Giovanna Melandri and that of Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, director of MAXXI Arte, have led to the publication of the book Paolo Di Paolo. Mondo Perduto, Fotografie 1954-1968, which was presented at MAXXI in December last year, and this exhibition.

The exhibition The exhibition has been organised in sections that intersect and establish dialogues with one another, rotating around a reconstruction of the newsroom at Il Mondo, with desks, lamps and images of Mario Pannunzio at work with his copyeditors.

The section Society/ presents the country emerging from poverty and illiteracy in the immediate post- war years with hopes and contradictions; a country in which young women wearing veils and carrying baskets on their heads at Campobasso lived alongside girls in shorts on the seafront at Viareggio, where the agricultural community coexisted with the Ferrari workshops, and donkeys were used as beasts of burden while passengers flew on the new airlines. Particular attention is paid to Rome: Di Paolo photographed the city's nobility and the sparkling international high society frequenting the capital, working with, among others, Irene Brin at Harper’s Bazaar, but also the funeral of Palmiro Togliatti, with a weeping old lady in the foreground. Society/World features shots from his reportages from Japan, Iran and New York.

Particularly rich sections are devoted to Artists/Intellectuals and Film, with portraits of painters, poets, writers and film stars, mostly previously unseen and taken for pleasure. Lucio Fontana at the Biennale, Carla Accardi in Rome, Renato Guttuso on the Salita del Grillo, Mimmo Rotella creating one of his décollages in Piazza del Popolo, Ezra Pound, Tennessee Williams on the beach with his dog, Giuseppe Ungaretti with a cat in his arms, an unusual portrait of Oriana Fallaci “playing” at being a diva at the Venice Lido, Kim Novak ironing in her room in the Grand Hotel, Sofia Loren joking with Marcello Mastroianni in a studio at Cinecittà, Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni walking while reading a newspaper, and Simone Signoret and Yves Montand kissing at the Aventino. Then there are the “impossible” encounters captured for the weekly news magazine Tempo: Giorgio De Chirico together with Gina Lollobrigida, Salvatore Quasimodo with Anita Ekberg, Luchino Visconti with Mina, Nilde Iotti with Renato Rascel, and with Claudia Cardinale. With each of his portrait subjects, Di Paolo created a relationship based on empathy, trust and complicity that made every shot unique and unmistakeable: “Many of his photos” - writes his daughter Silvia Di Paolo - “remained unpublished because they were so intimate that it would have been inappropriate to give them to the newspapers.” Like those of Yves Montand in Rome, Oriana Fallaci in Venice and Anna Magnani on the beach.

A special group of pictures in the Film section is dedicated to Anna Magnani. Anticipating that the paparazzi would be following her and knowing the courtesy and style of Di Paolo, the star invited him to her villa at the Circeo and, for the first time, allowed herself to be photographed with her son. Another group is devoted to Pier Paolo Pasolini, portrayed at Monte dei Cocci in Rome, thoughtful at the tomb of Gramsci in the Non- Catholic Cemetery, at home with his mother and, in Basilicata, on the set of Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, where Di Paolo was the only photographer allowed in. This group leads to another, La Lunga Strada di Sabbia, a portfolio of 1959 documenting Italian vacations. Here, the magazine Successo, edited by Arturo Tofanelli, had the idea for an innovative pairing of Paolo Di Paolo and Pier Paolo Pasolini for the project. One of the most iconic images portrays Pasolini himself walking on the Cinquale beach at Viareggio while observing the young bathers.

In Paolo Di Paolo’s images, says Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, Director of MAXXI Arte, well-known and anonymous faces re-emerge from the past in previously unseen poses, presenting us with a surprising proximity and intimacy, with Di Paolo’s lens masterfully capturing moods, characters, vanity and truth.

“In the years of the spread of humanist photography along French lines, together with the images and scoops of the Rome paparazzi,” says the exhibition curator Giovanna Calvenzi, “Di Paolo found an independent, different, cultured path. He has the capacity of entering the world of art, literature and film with a light, and at times humorous, touch. He possesses a natural gift for seeing an overview of the situations he frames and an ability to place people in relation to space, in a kind of circularity of vision that obliges the observer to read his photographs starting with the subject and going on to discover all those elements that render that subject central and a protagonist in a wider narrative”.

The press kit and images of the exhibition can be downloaded from the Reserved Area of the Fondazione MAXXI’s website at http://www.maxxi.art/en/area-stampa/ by typing in the password areariservatamaxxi

MAXXI PRESS OFFICE +39 06 324861 [email protected]

PAOLO DI PAOLO. Mondo perduto 17 April – 1 September 2019

INTRODUCTION

In 1949 Paolo Di Paolo was 24 and had just arrived in Rome from Larino, a small village in Molise, to study history and philosophy. He stayed in the Student House and made a living by doing a host of jobs, in the end becoming chief editor for a travel magazine. In 1954 his life changed radically: he fell in love with the Leica III C camera, he resigned, bought it on instalment and started as an amateur photographer, «in the sense of taking photos for pleasure». He frequented the artistic circles in Rome and came into contact with Gruppo Forma 1: it was his artistic friends who suggested he offer the photos to the weekly cultural magazine Il Mondo, founded and edited by Mario Pannunzio. Paolo Di Paolo would soon become one of the publication’s closest collaborators and over the years he published 573 photographs, in which protagonists from the world of art, culture, fashion, and cinema, alongside normal people, told the tale of the Italy that was being reborn from the tragedies of the Second World War. He also collaborated with the most interesting national and international periodicals of the era until 1966 when, with the closure of Il Mondo and the editorial changes at other papers now focussed on reporting scandals, he decided to interrupt his work as a photographer: “I stopped photographing for the love of photography”, he said. He withdrew to the countryside and returned to studying philosophy, historic research and publishing projects for the Carabinieri. His archive, consisting of over 250,000 photos, would remain perfectly preserved in a cellar. Here his daughter Silvia found it by chance twenty-odd years ago and brought to light the extraordinary interpretation of an era which Di Paolo provided, one of the most important “discoveries” of recent years. In an historic moment in which in Italy too an interpretation was spreading of reality defined as “humanist” from the French tradition, Di Paolo found his own different and refined path. He had the ability to gently step into the world of art, literature, and cinema. He had the natural ability to read the various situations which he captured and to place people in them, while respecting their space in a kind of “circularity” in vision which obliges the reader to read his photographs starting from the subject, to then discover all the elements which make it central and key. The route through the exhibition, fluid and permeable, makes it possible to go through the areas of most interest to Paolo Di Paolo: from Italian society, among the great cities and the rural context, to portraits of intellectuals, artists and the stars of cinema; from trips made worldwide to that which took him along Italy’s beaches with Pier Paolo Pasolini, to which a special section of the exhibition is dedicated. In the centre, the publishing office of Pannunzio’s Il Mondo, to which Di Paolo wanted to dedicate a tribute as the driver of a new way of thinking and looking at its own time: an example, which is still valid today, of how the telling of realities, the duty of information-giving and artistic sensibility can be combined.

Paolo Di Paolo was born in 1925 in Larino, in Molise. In 1939 he moved to Rome to study at classical high school and after the war he enrolled in the faculty of History and Philosophy at La Sapienza University. He frequented Roman artistic circles and decided to develop, through photography, his interest in figurative arts. In the meantime, he worked in publishing and in 1952 he was chief editor of the magazine Viaggi in Italia, of Cit/Ferrovie dello Stato. In 1954 he started to collaborate with the weekly magazine Il Mondo, founded and edited by Mario Pannunzio. Di Paolo would become one of its main collaborators, with the highest number of photographs published (573). Between 1954 and 1956 he expanded his collaboration to Settimana Incom Illustrata and had regular work with the weekly Tempo, edited by Arturo Tofanelli, for which he produced numerous services and inquests around the world. Thanks to the friendships he established in the world of cinema and the arts, he shot private and exclusive photos for the greatest intellectuals, actors and directors of the era. He worked on important sociological inquests, such as “The long road of sand” in 1959, on the habits of Italians on holiday, made together with Pier Paolo Pasolini. He developed a relationship built on trust with Pasolini and accompanied him during the shooting of Il Vangelo secondo Matteo and Mamma Roma and also shot private photos at his home, with his mother, at Monte dei Cocci in Rome and in reflection on the tomb of Antonio Gramsci in the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome. He ended his photography work collaborating assiduously with the famous journalist Irene Brin, creating with her a “tandem” specialising in exclusive reporting on international high society. In 1966, following the closure of Il Mondo, he decided to abandon his profession as a photographer, returning to his studies of philosophy and historic research. His perfectly preserved archive was brought to light by his daughter Silvia at the start of the 21st century.

PAOLO DI PAOLO. Mondo perduto 17 April – 1 September 2019

THE EXHIBITION

IL MONDO The editor’s office of Il Mondo, here recreated, was in Rome, in Via Campo Marzio 24, on the first floor. The editor of the weekly publication, founded in 1949, is Mario Pannunzio, the editorial secretary Bice Munao. The editors include, among others, Ennio Flaiano, Alfredo Mezio, Giulia Massari, Nina Ruffini, and Mino Maccari. The collaborators are the most refined intellectuals of the era. Il Mondo sets itself up as a refined and elitist weekly, which fights for a more civil Italy, proposing a continuous exchange of ideas and opinions. On its large-format pages (35x50 cm.) it uses photographs in an eccentric way, sometimes just one large image per page, and it promotes the tale of the “real” Italy, provincial and poor, in opposition to the dreams suggested by the approaches of other magazines. It is a testing-ground for debates, the goal of the best photo-journalists. It ceases publication on 8 March 1966. For me and other friends today the ambition of being photographers has died - writes Paolo Di Paolo in a telegram sent in 1966 to Mario Pannunzio on the closure of Il Mondo.

LA LUNGA STRADA DI SABBIA In June 1959 Paolo Di Paolo was in to meet Arturo Tofanelli, the director of the weekly magazine Il Tempo and the monthly Successo, to agree the usual summer service on the holidays taken by the Italians. He already had a proposal for the title, “The long road of sand”. Tofanelli proposed a travel companion, Pier Paolo Pasolini, then considered “a young author”: he had already written Le ceneri di Gramsci, Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta but he had not yet become a director. A complex, delicate relationship developed between them, which would bring them together only for the first leg of the journey, from Rome to Ventimiglia, but which would then strengthen into mutual respect and trust. They then set off from Rome towards Ventimiglia, the first reverse leg of the “long road”, with Di Paolo’s car, a MG-TD Bertone Arnolt, but they had different objectives: “He was looking for a lost world, of literary ghosts, an Italy that no longer existed – Di Paolo recalls -, I was looking for an Italy which looked to the future”. They would face the next two legs separately. The extraordinary tale told in images by Paolo Di Paolo would be published only in the three editions planned by Successo, while for the writer The long road of sand would become a text – integrated with sections that the monthly magazine had not used – that was published a number of times.

CINQUALE, JUNE from Pier Paolo Pasolini, The long road of sand, Guanda, Milan 2017

Here is the beach of Cinquale. A sea of memories fed above all by my friend the poet Bertolucci, who comes to holiday here, with the cream of the literati. Here there was D’Annunzio. Here between 1920 and 1930 Huxley wrote Those barren leaves and Thomas Mann – who had his children bathe nude, thus scandalising Italians – indignantly Mario and the magician. From here came Rilke too to think of who knows which of his sonnets. And here Malaparte came on exile. Pea lived his long life here. Carrà painted here. And, I repeat, the literati still come, especially the Florentines: Longhi, Anna Banti, De Robertis, with that smiling eye which always contains a tear, that head of his like a little bird, back from eating some of his soups, the only thing he eats, and with a great love inside him for poetry, a unique love. Now I am walking along the Cinquale beach, amidst all these memories with the backdrop of the hills of Versilia; and do you know what I see? A band of youths from Emilia flat on their stomachs looking at a German girl, all of them a bit fat and scruffy with one of them pretending to be epileptic for fun. (...)

MEMORIES Paolo Di Paolo

Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Monte dei cocci. Rome, 1960

When I took these photos of Pasolini, we had already done the reportage together for the three episodes of “The long road of sand”. He was the one who proposed it to me. “You know – he told me – loads of people have been asking me to do it, all people I don’t know. With you it’s different, I would feel at ease”. And that’s how it went. I took these photos in complete calm, almost in silence. A whole afternoon characterised by a perfect understanding. He chose the places, especially Monte dei Cocci, the borough of Testaccio, at the base of which once upon a time the “cart men” used to work, in other words that world which gravitated around the traditional horse-drawn carriages for tourists in Rome: so stables, blacksmiths, saddle makers and the colourful world in which they lived. As the director he would later become, he himself decided on the set- ups which were made particularly favourable by a sky weighed down by grey, oppressive clouds. He was a perfect actor. He interpreted my needs and I his self-representation. Just one photo came about by chance, due to a happy series of coincidences, that in which Pasolini, sitting at the bottom of a cross, on the right, follows with his surprised gaze a young man who cuts across the scene with an apparent sense of guilt, without saying hello, after spying on us for a long time. In that photo, Alfredo Mezio, the chief editor of Il Mondo, explained to me, the protagonists are not Pasolini or the young man: the protagonist is the space in which the scene takes place, a space full of tension and meaning.

“Autostrada del Sole”, inauguration of the Rome-Florence section, 1962

Taking photos of the inauguration of the Rome-Florence motorway, a job which I didn’t appreciate. I imagined the scene: a cardinal, several mayors adorned with their Italian flag sashes and a host of politicians. An hour ahead of time I followed the route by taking the secondary roads that ran alongside it, the Flaminia and the Tiberina. Finally, I chose a hill from which I could document how the motorway violently cut through the calm beauty of the Tuscia region. A farming family was waiting to follow the event. Finally, the first car came through, a Fiat 850, then nothing more. I took this photo and just a few others, which I didn’t show to the editing office which had commissioned the service from me. The photos wouldn’t have gone down well: they would have asked me: “And the moment of the blessing?”.

Simone Signoret e Yves Montand. Aventino, Rome, 1956

There were only a few characters for who I did not have to suggest some situation to then be translated into photos. With Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, who were travelling in Rome after making their union official, I couldn’t put a new film in time before I found them playing a new and unexpected role. At the time immortalising the sequence of a kiss, especially between actors, was a scoop. Yves Montand and Simone Signoret gave me the chance under the ancient walls of the Palatine: I was shocked, even if I interpreted it as a sign of trust, the start of a friendship which lasted forever. This is why I have never published them before now, to avoid improper use, particularly when some imagined the actor might be a candidate for the presidency of the French Republic: imagine the inhabitant of the Élysée Palace mimicking the Roman emperors while posing on a marble pedestal in the Roman Forum. It was the actor himself who suggested it, under Signoret’s gaze of loving disapproval, the unforgettable star of Casque d'or.