I’ve spent way too much time staring at Georgia Meloni’s face the past few days while wrangling out an op-ed about the rise of the Italian far-right. That piece will go out sometime next week so to avoid doubling up rants - and to preserve my sanity - I thought I’d take a break from hardcore election coverage here and instead share a few nuggets of cultural news and other miscellaneous titbits. Think of this edition of the newsletter as a modest antidote to the political disaster that’s unfolding. Yes, it’s obviously important to engage, to understand and to resist the rise of the neo-fascists but there’s definitely such a thing as overload ragazzi. Just ask outgoing Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, who during a trip to Naples this week for some reason allowed himself to be thrust into the arms of a group of sweating pizzaioli and spun around in the air to the sound of the Dirty Dancing theme. I confess, I’ve watched the clip below dozens of times from all the different angles available on YouTube and I still don’t get it. Was this Di Maio’s idea? His way of showing he’s down with the common folk? Or were the pizzaioli trolling him? And if so, why Dirty Dancing? And why is Di Maio playing Jennifer Grey’s role? Did the masterminds behind this idea conceive it as some kind of vaguely offensive “emasculating” prank? Or was it just an innocent jibe against a local boy turned politician who’s party symbol is, after all, a poorly sketched honey bee? Answers on a postcard please.
My friend Alex Sakalis published another of his off-beat travel features this week, and it’s as mind-bending as you might expect. In the essay, Alex takes the reader around Tresigallo, a small village near Ferrara which was the site of a striking utopian architectural experiment in the 1930s. Now, few readers here will have many positive things to say about Mussolini’s regime (at least I hope y’all don’t) but there’s no denying that some of the rationalists and modernists who collaborated with the government at the time produced extraordinary work that, decades on, stands out as among the most beautiful of the 20th Century. Here Alex well-captures the ambiguities of admiring “a utopia built by a rogue Fascist, adorned with metaphysical architecture, both conservative and transformative in its vision, ruined by deindustrialization, burdened by stigma, and ultimately born again from its ashes.” It’s a fascinatingly complex read, so I really recommend you save this link somewhere and take the time to go through it slowly. Alex, if you’re reading, you need to do a book on this stuff. Seriously.
Arts and culture: What to read and watch this autumn
Maggie O'Farrell, the Northern Irish novelist best known as the author of Hamnet (2020) has a new book out this month and it’s set in Italy. The Marriage Portrait, a “dark Renaissance fable” explores the life of Lucrezia de' Medici – daughter of the famous Florentine art patron Cosimo De Medici – who was forced into marriage with Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, aged just 16. A year later she died under mysterious circumstances which some historians have attributed to suicide, others to poison. This novel pursues the latter hypothesis, merging fact and fiction to create an original, fantastical allegory about the brutality of marriage, sex and violence, female agency and femicide. Based on the first few pages, O'Farrell seems to have adopted a faux-naive, melodramatic voice here, presumably to reflect the protagonist’s subjectivity, and to make the tale more accessible to younger audiences. Critics are split down the middle about how effective the result is. The Guardian loved it. The New York Times? Not so much. For the time being consider my judgement suspended.
Any Italian readers will no doubt feel some kind of strong emotion at the mere mention of the words I promessi sposi. Manzoni’s novel - usually translated as The Betrothed - has, after all, been putting this nation’s schoolkids off reading for decades now. In the collective imagination the book is a boring, old unreadable tome; a masterpiece, of course, but also turgid to point of being incomprehensible. My guess? The problem lies with the teachers. Because The Betrothed is, in fact, a quite breezy novel which despite the dense language offers one of the most lucid overviews of politics, corruption, the powers of religion, campanalismo and provincial Italian characters that you’ll find. I admit that I too struggled to get through the thing some years ago, and certainly missed a lot along the way. I’ve long been meaning to have another go. That’s why I’m so pleased to hear that Michael F Moore has just released his own new English translation which, according to reviews, offers an elegant, lyrical and accessible version of the text. Jhumpa Lahiri has published a particularly glowing endorsement for LitHub which is well worth a read. So go and check that out, and if you’ve never faced-up to Manzoni, this, by all accounts, seems like a great opportunity to rectify that.
The HBO dark satire The White Lotus (2021) was one of the best things to come out of post-lockdown TV. While pedants might well accuse the show of being a little cheap in its punchlines, I thought it did a great job of lampooning its cast of brash, selfish, consumer capitalist tourists while offering a few clever nods to the colonial racism that underpins Western privilege more broadly. Now, this might be old news to some, but I was surprised to discover the other day that season two is already on its way this October and, not only that, it will be set in Sicily, in Taormina’s Four Seasons San Domenico Palace! The trailer doesn’t give much away re: plot, but fact that the cast will include F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hollander and Aubrey Plaza is more than enough for me. Genius composter Cristobal Tapia de Veer will also return with another soundtrack which, frankly, is the most exciting bit of all as far as I’m concerned. Check out the short teaser below and feel the hype.
Recipe of the week: Cured sea bass with cumin cicchetto
I’m off to Venice on Sunday to catch the end of the Art Biennale and obviously to gorge myself on chichetti (the bite sized nibbles sometimes known rather nauseatingly in English as Venetian “tapas.”) There’s one particular little dish, though, that I’ve been fantasising about ever since I read about it and that’s Emiko Davies’s Branzino marinato al cumino (cured sea bass with cumin). Inspired by a recipe in the Slow Food cookbook, Ricette di Osterie del Veneto this small plate of fish on bread is true to the region’s traditional way of eating, but also has an innovative modern twist with the cumin and honey component. High quality ingredients are no-doubt essential here, so I plan on making this with some locally sourced bass on my return and serving with a nice Malvasia. If you fancy giving it a go yourself, Davies has shared her recipe for this dish and some other chicchetti here. It also features in her latest book Cinnamon and Salt which was published by Hardie Grant earlier this year.
About Me
My name is Jamie Mackay (@JacMackay) and I’m an author, editor and translator based in Florence. I’ve been writing about Italy for a decade for international media including The Guardian, The Economist, Frieze, and Art Review. I launched ‘The Week in Italy’ to share a more direct and regular overview of the debates and dilemmas, innovations and crises that sometimes pass under the radar of our overcrowded news feeds.
If you enjoyed this newsletter I hope you’ll consider becoming a supporter for EUR 5.00 per month (the price of a weekly catch-up over an espresso). Alternatively, if you’d like to send a one-off something, you can do so via PayPal using this link. No worries if you can’t chip-in or don’t feel like doing so, but please do consider forwarding this to a friend or two. It’s a big help!