People From Tuscany

"Gomez: But in the meantime we know how these things go: he will end up being acquitted."

"Italy, it must be recorded with honesty, albeit bemusement, has produced few more remarkable individuals this century than Licio Gelli."

"Would Giulio Andreotti have been the true "master" of the P2 Lodge? For heaven's sake... I had the P2, Cossiga the Gladio and Andreotti the Ring."

"The P2 Lodge, until its dissolution in 1982 due to the Anselmi-Spadolini law, was a regular lodge of the Grand Orient of Italy, as attested by extensive documentation that passed between the grand masters Gamberini, Salvini and Battelli on the one hand and Licio Gelli on the other."

"With P2 we had Italy in our hands. Then there was the Army, Financial Police, Police: they were clearly commanded by all people from the P2 Masonic lodge. [...] We never wanted to attack and we couldn't attack, but we were a sentinel to prevent the Communist Party from emerging."

"The real power lies in the hands of the holders of the Mass Media."

"We had Italy in our hands. We would never have wanted to attack, but we were like a sentinel, carefully ensuring that the Communist party should never emerge."

"[journalist:] what can you tell us about the carnages? I asked her who is behind the carnages. [Gelli:] but you see, there have always been these massacres here. And there always will be. Oh yes, because there is no order. And also in recent times, because in the early days there were no massacres. They possibly took place after '60; before 1960 they never occurred. It's from the '60s: and why am I talking about the '60s? Because in 1960 there was still a certain condition that the people had emerged from a dictatorship of fascism - call it the dictatorship of fascism - and the people had gotten used to working and had to go to work because otherwise they would have been punished and wouldn't have had to go on strike because with the strike it is not that it occurs; the strike makes people more poor."

"Why should I and other sculptors.. .I know Marino Marini feels it – find this work ['the Rondanini Pietà' of Michelangelo] one of the most moving and greatest works we know of when it's a work which has such disunity in it?"

"But I am no longer trying to formulate a stylised version of anxiety such as we find in the Laocoon group and in so many other sculptures of the Silver Age of antiquity. I feel that these works are always a bit too melodramatic. If you really want to find the sources of my present style [1958] in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses that have been unearthed in Pompeii.. ..if the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age, I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine."

"I had been born in an Earthly Paradise [in Tuscany, Italy] from which we all have expelled. Not so long ago a sculptor could still be content with a search for full, sensual and vigorous forms. But in the past fifteen years [1943 – 1958], nearly all our new sculpture has tended to create forms that are disintegrating."

"Machines change their style so rapidly. If one tries to reproduce them in art as realistically as man and the horse in classical art, one immediately lapses into a kind of anecdotic or documentary art.. .Only the stylisation of a painter like Leger could integrate the machine as the subject matter of art. Here in Italy, the futurists, before 1914, attempted a similar integration of the machine.. ..César [French sculptor, in the generation of Marini] creates with elements borrowed from industry and the world of machines, sculptural fossils that appear to have survived the same kind of catastrophe as my own figures. But I would like to show you [ interviewer w:Eduard Roditi now in my studio my latest fossils.."

"My equestrian figures are symbols of the anguish that I feel when I survey contemporary events. Little by little, my horses become more restless; their riders less and less able to control them. Man and beast are both overcome by a catastrophe similar to those that struck Sodom and Pompeii. So I am trying to illustrate the last stages of the disintegration of a myth, I mean the myth of the individual victorious hero, the 'uono di virtù' of the humanists.."

"I am no longer seeking, in my own equestrian figures, to celebrate the triumph of any victorious hero. On the contrary, I seek to commemorate in them something tragic – in fact, a kind of 'Twilight of Man', a defeat rather than a victory. If you look back on all my equestrian figures of the past twelve years [between 1946 – 1958] you will notice that the rider is each time less in control of his mount, and that the latter is each time more wild in its terror, but frozen stiff, rather than reared or running away. All this is because I feel that we are on the eve of the end of a whole world."

"Until the end of the fascist era and of the war [World War 2.], I continued to hark back to the sober realism [in his human figure sculptures, then] of the artists of the Etruscan funerary figures, or the sculptors of some Roman portraits, especially the earlier ones. My own way of reacting against the imperialist pathos of official Fascist art continued, until 1944, to consist in identifying my art very consciously with my private life, so that I never allowed myself any form of expression that might seem too blatantly public."

"it belongs to the highest levels of modern art, when they [the early Etruscan sculptors, very inspiring for Marini] found their images and their forms from basic mythical experiences.. ..he [Marini] tried to imitate their gestures to explain what he meant, then he became one with his creatures, belonging at once to this particular progeny of remote origin."

"My 'Pomone' live in a bright world, with their sunny disposition, full of humanity, of abundance, and of great sensuality. they represent a happy season that breaks the tragic time of war. in all these images, femininity is enriched with all its past meanings, those most inherent, most mysterious: a sort of unavoidable necessity, of unmovable stillness, of primitive and unconscious fertility. The figure, the statue, instead demands a wider research of shapes, of lines, of bodies. My women, that some find awkward, respond to this preoccupation. In the figure, I propose to myself to deepen the way I play with volume in a togetherness that is always more united, more steady, yet also free and nimble. But this research on volume is not the only premise of the sculptor, who need not ever forget what moves most in a sculpture is always its inspiration."

"My equestrian statues express the torment caused by the events of this century. the restlessness of my horse increases with each new work, the rider is always more exhausted, he has lost his domination of the beast and the catastrophes to which he succumbs resemble those that destroyed sodom and pompeii. I aspire to make visible the last stage of destruction of a myth, of the myth of heroic and victorious individualism, the humanists' man of virtue. my work in the last years doesn't want to be heroic, but tragic."

"Equestrian statues have always served, through the centuries, a kind of epic purpose. They set out to exalt a triumphant hero, a conqueror like Marcus Aurelius.. .In the past fifty years, this ancient relation between man and beast has been entirely transformed. The horse has been replaced, in its economic and its military functions, by the machine, by the tractor, the automobile or the tank."

"The Romantic painters were already addicted to a cult of the horse as an aristocratic beast.. ..From Géricault and Constantin Guys [both Romantic French painters] to Degas and Dufy, this cult of the horse found its expression in a new attitude towards sport and military life.. .In Odilon Redon’s visionary renderings of horses and later in those of Picasso and Chirico, we then see the horse become part of the fauna of a world of dreams and myths."

"There is an intimate relationship between my pictorial [2-dimensional] and my sculptural work. I would never begin on a sculpture without first gaining an idea of the colour.. .My mind is captivated by this task until I start to put down the colour on paper and imagine that this colour will become a drawing. And then, suddenly, the drawing begins to acquire shape, the shape, and this shape becomes the real shape."

"We must enter into the spirit of the character [for making a portrait]: here the challenge is to place this figure in the human space, to work out what he represents in relation to other people, other human personalities; when you've worked this out, you're done. this truth has to stand out in the end result of the portrait.. ..when this task is complete, and the subject is placed in the realm of the dead that go on living, I hand over my work."

"Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma. (Floria Tosca)"

"Whatever the atmosphere he wanted to create, Giacomo Puccini’s sound world is unique and unmistakeable with its opulent yet clear-cut orchestration and a miraculous fund of melodies with their bittersweet, tender lyricism. His masterly writing for the voice guarantees the survival of his music for many years to come."

"in te ravviso --il sogno ch'io vorrei sempre sognar! (Rodolfo)"

"Ho tante cose che ti voglio dire, o una sola, ma grande come il mare, come il mare profonda ed infinita...Sei il mio amore e tutta la mia vita! (Mimì)"

"Questo è il bacio di Tosca! (Floria Tosca)"

"L’esser uomo dabbene, Mariana mia, è ’l maggior capitale del mondo."

"Tal persona, tal pasta."

"È meglio vestir cencio con leanza, che broccato con disonoranza."

"Il cielo chiude volentieri gli occhi a nostri difetti, quando non son fatti avanti gli occhi del mondo, e quando per mancanza di testimoni non possa compire perfettamente il processo contra di noi."

"As always, victory will have a hundred fathers, but defeat will never be acknowledged by anyone at all."

"Contrastan le donne per esser vinte."

"Alle spese del compagno non si può imparare."

"Chi ama, si fida in tutto e per tutto della cosa amata."

"Io per mi pensava che in un giovine l’esser innamorato fusse il condimento di tutte le sue virtù, e che se ben alcun fusse una profonda sentina di vitii, Amor fusse bastante a sollevarlo in un momento fino a le stelle."

"L’amor non si paga se non con amore."

"Pochi servidori si trovano che per danari non si corrompano."

"Acque quete fan le cose."

"L’oro è quello che abbaglia gli occhi delle donne."

"Prendiam il dolce ognihor che torlo accade, Se ben d’amar alquanto ivi gustiamo; Ch’ al mondo huom mai non è beato a pieno."

"Il mondo va invecchiando e peggiorando di mano in mano."

"(Che) il cercar di sapere saper quel che saputo Accresce duolo, non m’è mai piaciuto."

"Un litigante è di vincer si ingordo, Che non dà a se, o altrui pace o riposo, Ma ad ogni altro piacer è cieco e sordo."

"La Fortuna è una Dea senza cervello, E però tutto il giorno fa pazzie."

"L’esser d’ un’ avvocato, chi ben pensa, E un molino, ove a macinar concorre D’ogni sorte di genti copia immensa."

"Di tre cose fa il diavolo insalata, Di lingue d’Avvocati, e delle dite De’ Notari, la terza è riservata."

"Come a comprar in piazza il poponi, Ne tagliarete cento e fra cotanti A pena due ne treverete bueni, Così hoggidì, fra lingue tante e tante Che fanno bel veder di fuora via Due per cento rispendene al sembiante."

"Poca uva fa la vigna pampinosa; E il dire e il far non son la stessa cosa."

"Ogni stato ha i suoi guai; e chi desia, Mutando il suo, trovarne un più giocondo, Cadde in una grandissima pazzia."