Guido Piovene

"Letters of a novice (C.E.1960) – subject"

"The successful man, within the walls of his own home, is often unsuccessful and unhappy."

"The writer must give himself whole, only once the trajectory is completed will it be possible to judge where in it he has focused best."

"I believe that the modern writer must live everything in public, in the company of dialogue with others, outside the myth of restraint."

"One of the offices of art is to convey regrets and remorse."

"«Now I understand what good the horror of renunciation and the terror of dying can do. Well, now I say to myself: there is only one way to avoid meeting death, that of dying first. I will have to be afraid, very afraid, and thanks to it I will not give up anything, I will not break any bonds, I will not admit abandonment: I will close myself alive in an absolute world, which is already the afterlife. Then the vice of cowardice and selfishness, avarice and pride, will become a non-mortal loyalty, in which death cannot have an effect, because its passing will be any moment of our absolute life. This is why I won't let you die away from me.""

"Every new moment of life is an additional right to refuse death."

"Every human pleasure finds its opposite and its destruction within itself."

"I hate remorse, which ties man to the past. I believe it is right to revolt in the face of injustice and in fact there are martyrs, but I hate collectors of revolts, who love the revolt itself: it is a terrible chain. (p. 53)"

"The soul is what you make, and the bonds are good if they enter it, bad if they remain against or outside, even if they call them holy. (p. 59)"

"There are no holy laws, in the physical world and in the moral world; but all the laws, as they are discovered, are holy. (p. 61)"

"There are men whose character is given almost exclusively by their way of thinking, but they too exist in nature, no less than the active and the adventurers. (p. 69)"

"The soul lives for the work, only for the work. Without the work one is not a soul. (p. 124)"

"The sky is divided into three, the nearby moon, the stars that burn and escape, and in the middle, half of man and half of the world, the quiet planets, great still affectionate beings that reconcile love and sleep. (p. 129)"

"The vogue for James Bond is on the decline. The favor of the general public is no longer what it once was. Agent 007 represented a moment, not without interest for me, in the history of the adventure film-story. Whoever makes the history of the genre will not be able to forget it."

"The cultural industry is largely a myth, a target of convenience, as the devil and witches were in other times. If anything, the industry and public moods are in the same boat: the set of products ends up regularly corresponding to a genuine demand."

"The films of James Bond, to the usual mixture of violence, sex, technology, add something more, which marked the moment: an aestheticism of images, a touch of dandyism, a preciousness of the horror, in which motifs typical late nineteenth century machines seemed to filter through futuristic and science fiction machines."

"The genre film, or novel, of espionage is today moving towards new formulas. The triumphant, invincible hero, all gesture, without soul, is replaced by another formula, the meditative, psychologizing spy, who feels the meanness, the sadness, the filth of his profession, the disappointed and disgusted hero."

"In You Only Live Twice the director (Lewis Gilbert) does not bring a fresh invention. The actor, Sean Connery, has aged. The "bad guys" are insipid, they don't stand out, they don't cause any fear. The love scenes seem wrapped in cellophane"

". The Red Count. (Marcello Marchesi)"

"Guido Piovene, De America, Garzanti, Milan, C.E.1961."

"Guido Piovene, The puppets and the flying dragon, La Fiera Letteraria, October 19, C.E.1967"

"Guido Piovene, The Straw Tail, Baldini Castoldi Dalai, C.E.2001."

"Guido Piovene, La gazzetta nera, Oscar Mondadori, C.E.1968."

"Guido Piovene, The Furies, C.E.1958."

"Guido Piovene, The cold stars, Mondadori, C.E.1976."

"Guido Piovene, American Novel, CDE, C.E.1980."

"Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, Baldini & Castoldi, Milan, C.E.2013. ISBN 978-88-6852-019-9"

"Loveless Lovers (C.E.1948) – screenplay"

"Children, "creatures" are swarming. Even in average restaurants, there are few patrons without children around. Naples is a lactating and suckling city, perpetually pregnant. A Neapolitan demigod is love; In the popular consciousness, love is redeemed through creation. (p. 432)"

"Naples is not a city for purists. I see a small baroque church, which carries the statue of an angel halfway up to the same height, and extends on the same floor with the window and balcony of an unpretentious house. On the balcony stands a woman, elbow to elbow with the statue of the angel; this is really Naples; Let the house and the balcony be torn down, and the church will also have become sloppy. In all cities, but especially in Naples, it is clear that art is not only made up of what we call works of art. (p. 433)"

"It is an accent that I have often heard resonate in Naples in a different form. An enchantment in living, but combined with the implication that living has something painful for itself. There is a kind of pendulum between that enchantment and that hidden implication: you never know which one will prevail. (p. 437)"

"In Naples, as in Paris, it is difficult to hear, at least in conversation, those absolute, radically negative judgments that are heard elsewhere; as in Paris, the tendency is rather towards absolution, naturally with a somewhat skeptical undertone, and without delving too deeply; There is always, in the judgments, a humor and a politeness of worldly capital. (p. 443)"

"Just as they have found a way to live with saints, miracles, science and technology, these people live in confidence with occult forces and cosmic powers. Everywhere he juggles with his mischief, like the little boat on the waves of the sea. This is also why I believe that the volcano of Naples, like the archaeological excavations of the Neapolitan area, have no equivalent anywhere in the world: everything in Naples is humanized twice. (pp. 464-465)"

"A splendid legacy of Bourbon rule, the National Archaeological Museum of Naples|National Museum]] is inside the soul of Naples, and a foreigner notices it more than a Neapolitan himself. [...] Roman life here loses all academic solemnity, and approaches with a loquacious realism; confidence takes the place of reverence; you couldn't think of a museum like this if not in Naples [...] (pp. 465-466)"

"It may be that Neapolitan cuisine, as one gastronome told me, is poor city cuisine; a primordial cuisine, born from the three elementary products of the land and water, wheat, vegetables and fish; Played on the variations of three foods, pasta, fish and the ancient pizza. Many foreigners do not like the cuisine of Naples because, led by different habits, they never discover it. But, when it is good, it contains, at the same time, antiquity and nature; it leads to communion with nature and with a remote past; It's simple and mythological. (p. 473)"

"There were those who told me that the two gardens of Ravello, at Villa Rufolo and at Cimbrone, are the most extraordinary gardens in the world together with those of Charleston in South Carolina; And it is right in the sense that neither one nor the other has equivalents elsewhere. Perhaps the gardeners in Ravello were influenced by the British. Of course, they have acquired the art of matching very different colors by throwing them haphazardly, as if on a palette, refraining from overly drawn flower beds. They are gardens, those of Ravello, romantic, of a brilliant scapigliatura. (p. 477)"

"Salerno is different from Naples, in appearance and spirit. This is where a lot of clichés about southern Italy fall. The appearance is in fact almost northern, and the cleanliness almost Swiss. The speeches are dry, short, typical of active people. [...] Those who know Salerno life intimately tell me that it is a mixture, typical of southern Italy in this phase of transition, and in the leading places, of still patriarchal customs and modernisms sometimes even strange and excessive. [...] If you look closely at Salerno, you get the impression of a fairly typical centre of the transformation phase of southern Italy. Industrialization and prosperity are progressing, even if the old liabilities still weigh heavily. (pp. 477-478)"

"The Royal Palace of Caserta The charm of this Neapolitan Versailles [...] comes for me above all from a certain gratuitous and fabulous that emanates from this palace of disproportionate size rising in the middle of a flat plain: there is, as we have already said, a Neapolitan avant-lettre surrealism, which was born from the theatrical splendour of Naples: and which consists in living great architectural fantasies where they least expect them. The park itself, crossed by the waters falling from a mound, then flowing in a slight slope from basin to basin, interrupted by white groups of large statues, animals, divinities, winds that swell the cheeks, Actaeon transformed into a deer and torn to pieces by dogs, is a macroscopic fantasy, in which everything seems to be a little bigger than it should be; This generates a disturbance of the imagination, which the Baroque called wonder. There is a clear desire to surpass in pomp the great European palaces and the great metropolises; the contrast between this dream and the reality of the environment means that Caserta, much more than that of Versailles, is a fantasy palace. (pp. 493-494)"

"You climb the tawny yellow side of the mountain; at the foot there is the plain, the immense quadrilateral of the palace; Then you go inland, and the plain disappears. There exists in Provence a splendid and illustrious city abandoned among the rocks, Les Beaux; , Lombard, built in the eighth century, formerly the seat of bishops and counts, is its Italian equivalent. Only Les Beaux is of two styles, medieval and Renaissance, Caserta all medieval; and Les Beaux is celebrated in France, while old Caserta is almost unknown to us. Capable of accommodating many thousands of people, it contains about two hundred. It is a knot of dead and monochrome houses and alleys, the yellowish color of travertine; all around a landscape of barren, stony hills, sown with spikes of towers; A still and perfect landscape. (p. 494)"

"There is a greater civic and historical pride in Benevento than in the other provincial cities of Campania. (p. 496)"

"Benevento is not Naples, and he wants to let you know. Their character, the people of Benevento point out to me, is already very different from that of the rest of Campania: harder, more closed, more Alpine. Salerno has something Milanese about it as much as is possible in the South; I found in Avellino perfect specimens of a certain type of Southern intellectual, intelligent, pessimistic, who contemplates himself and his ailments as a chapter of history. The people of Benevento, on the other hand, carry, if anything, to the South some characteristics of the Trentinos. The climate itself is cold, not very Campanian; The beautiful views of the province are alpine. (p. 496)"

"After the fall of Rome, Benevento had another period of splendour under Lombard rule, and was the most important Lombard fief in the South. Under Rome, and in the Middle Ages, it was a great center of commercial traffic between the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Seas. The people of Benevento care about that distant background of internationalism. The very names, scholars tell me, in the documents in the archives, show that the families came from all over; the population had an international composition, and Benevento something of the metropolis. (p. 496)"

"Today Benevento is largely a brand new city with oases of beautiful monuments. Even in the remnants of what was once the intellectual aristocracy of the South, alive although numerically restricted, I have noticed here a passion for art, a defense of the artistic and archaeological heritage, which are less common in the North of Italy. It is that humanistic passion that in the South of Italy now threatens to be shipwrecked, but which here is kept awake, as I said, also by civic pride. (pp. 496-497)"

"[...] the Arch of Trajan, perhaps the most beautiful and harmonious of the existing Roman arches, more beautiful than those of Rome. And it is also a strangely modern arch, since you can see Trajan in the bas-reliefs dedicated to social and welfare works. (p. 497)"

"Italy, with its landscapes, is a distillation of the world, the Marche of Italy. (p. 508)"

"A trip to the Marche region, not hurried, leads to see wonders. (p. 513)"

"Ascoli Piceno [...] is one of the most beautiful small towns in Italy, and I don't see any other that resembles it. Gide preferred it [...] as beautiful as some cities in southern France, not so much for this or that monument in a special way, but for its whole, for its anthological quality, for an enchantment that comes from nothing and everything. More than any other, it must be defended from stupid disembowelment. You must have walked through it, starting from Piazza del Popolo, the Italian square that together with that of San Marco in Venice gives more of an impression of a hall, surrounded by arcades, closed by the stupendous apse of San Francesco; or along the Baptistery of the Duomo; or along the steep banks of the Tronto; and in the narrow streets, called "rue," where the palaces are countless; and that spread out into small squares [...] Ascoli is a city of towers, anthological as we have said, because there are many styles, the Romanesque, the Gothic, the Renaissance, the Baroque. But the Romanesque remains the constant background, the color; stone-walled, windowless churches; a travertine of a warm, uniform grey, without plaster [...] That grey marble is all ornamented, worked, engraved [...] here, on every door and window, you see fruit, foliage, female caryatids, flowers, animals, stars, or even simply proverbs and carved sentences. (p. 534)"

"Wherever you feel the space. Therefore The Eagle is gay. Located at over 700 meters, the highest, if I'm not mistaken, among the Italian provincial capitals after Enna and Potenza, it is a city that breathes. The gaze, as soon as it finds an opening, immediately goes far away, with the immediacy of a submerged body that comes to the surface, up to the Gran Sasso and the Sirente, dominating the vast basin. (pp. 557-558)"

"On Calabria It is certainly the strangest of our regions. In its vast mountain areas it sometimes does not seem to be in the South, but in Switzerland, in South Tyrol, in the Scandinavian countries. From this imaginary North you jump to olive forests, along coasts of the classic Mediterranean type. It is wedged with canyons reminiscent of the United States, stretches of African desert and corners where the buildings retain some memory of Byzantium. It would seem that the debris of different worlds has collapsed together here; that an arbitrary deity, after having created the continents and seasons, amused himself by breaking them to mix their shining fragments. (pp. 559-660)"