The underground car park of Villa Borghese, the vanguard, the gelatinous substrate and the two Italie

It’s one of those afternoons when one leaves behind the door thoughtfully. Almost just because time has granted a bright spell. The same random is the path taken: Viale Castro Pretorio over Italy, Villa Borghese. A little 'less the reason that leads me down the stairs of the underground parking. I do it in a sort of hypnosis, dream. The excuse is that I should get the car that I left there for several days but in reality is very different reason. There is almost a wish, step by step, to return back to the day when, at the opening, in November 1973, was set up inside a large exhibition, "Contemporary", organized by Achille Bonito Oliva with Graziella Lonardi.

 

What city was Rome in those years? It was, despite the artistic vitality - was precisely then that Christo packed two hundred meters of the Aurelian Walls - a sad city, gray? Who will have had ten, eleven years is likely that he would answer yes. "Not less of the rest of the country" would feel, perhaps, to specify those who then had already reached the age of reason. Exactly, as was Italy in those years? The unmasking of many intrigues was still far to come and the two Italie, that solar surface and the dark, and that grim underground of today is often confused in a "gelatinous substratum, were well separated. Entering a collision course only at certain points. 

 

It is not known what led Achille Bonito Oliva and Graziella Lonardi, to the end of this parking. But you can not exclude  that beyond the intent of doing amazing display in a space so unusual artists of international renown - an idea of what that event is represented can have it by visiting the MACRO via Reggio Emilia exhibition in Rome Ours was the vanguard - had, in their way, also aimed to shed light on these two Italie. I am convinced more and more not just return to the surface, searching the area above. Although, in partial confirmation of this intuition, there is only the usual bright of the grass of the great occasions and the presence, wacthful and austere, of the trees.