In the Footsteps of Lalla Romano: Between Absence and Presence

Paesaggi d’assenza, a book and exhibition by Alessandro Vicario, presents photographs of details in Lalla Romano’s home in Milan, which has remained intact since her death (26 June 2001). Yet space is almost entirely excluded from the representation. To emphasise absence. While at the same time focusing all attention on certain presences (imprints, old photographs, assorted objects). And it is precisely the presence of these traces that makes absence more apparent—and more poignant.

What is essential in memories and recollections?
What will be grasped and experienced anew by those who were not there.
Lalla Romano

Besides offering a critical contribution, this brief text is intended as an account of the research of photographer Alessandro Vicario—whose development I have followed from within—born in Modena in 1968 and a Milanese by adoption.

When he began working with me in 2002, he often came not only to my studio but also to Lalla Romano’s home in Via Brera, in central Milan, which has remained intact since the writer’s death on 26 June 2001. (I now live and work in this house, in accordance with Lalla’s own wishes, having lived with her during her final years; but I strive tenaciously to preserve it as she left it, with the aim of making it a house museum, a centre for study and documentation of her work, and the home of a foundation or association bearing her name: although, sadly, all my attempts have so far proved fruitless. Yet I do not give up.) As well as visiting the house, Vicario began reading Lalla Romano’s writings. (He is not only a photographer: his background includes a degree in Modern Literature from the University of Milan, where I had already met him and recognised his abilities during a course on photography in anthropological and geographical research that I taught at that university in 1994.)

I remember that he was struck by a presentation I gave about Lalla at a worthy cultural association in Milan in 2003. He began reading her work more intensively. Yet his passion for Lalla Romano’s writing could be said to have been inherited from his grandmother Jole, with whom he lived for several years, until her death. His grandmother was herself an avid reader of Lalla, and when she became blind towards the end of her life, her grandson Alessandro would bring her audio cassettes of readings from the books every month. He told me that, when he later read Lalla Romano’s works, vague memories of those recordings his grandmother used to listen to resurfaced: “not memories of plots, characters or descriptions, certainly, but of atmospheres, of familiar settings”.

Indeed, it was to his grandmother’s absence after her death—in the emptied house, which still retained faint traces of her presence—that he devoted an important work, recently realised as an exhibition at Galleria Officina Fotografica in Milan, entitled “Frammenti domestici tra memoria e oblio”.

So, after seeing some test photographs, I agreed to his request to be left alone during the scorching summer of 2003 to photograph Lalla Romano’s home: the house where she lived for almost fifty years, where she wrote most of her books, and where everything still speaks of her. Alessandro Vicario was able to rediscover her traces among the furniture she designed in Cuneo in 1932, when she married Innocenzo Monti (who would later conclude his career—between Cuneo, Turin and Milan—as chairman of Banca Commerciale Italiana); among her bookcases, in the bedroom, her study, the bathroom, the kitchen…

The kitchen was an important place for Lalla. After breakfast she would linger there to read the newspapers, sometimes beginning to write or take notes. Like the kitchen in the house in Cuneo, the “house at the Orti” of her adolescence: “The kitchen was important; we spent much of our lives there. I would like to distinguish its moments, the places within it: each one a world.” This is what she wrote around 1970 in the text “La cucina”, which was intended to become a chapter of a book about her years in Cuneo—the years of her adolescence—a book forever postponed and which, in the end, she did not write as originally conceived, starting from places. To the Cuneo years, following her childhood in Demonte (La penombra che abbiamo attraversato, 1964) and preceding her youth in Turin (Una giovinezza inventata, 1979), she later devoted Dall’ombra (1999), but with a new structure. In that text, Lalla Romano described every detail of her kitchen in Cuneo, its various elements and moments, just as she had experienced them.

Now it is a sensitive photographer who surveys the corners and details of her home, dwelling particularly on the kitchen. From this analytical and symbolic investigation—“abstract”: “Art is always abstract”, Lalla Romano would repeat, following her teacher Felice Casorati—Alessandro Vicario brings forth a presence that, though it has now become absence, is no less alive for that.

Thanks to Edizioni Le Ricerche in Losone (Canton Ticino) and its publisher Jean Olaniszyn, this work has become a book, Paesaggi d’assenza. Sulle tracce di Lalla Romano: it is being published as the second volume in the “Quaderni d’arte” series, inaugurated in Lalla Romano’s name with Venti disegni inediti (1938–1960). Under the same title it is also becoming a travelling exhibition, with its first showing in Milan at the Feltrinelli bookshop in Via Manzoni, which Lalla often visited, not least because it was close to her home.

In the volume, enriched by a previously unpublished poem by Lalla Romano that we reproduce here, the reader will also find a critical essay by Roberto Signorini presenting the young photographer’s work and the importance of this research within his brief but rich history, with a broader consideration of the significance of this survey for “the artistic practice of photography” and “theoretical reflection upon it”. Vicario’s research, Signorini notes, “appears remote from any anecdotal interest”: “photography captures the writer’s absence in the presence of her traces”. With a “gentle and contemplative” gaze, he can see in “domestic objects, paintings and books, still alive and available… the signs of time not only as an ending but also as a hope of continuity”. This research is rich in resonances and references, the outcome of a careful analysis of photography’s theoretical premises. Roberto Signorini stresses that in Alessandro Vicario’s photographic fragments there is, at once concealed and perceptible, “the depth of Lalla Romano’s writing and life. Yet this photography does not represent that writing and that life; it does not illustrate or describe them: it presents their traces through its own existence as a trace, an object placed alongside objects; and through this closed and mute presence, before which the artist steps aside, it suggests how much remains for us to discover and understand in what we believe we see”.

For my part, I would simply like to try to connect Alessandro Vicario’s work with Lalla Romano’s writing as a whole, thus providing an adequate reason for publishing this book on the third anniversary of the writer’s death—a date that is therefore meaningful to us, her readers.

It seems natural to place all this within the concept and practice of memory in Lalla Romano’s writing: her books arise from memory, which filters recollections. That memory which, as she wrote, “may rightly be called a daughter of the Muses (that is what works are)”: “the foremost measure of every narrative” (Un sogno del Nord, 1989). Memory is connected to the theme of time: “We live immersed in time, but time is not only what clocks measure… There is a time of waiting, a time of regret… In a sense, an artist always lives in the present. There is an eternal present in which we rediscover our past… Because it is relived, it becomes present” (L’eterno presente. Conversazione con Antonio Ria, 1998). And what, for Lalla Romano, is the relationship between writing and time? Here is her answer: “Writing gives back, transformed, what time takes away from us.”

I had been struck by a sentence by the great eighteenth-century French thinker Joseph Joubert, whom Lalla regarded as her teacher: “Among the three dimensions we must count time, space and silence.” In that conversation I asked her whether these were also the dimensions of her life and her writing. “Certainly,” she replied, “silence is what gives value to the few words that emerge from that silence.” She also pointed out that “the words used to compose a poem or a work of fiction” have a different value from the words we commonly use to communicate: “they are like the tesserae of a mosaic, which must be few, precise and necessary”. Therefore the words of creative writing, she concluded, “must be few, and must indeed be surrounded by the space that silence forms”.

“A space of silence”: this is how we might define Lalla Romano’s home, a house immersed in “half-light”—as it always was and still is—which Alessandro Vicario has “crossed” and then succeeded in conveying to us in his images. “Places certainly have a soul,” writes the philosopher and psychoanalyst James Hillman in his book L’anima dei luoghi (2004), “and our task is to discover it.” Alessandro Vicario has brought forth the hidden inner life of Lalla Romano’s home, the “depth of the place”, in distance and in presence: “a highly complex interior and dynamic topography, made up of feelings and memories, figures and forces, fantasies and thoughts” (Giorgio Montefoschi, “Corriere della Sera”, 3 June 2004). In essence, a “space of the soul”.

For this reason, in his photographs physical space is almost entirely excluded from the representation. To emphasise absence. While at the same time focusing all attention on certain presences (imprints, old photographs, assorted objects). “And it is precisely the presence of these traces,” Vicario writes in the introduction, “that makes absence more apparent—and more poignant.”

Here, then, the connection emerges between Alessandro Vicario’s photographic research and Lalla Romano’s writing. Within that foundational idea of memory—“daughter of the Muses”, but also “mother (Mnemosyne)”—space extends into time: yet everything is surrounded by silence. “For me, writing,” Lalla said in 1996 when presenting the new Einaudi edition of Nei mari estremi, “has always meant taking a few images from the dense and complex fabric of life, a few notes from the noise of the world, and surrounding them with silence.” “This passage struck me like lightning,” Alessandro Vicario notes in turn. “Ultimately, I too do nothing but isolate certain details from the complex fabric of the world, to surround them with empty spaces. With silences.” The silence surrounding words in Lalla Romano’s writing is therefore akin to the silence that hovers in Alessandro Vicario’s photographs. Finally, we should not forget how important “photographic memory” has been in Lalla Romano’s work. Not only in her books explicitly composed with and around photographs—especially her father Roberto’s photographs of Demonte—but as a point of departure, a narrative trigger for her other novels: La penombra che abbiamo attraversato comes to mind.

I would like to close with the words Lalla Romano wrote in 2000 at the end of her last book, Ritorno a Ponte Stura (Demonte): “There is no conclusion, because time continues. It moves forward and returns. Such is its rhythm.”

Only silence
beyond the frost of worlds
beyond the solitary tread of the old
beyond the forgotten sleep of the dead

only silence lives

Lalla Romano

Summer
by Lalla Romano

The great summer is much like me,
at the hour of noon; and already the time
has come midway through the journey
of day and year: dawn is now remote,
the timid season of waiting:
it anticipates the hour of return
and, with its peace, the evening
and the shadow is brief, and time is difficult.

Lalla Romano, previously unpublished poem. The manuscript is shown in the background.

Photograph by Antonio Ria.