A Confused Harmony in Lalla Romano’s Rooms

An apartment overlooking the Accademia and the Pinacoteca di Brera holds the presence of Lalla Romano. She “lived” for almost fifty years in those rooms, where books, paintings, memories, feminine vanities, objects and disparate images (magazine cuttings, drawings, photographs, postcards...) accumulated in a harmonious confusion of vitality and passion. The apartment will become a “House Museum and Study Centre”, and everything will be left intact. She designed the furniture herself in 1932. This is no surprise: as a student of Felice Casorati, who believed in the complete artist, she had absorbed his lesson. Paesaggi d’assenza is an exhibition/journey into a private space, with photographs by Alessandro Vicario, curated by Antonio Ria (Biblioteca Cantonale di Bellinzona, until 2 April). Born in 1968, Vicario has been a professional photographer since 1999. With his lens he has visited the rooms, collecting not information about their surroundings but signs: bookcases threatening to give way under their weight; unusual assemblages of images in which Brigitte Bardot, Che, an alarm clock, Carlo Marx, the enigmatic smile of an Etruscan sculpture and the melancholy composure of an Egyptian head seem to suggest the possibility of reconciling the world. And then, the linear austerity of the kitchen furniture, echoing the Bauhaus, the Spartan simplicity of the bathroom, the geometric panes of textured glass in the doors. Precisely in these jarring contrasts one senses the spirit of Lalla Romano: a rigorous intellectual, writer and painter, and above all a woman who unstintingly absorbed every stimulus that time brought her.