Travelling with Alessandro Vicario through Lalla Romano’s “Landscape Found Again”

I believe that the best and most effective way to remember Lalla Romano (1906–2001) on the centenary of her birth is to entrust her “memory” to books, to the words that remain. That is why we have intensified the publication of books by and about Lalla Romano on this occasion: I shall briefly list them in order of appearance. Beginning with her Diario ultimo, published by Einaudi, an “extreme” book, almost at the limits of language, a “mute song”: her notes, aphorisms, poems and reflections from the final months before her death, when—by then almost blind—she clung to writing as her only possibility of survival.

The Swiss publisher Jean Olanizsyn (Edizioni Le Ricerche) then published two volumes accompanying exhibitions of Lalla Romano’s work in Lugano and Sanremo, the result of extensive research into her relationship with Switzerland and Liguria respectively, particularly with Ligurian writers and artists: volumes that also include previously unpublished texts by Lalla and other writers. Their titles are Lalla Romano. Il silenzio condiviso and Lalla Romano fra scrittura e immagini della Liguria.

Ernesto Ferrero has intelligently and effectively collected and introduced a series of Lalla’s texts to form the volume (published by Manni in Lecce) that he has entitled Vita di Lalla Romano raccontata da lei medesima, complemented by Lalla’s self-portraits with her own commentary: an evocative guide to the writer’s life, works, passions and ideas, to her “new way of seeing and telling in the spirit of modernity”.

Lalla’s continuing relevance also emerges from the young writer Paolo Di Paolo’s “coming-of-age novel”: his emergence from adolescence and first encounter with adult life, with the reflections, fears, suffering, emotions, joys and discoveries of a twenty-three-year-old coming to terms with life and writing. Paolo Di Paolo’s Come un’isola, then, is an “initiatory journey”, an “existential diary”; subtitled Viaggio con Lalla Romano and published in Rome by Giulio Perrone, it demonstrates Lalla’s modernity, the “fruitfulness” of her “teaching” or, more simply, the fascination that her writing holds and can hold for young people today, to the point of inspiring this “self-aware, rarefied prose, painstakingly intent on inner movements”, as Dacia Maraini has described it. Interlinea in Novara has also published a collection of all the writings and reviews of Lalla’s works published by Carlo Bo since 1951: the volume is entitled Leggere Lalla Romano. It offers a way to compare one’s own reading with that of a perceptive and faithful critic who, over time, was able to penetrate deeply the style and inventions that emerged from the writer’s successive works.

The young artist Alessandro Vicario, too, offers further evidence of the depth of his research into Lalla Romano’s work through another volume of photographs accompanied by texts by Lalla, following the publication in 2004 of Paesaggi d’assenza. Sulle tracce di Lalla Romano (Edizioni Le Ricerche), which we presented here at the time. The new volume is entitled Un paesaggio ritrovato, with the subtitle A Demonte e in Valle Stura sulle tracce di Lalla Romano. Published in Turin by Weber & Weber, it will also become an exhibition in February 2007 at Alberto Weber’s Turin gallery, a significant highlight of a series of exhibitions covering Lalla Romano’s entire body of work that we are preparing in Turin with the Regional Council of Piedmont and the Turin World Book Capital with Rome initiative. We now wish to give a fuller account of this important project by Vicario, which has become both a book and an exhibition.

As Giovanni Tesio perceptively observes in his introductory text to Un paesaggio ritrovato, in Lalla Romano’s poetics “places are everything”: “Places are the pivots of a journey seeking the secret, the ecstatic, the enduring. Highly specific places, yet at the same time enchanted, fairy-tale-like, remote.” The literary critic also quotes Lalla Romano’s assertion: “For me, places too are a little like people.” And it is precisely in this direction that Vicario’s research proceeds, its aim, Tesio notes, being “to interpret a body of writing, to find an image that—in its difference—corresponds to it. A relationship moving from text to text. Not a verification, then. Nor an inventory. But an epiphany.”

That, then, is what Alessandro Vicario’s photographs are: an epiphany, a manifestation of that “feeling for places” which is central to Lalla Romano’s writing. Vicario masterfully interprets her texts, particularly La penombra che abbiamo attraversato, himself passing through their “half-light”, “that of a text loved to the point of embodying the feeling that informs it” (Tesio). Vicario’s precision, his “creative passion”, draw us along with him “from the written village to the real village, from emotional geography to the geography of the place itself”, the concrete place. Yet his is a “return” to Demonte, no “less necessary than his departure from the Ponte Stura [the ‘artistic name’ that Lalla Romano gave Demonte in her works] that inspired him”: that symbolic, almost metaphysical “Ponte Stura” of every place of every childhood, which has left an indelible mark, for ever and on everyone. This is why Giovanni Tesio ultimately speaks of a “‘half-light’ of affinities” between Lalla Romano and Alessandro Vicario. And this is why, as Vicario himself observes in his text in the volume, the inspiring idea of childhood was fundamental to this research: that “child’s gaze” which gives things their mystery. “Photography,” he writes, “is an approach to things that allows a little of their irreducible mystery to emanate from them—from what is visible of them: from their appearances.” And he concludes: “Photography is the medium of choice for recording the appearance of things. And appearance—as Lalla Romano herself reminds us—‘expresses the meaning of substance’ (In vacanza col buon samaritano).”

Alessandro Vicario’s style and form—which in art is substance—are also in accord with Lalla’s style. In her essay in the volume, Gigliola Foschi, a historian and critic of art and photography, observes: “Strictly free of nostalgia, as precise as testimony, this artist’s images, once again in tune with Lalla’s writing, proceed by subtraction rather than addition.” Lalla Romano “strips her sentences down until they appear to have been cut out of the uncontrollable magma of life, until every word becomes inevitable, as precise as a fragment of reality. He uses photography to take a sample, eliminates every superfluous element, stands before things as if to prevent them from escaping, photographs them at close range and isolates them, surrounding them with silence.” Yes, exactly as in Lalla Romano’s style: “For me, writing 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.”

But let us return to places, to their centrality in Lalla Romano and, by reflection, in this work by Alessandro Vicario. Precisely because of the importance that the places of her origins held in Lalla’s life and writing, we wanted the national celebration of the centenary of her birth, last 11 November, to take place between Demonte and Cuneo. “Demonte,” Lalla Romano wrote in a short text that remained unpublished, “has always been for me, and is even more so now, not only the real village, which I always find little changed, but also the symbol of everything that has mattered in my life, and above all in my work—that is, in my writing.” As the years pass, Lalla Romano’s awareness of the importance of the places of her origins becomes increasingly insistent, culminating in this statement from 2000, a few months before her death, in a text, Dedicato a Cuneo, that opened the small catalogue of the exhibition L’ora del tempo. Lalla Romano a Cuneo. Dipinti, disegni, documenti, and which she described as a “testament/confession”: “My parents came from Cuneo, and I consider myself a native of Cuneo, although my homeland is Demonte, the principal town of the Stura Valley. I was born in Demonte by chance, because my parents were living there at the time, having moved there for my father’s work. I fear that at times in my life I have thought that the place of my birth did not matter. Now, however, I think that the place where we were born is an important sign of our destiny.”

Alongside this awareness of the importance of places of origin, the theme of return emerges in Lalla Romano, less as a physical, material return than as a symbolic one: to the origins of one’s “destiny”, of the original inspiration of art, of writing. And the text quoted above, Dedicato a Cuneo, concludes with this illuminating statement: “We always return to the place we have never left.”

The theme of “return”, of “origins”, constantly accompanies Lalla Romano’s reflections: one need only think of the last book published during her lifetime, in 2000, Ritorno a Ponte Stura: “Everything that will be is already there in the origins. It is not determinism, an odious term, but freedom. A sacred word.” And the final chapter opens with precisely this statement: “In the mode of writing, returns are a fundamental, motionless time.”

This theme of return also emerges in Diario ultimo: “Can one return to a place where one has never been? Yes, provided one loves that place deeply. / It is a thought from fairy tales. / And fairy tales are poetry for children. // Why is memory more beautiful than reality? / Because it is the memory of the village where we have never been. / How can we remember it? / We desire it. // Can we long to return to a village where we have never been? Yes, if we have visited it in a dream.” Lalla Romano writes of love, fairy tales, poetry, memory, desire and dreams: all themes that recur extensively in her work and are taken up here in succession, in a chain of thought whose development would lead us far.

Alessandro Vicario has undertaken this long journey of “return”, of “rediscovery”, because he has long loved, imagined and contemplated these places—even before going there in person—in Lalla’s books (especially La penombra che abbiamo attraversato and her novels “in images”) and in Roberto Romano’s photographs. What Lalla draws from Joubert (“There are no beautiful books except those that have been contemplated for a long time”) also applies to this research, this exhibition and this volume by Alessandro Vicario.

After Paesaggi d’assenza, on Lalla’s home, which remained intact after her death, this was the further step to take: to return to the origins, not only as a philological choice but as a poetic one. There were two years of intensive research, first in the Lalla Romano Archive in her Milan home; then Vicario made numerous journeys, with lengthy stays in Demonte and the Stura Valley throughout the four seasons. Yet beyond the commitment and seriousness, I would like to emphasise—following Lalla’s words—that combination of dream, desire and fairy tale, and therefore of a search for poetry, that has characterised this work by Alessandro Vicario. Yes, Alessandro has “returned to a village where he had never been”, because he had previously “visited it in a dream”: that is, in the realm of desire and poetic invention.

And then, what matters is not going but returning: not finding but finding again. This is the “landscape” that Vicario has “found again”: the “landscape of the soul”, even before the physical and natural landscape of the Stura Valley. The epiphany of Alessandro Vicario’s research, of his encounter with Lalla Romano’s writing through revisiting the places of the writer’s childhood, lies precisely in the “revelation” of a place that everyone can inhabit as a metaphor. His photographs are not simply documents or traces: they come to reveal a journey not so much into the past as into the present of each of us.

Demonte. Wednesday, 14 June 2006, 20:58.
“I went out into the street in front of the hotel, and I felt the air. The air can be enough for me. It is my air.”
Lalla Romano

In the Ischiator valley. Thursday, 2 February 2006, 15:31.
“The names of those mountains, with their strange, mysterious sound, as though in an unknown language. They were Tinibras, Nebius, Ischiator. They evoked Arctic landscapes, desolate and solemn.”

In the Arma valley. Friday, 16 September 2005, 15:38.
“For me, as for my mother, the mountains were beauty.”

In the Arma valley. Friday, 16 September 2005, 15:38.
“No other valley, near or far, has that air. I recognise it by its faint smell of milk, of straw bedding, of bitter herbs.”

Demonte, the Cant stream from the bridge on the road to Perosa. Tuesday, 31 January 2006, 13:06.
“There was a correspondence between the wind and the roar of the Cant; both were an inexhaustible flow.”

Demonte, the town hall, in the room where receptions and dances took place. Sunday, 7 August 2005, 15:38.
“Certain festivities that I tried to imagine belonged to the time before.”

Borgata Biancotti, near San Giacomo. Wednesday, 14 June 2006, 15:25.
“The hamlets, the last huts, were like humanity’s outermost tents on the threshold of another world; they were wretched and privileged at once.”

Demonte, exterior of the house where the castle caretaker lived. Thursday, 15 September 2005, 18:26.
“A vague fear loomed from above, from the caretaker’s house, which one did not approach.”

Near Festiona. Friday, 16 June 2006, 06:10.