Mannikins in Siena, Tuscany. Taken with a Leica M6 camera with a Leica Summilux ASPH ƒ/1.4 35mm lens. For more photo goodness, Visit my flickr photostream.Reading Michelangelo Antonioni: The Complete Films. I am a little bit sad that the authors have so confidently sub-titled the book, The Complete Films, since the director is still alive, although very old, and disabled by a stroke. But even as recently as three years ago Antonioni had made a short film as an episode in the feature EROS. I hope that the authors of the book will be proved wrong. Antonioni is a very great artist.
I am also reading, in a desultory way, The Dark Heart of Italy, by Tobias Jones. The author, a young Englishman named Tobias Jones gives a tour d'horizon of Italy in 2004 -- not the land of Verdi and Michelangelo, but the land of Berlusconi, the corrupt, super-rich media mogul who -- until very recently -- was at the head of the government.
There's nothing remarkable about the form of the book -- it seems that every Englishman must write a book the first time he goes abroad; the books are always cast as "fish-out-of-water" stories. Sometimes the books are comic; sometimes serious; sometimes -- unfortunately -- solemn. At best, the author measures his received ideas -- which is to say, prejudices -- against the realities of the place about which he writes. At worst, the man carps about how the damned foreigners don't do things like the English (although it is possible to be an entertaining curmudgeon: Paul Theroux has made a career of it).
Although there is not much humor in Tobias Jones' book, he happened onto his subject -- Italy -- at a particularly difficult moment in its history, and he reports what he saw, as an expatriate journalist. His book struck a chord with Italians, and it became a bestseller -- in English -- in Italy.
The book does explain many of the contradictions of which I had been made aware by friends who live there. My friends all love the beauty of the place, but they are perplexed and put off by many aspects of modern Italian society.
I would love to return to Italy, and I read this book as a way of understanding the place and the people. Up until now I have been strictly a tourist, enjoying the good, and ignoring the stuff I didn't understand. But that way yields up a very limited range of pleasures and satisfactions from a place -- better to understand more, to appreciate the place more, too.
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