GIOVANNA FOZZER

“I managed to understand my youth only by tricking it. I beset it greedily,” wrote Piero Bigongiari in 1938, transcribed by Ennio Scalet in 1954 in a letter to Giovanna, also consisting of a passage from Plots by Mario Luzi. Blazing childhoods, taking any risk, even deadly, those of Davide Orler, Giulio Alchini and Riccardo Schweizer, the friends (born in the late Twenties and Thirties) who met up in the early Fifties, especially in summer, in their native Primiero Valley. The smallest valley in the small region of Trentino seemed to be a melting pot of intelligentsia and passions: passion for art, poetry and beauty - partly discounted as an inferno of poverty, suspicion and misunderstanding. They spent their nights walking from one town to another, Ennio and Davide, Giulio and Riccardo, talking about art: Morandi or Picasso, Goya or Rembrandt, reciting Pasolini, Valéry or Rimbaud, Montale, Gatto or Saba, quoting by heart pages from Ragghianti or Longhi, agreeing and disagreeing about ideas, about love.

Now and then they met up in Venice - the museums, the exhibitions, the intellectuals - and met Giovanna Bemporad who was already reciting the hendecasyllables of her Odyssey, or the beautiful waitress in the bar, with the rose on her bosom, or Zoltan Rakoši, the supreme intellectual, the stateless Hungarian at the risk of being hanged, who knew everything about everything, from ancient and modern languages to Venice’s stones and history.

Bursts of friendship and irony, drinking and fighting in taverns, literary salons, amazing encounters; as well as poverty, and the gradual dispersion of these youths in the early years after the war towards life: painting, sculpture, poetry, even work, that would save them from poverty in the end. But soon came misfortune and the first death, that of Giulio in 1958.

Into Davide Orler’s painting - having descended from the dolomitic valley to serve in the Navy in La Spezia (a guaranteed wage and plenty of new experiences) - entered the sea for the first time.

Davide Orler and Riccardo Schweizer  

(about 1949)

Ship “Duilio” (about 1950)