“Fernanda Pivano e la Beat generation – Mostra di fotografie e memorie” is the title of this collection of photos on display in Verona from 1st December last to 2nd February 2008, at the Modern Section of the Biblioteca Civica in the centre of Verona, on the corner of via Cappello (at number 23 is the home of Giulietta Capuleti, a place of continuous pilgrimage to this day) and vicolo San Sebastiano.
The exhibition was set up by the Verona City Council for Culture with the help of Biblioteca Riccardo e Fernanda Pivano - Fondazione Benetton studi e ricerche and the Verona Centro Internazionale di Fotografia Scavi Scaligeri.
45 photos are on display, in two sections: in the first one there are 30 black and white pictures taken as far back as 1948 by Ettore Sottsass – Pivano’s husband – some on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of “On the road”.
In the second section, there are 10 photos of the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who then became the publisher of the Beat movement, taken from the Conz Archive in Verona and 5 photos of Pivano taken between 2002 and 2005 by Walter Pescara, the photographer and curator of the collection.
Then there is a special section dedicated to autographed books, documents and papers that relate mainly to Hernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
This exhibition is noteworthy because, among other things, it allows young people to learn about the Beat movement that their “all and now” generation feeds on.
A generation that is considered “as voracious as it is unknowing” by Pescara, who denounces the fact that all too often in schools the Fifties are barely mentioned.
However, Pescara also says, “that climate of holier-than-thou conformism and prohibitionism that existed at the time has been eroded in the West thanks to those poets, writers and musicians: opinions that went against the tide, that dissociated themselves from the ideas shared by most"; these are words that echo those of the poet Gregory Corso: “Beat is whoever breaks away from the established line in order to follow the line of his destiny”.
And the faces of those pacifist-revolutionaries are all there, often with Fernanda Pivano:
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Hemingway, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Rudolf Nureyev, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, Julian Beck, Judith Malina.
The collection that celebrates two important anniversaries of the two fathers of the movement, Kerouac and Ginsberg, is on display among the shelves and the computers of the renewed artistic and high tech version of the Library.
In fact, 2007 is the 50th anniversary of the Beat Bible: On the road, written in 1951 on a roll of teleprinter paper and published in New York in 1957 by Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, while the author of Howl, a scandalous book published in 1956 by the same publishing house, who was taken to court for it the following year, died ten years ago.
The group was kept together by an extraordinary woman: Fernanda Pivano, 90 last July, famous above all for being Hemingway's translator, who also inspired Kerouac himself when he wrote the great new American novel.
Of the over 40 translations from across the ocean, Italy owes Pivano the Antologia di Spoon River by Edgar Lee Master, paraphrased to music by Fabrizio De Andrè, and the made-in-Usa classics: from Faulkner to Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom she met personally in order to grasp their essence.
Finally, the event is enriched by a series of fringe appointments, such as the screening of a video on the Beat Generation and a theatre performance on Kerouac.
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