Ferlinghetti - says the Director of Brescia Musei Luigi Di Corato - in addition to being the author of one of the best-selling collections of poetry in the world "A Coney Island of the Mind" (1958), he played a decisive role in the diffusion of the work of the writers of the Beat Generation, through the bookshop and publishing house City Lights Bookstore, which he founded in 1953 together with Peter D. Martin. Retracing Ferlinghetti's career, as this Brescian exhibition does, gives us the opportunity to pay homage to the entire literary movement, opening our gaze not only to the work of individual authors but more generally to the Beat phenomenon, which from New York to San Francisco, from the east coast to the west coast, it animated the American underground cultural landscape of the fifties and sixties”.
The exhibition itinerary also wants to tell how this literary current has had a particular following in Italy thanks to the translator and literary critic Fernanda Pivano, who was the first to translate and publish the work of authors such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Charles Bukowski and Ferlinghetti himself of whom she was a supporter and friend.
The visit to Italy of some of these authors – for example Kerouac participates in various conferences and gives an interview to RAI in 1966 and Ginsberg takes part in the Festival dei due Mondi in Spoleto in 1967 – also contributes to the fact that the Beat movement becomes country a cultural, musical and customs phenomenon. The exhibition thus becomes an opportunity to retrace the history of those years and recreate their atmosphere through printed materials, photographs and video recordings. Many of the books and documents on display, as well as a series of photographs taken of the Beats by Ettore Sottsass, come from Fernanda Pivano's immense archive, now curated by the Benetton Studi Ricerche Foundation and the Corriere della Sera Foundation.
In addition to the beautiful shots by Sottsass, some of which are unpublished, photographs by Robert Capa, Aldo Durazzi, Larry Keenan, Allen Ginsberg, Christopher Felver and Fred Lyon are presented in the exhibition.
The exhibition also documents the artistic career of Ferlinghetti who began drawing and painting immediately after the war while in Paris, to obtain a doctorate at the Sorbonne. Here he frequents the atelieres livres in his free time to practice drawing from life, thus discovering his own vocation for the figurative arts.
In Santa Giulia the precious oil on canvas Deux from 1950, the first work painted by Ferlinghetti, is exhibited, as well as a wide selection of drawings made between the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, never exhibited in Italy before. Large canvases, coming directly from the artist's collection, enrich the sections of the exhibition, testifying how Ferlinghetti has always been inspired by his own life experiences, from adventurous travels around the globe to the constant search for his origins.
The last rooms of the exhibition in Santa Giulia are reserved for Ferlinghetti's relationship with Italy. The poet discovers that he has Italian origins only at the age of twenty when he requests his birth certificate to volunteer in the United States Navy, a choice that will then determine his participation in the Normandy landings. On that occasion Ferlinghetti realizes that his father Carlo Leopoldo, who died before his birth, had anglicised his surname to Ferling. Only in 1955 did the poet decide to officially take his Italian surname and sign his entire literary and artistic work with it.
From this moment on Ferlinghetti will undertake a long and tortuous search to trace his father's birthplace, Brescia, managing to locate in 2005 the house from which he left to emigrate to the United States at a very young age.
image. Christopher Felver, Ferlinghetti at Ellis Island, 1994. The artist's collection, Sausalito, California © Chris Felver
