Florestano Vancini : a memoir
Hit by a thunderbolt that determined a career and style of life.
“In my day, it made a difference whether you were born and raised inside or outside the walls. Ferrara seemed to be a fortified place compared to that limitless countryside, poor and hard-working, and my father was only the Boara postman….” Florestano Vancini, who died on 18 September 2008 last, was physically born inside the walls, on 24 August 1926 in the hospital. However he was raised in Boara, the first village on the road to Copparo, and not “inside” the walled city.
Boldini in Paris
The relationship between Boldini and French Impressionism will be explored in this great exhibition.
Boldini painted a fascinating picture called Cantante mondana [“Society singer”] in the mid-1880s. It shows a snapshot of the Paris of the late nineteen-hundreds - the life, the cafés and the music halls that the artist patronised along with his friends and fellow-painters like Degas - and as such lay outside the area for which he was renowned, namely portrait painting.
It's all in the blood
Impromptu thoughts of a "Dolomite-Po Valley man"
My mother was tall and slim, with a consciously understated beauty; on the contrary, my athletic father was well aware of his good looks, tanned by the Cortina sun. She was from a good Ferrara family, had a diploma from the music conservatory and was anything but sporty; he was a ski and ice-hockey champion and mountain climber, from a modest family who were photography pioneers in this remote corner of Italy.
Story of a insolvent bank
Luigi Franceschini and the "Piccolo Credito" bank, as remembered by his son.
This is a nice “vintage” photograph taken at the San Girolamo Piazza eighty years ago. It is a souvenir photo with a certain historical interest: the three people on the right were very important characters in the story of the insolvency of a Ferrara bank, the “ Piccolo Credito ” : my father, the lawyer Luigi Franceschini, who was the receiver appointed by the Court of Ferrara ; to his right,
Mystery and blades of grass in Filippo De Pisis
The re-emergence of the herbarium collected by the Ferrara painter as a young man.
The artistic sensibility of many leading cultural figures was cultivated by collecting grasses, herbs and flowers stalks, to then smoothen them out and press them between sheets of blotting paper:Obviously the great naturalists were enthusiasts, but world-famous thinkers also shared this hobby (Rousseau,Goethe,von Chamisso and Hesse), as well as poets,
