ETTORE
SOTTSASS
Signora Tron was the proprietor of a café and restaurant in Pinerolo, on the
road from
Turin
to Sestrière. Signora Tron was young, not what you might call slim; her eyes
were
black, lively and with a sparkle.
Her
hair was black and I don't remember how I first met her but she asked me to
redesign
the
café and restaurant, which I did with some effort.
I was
starting out. I'd spent too much time caught up in
the
war and all that. Back in the fifties, I considered myself more of an artist
than an architect and perhaps Signora Tron had the same suspicion, for one day
she asked me if I could design some tapestries. She cold me she had a place with
young ladies who were very good at making tapestries and then she said she was
going to open a shop in Turin and asked me if I wanted to design the shop too.
So, a few months later, there was the shop with all the tapestries in it, in Via
Viotti in Turin, under the arcades.
Signora Tron had been very brave to place such trust in modernity, in modern
designs, and in the modern painting and decoration that few people in Italy were
interested in, and in Turin even less: the automobile factory had not yet
embarked on its project for the community of Turin, and that community was still
meandering through the ruins of the city planned by the royal family of Savoy.
The ruins were so stifling that I wanted a breath of fresh air. From Turin, I
came to Milan.
As often happens, little by little, silence took over the space between the
courageous Signora Tron and me. I don't know what happened. I don't know where
Signora Tron is. I know that in Via Viotti in Turin, the tapestry shop is no
longer. I know I no longer drive through Pinerolo on my way to Sestrière to ski,
and I know I no longer stop by at Signora Tron's café. A few days ago, while I
was trying just to survive phone, fax, e.mail, computer, Internet, interfaces
and interactions, a gentleman, whom I didn't think I'd met before, asked if he
could enter my studio.
He introduced himself as Ugo Scassa and, talking rapidly in his Piedmontese
accent, he cold me that for years he had been making tapestries based on
drawings by Italian and foreign artists. He told me his tapestries had been
exhibited in several of the great galleries and museums. He said he had many
young ladies who were highly skilled at making tapestries, and also that he was
able to sell his tapestries, even to Arab gentlemen in distant lands. He told me
a tapestry sometimes contains hundreds of colours and that he dyed the wool in
his workshop with chemical dyes because natural ones corrode it.
He told me that it's terribly complicated, that it's also very hard to keep the
artists happy. He said he'd worked with Corrado Cagli, Max Ernst, Spazzapan,
Mastroianni, Guttuso... He said he loved making tapestries but that it wasn't
easy to get by, that tapestries cost too much, that only governments or banks
or, on rare occasions, companies or billionaires could buy them. But he said
that tapestries can only be used to decorate very large rooms, great halls or on
ships where they throw big parties, and then he said a tapestry is better than a
fresco because you can roll it up and put it somewhere else. And he said now
they were going to make a book with photos of the tapestries.
He asked me if I could write something for the book and I asked, "Did you ever
meet Signora Tron?" "Sure," he said, "the whole idea started with Signora Tron.
In the late fifties, I was even a partner with Signora Tron, but then we split
up. There were problems." "Then what?" "Then, I don't know. Perhaps she left
Pinerolo. She had problems. Then I moved the workshop to Asti and carried on.
That was forty years ago, and I've been making tapestries for forty years..."
Then I suddenly remembered: Ugo Scassa had made his first tapestry from my
drawing... The memory flashed in my mind like a lamp, but Scassa was deep into
story after story, his enthusiasm never waning, never showing the slightest
uncertainty, never doubting the destiny conferred to tapestries by countless
centuries.
Perhaps, even in Piedmont, that destiny had been centuries in the making;
perhaps it has followed the history of the ancient House of Savoy, whose dukes
had roamed from one white castle to another, taking with them all their
soldiers, horses, arms, cooks, wives, lovers, children, tables, chairs, chests,
clothes, plates, jugs, and their tapestries too. They took their tapestries, as
did the great court of France, to decorate the high stone walls of the castles
they went to. Freezing, empty castles in the mountains, high up in the Alps to
defend the supposedly strategic Alpine passes, protecting the borders with
France and Switzerland.
They changed castles with the change of season and for their vacations, and they
always carried along their tapestries. The servants would hang them on the
walls, and the tapestries would tell the stories of their walks through the
springtime meadows with beautiful ladies accompanied by charming, impulsive
young men singing to them; there were also gardens with fountains and ponds
where they could swim without costumes, and there were heroic tales of hunting
in the woods, there were titanic battles under city walls, and stories of other
heroes; tales from mythology, such as the
labours
of Hercules, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Patroclus or the fall
of Icarus, the embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, landscapes and storms...,
subjects that were not too religious. Tapestries decorated boisterous
banquet halls, and secret alcoves.
Today castles are few and far between, the long processions of the
courts, wending their way from one castle to another, with soldiers, women,
furnishings and tapestries, up steep mountain tracks, along the rushing
streams, crossing chasms in the rocks, have all disappeared. The motorways are
straight, the soldiers are in their barracks, the flags fly to show where petrol
can be bought, heroism is to be found in the giant slalom, in downhill racing,
in all those things; and yet...
Signor Scassa, who lives in those very same hills where the dukes and
their companies used to roam, is still able, with a long, lonely, perhaps final
breath, to bring back that magical world where we occasionally find ourselves
when a sign appears which, who knows how or why, leaves us naked before
ourselves, naked in the face of that fleeting moment, that
boundless, endless space…
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