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closed Lost world.

Curated by: Giovanna Calvenzi

The show

He was the most loved photographer of Il Mondo di Pannunzio, where in 14 years he published 573 photos, with reports from Italy and the world. He has portrayed movie stars, writers, artists, nobility and ordinary people. He traveled the Italian coasts with Pier Paolo Pasolini telling the holidays of the Italians. It is Paolo Di Paolo (Larino, Molise, born in 1925), an extraordinary singer from Italy between the 1950s and 1960s, who knew how to describe the country that was reborn from the ashes of the Second World War with delicacy, rigor and wisdom. The MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts is dedicating a major exhibition to him and his extraordinary history, PAOLO DI PAOLO. Lost World , curated by Giovanna Calvenzi, main sponsor of Gucci , a new stage in the photography research line strongly supported by Giovanna Melandri, President of the MAXXI Foundation (17 April - 1 September 2019). On display over 250 images , many of them unpublished, part of the immense archive (250 thousand negatives, proofs, prints and slides) found by chance by her daughter Silvia in the cellar, about twenty years ago. Paolo Di Paolo, in fact, shortly after the closing of Il Mondo in 1966, no longer feeling "in tune with the times, with the society that was forming", abandons the camera and, just over forty, returns to his studies philosophical and publishing sector, starting a collaboration with the Arma dei Carabinieri for which he edited about twenty volumes and 43 calendars. Di Paolo turns the page and his wonderful, priceless archive ends up in the cellar, forgotten.
The exhibition itinerary is organized by sections , which intersect and interact with each other and revolve around the rearrangement of the editorial staff of Il Mondo, complete with a desk, lamps and images of Mario Pannunzio at work with his editors. The Society / Rome section tells the story of Italy emerging from poverty, illiteracy, the post-war period, between hopes and contradictions, a country where young women with veiled heads coexisted who in Campobasso wore baskets on their heads and girls in shorts on the seafront of Viareggio, peasant civilization and the Ferrari workshops, donkey transport and new airlines. Particular attention is dedicated to Rome : Di Paolo photographed the Roman nobility and the most brilliant international society that frequented the capital, also collaborating with Irene Brin for Harper's Bazaar, but also the funeral of Palmiro Togliatti, with an elderly woman in the foreground in tears. In Society / World there are the shots of his reportages in Japan, in Iran, in New York. The sections dedicated to artists / intellectuals and cinema are very rich, with portraits of painters, poets, writers, movie stars, mostly unpublished, taken "for pleasure": Lucio Fontana at the Biennale, Carla Accardi in Rome, Renato Guttuso at the climb del Grillo, Mimmo Rotella while making her décollage in Piazza del Popolo, Ezra Pound, Tennesse Williams on the beach with her dog, Giuseppe Ungaretti with a cat in her arms, an unprecedented Oriana Fallaci who "plays" as a diva at the Lido di Venice, Kim Novak ironing in the room at the Grand Hotel, Sofia Loren joking with Marcello Mastroianni in the Cinecittà studios, Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni walking around reading the newspaper, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand kissing on the Aventine; and then the “impossible encounters” made for the weekly Tempo, with Giorgio De Chirico together with Gina Lollobrigida, Salvatore Quasimodo with Anita Ekberg, Luchino Visconti with Mina, Nilde Iotti with Renato Rascel, Alberto Moravia with Claudia Cardinale. And always, with each of the characters portrayed, Di Paolo creates a relationship of empathy, trust and complicity that makes each shot unique and unmistakable: "many of his photos - writes Silvia Di Paolo - have remained unpublished precisely because they were so intimate that it would be it was inappropriate to give them to the newspapers ”. Like those of Yves Montand in Rome, Oriana Fallaci in Venice, Anna Magnani on the sand. One of the focuses of the Cinema section is dedicated to Anna Magnani : playing in advance on the paparazzi chasing her, knowing Di Paolo's grace and style, the diva invites him to her villa at Circeo and, for the first time, has his son photographed. Another focus is dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini , portrayed in Rome at Monte dei Cocci, pensive on Gramsci's tomb in the Non-Catholic Cemetery, at home with his mother and, in Basilicata, on the set of The Gospel according to Matthew, the only photographer admitted. This focus also introduces the one on La Lunga Strada di Sabbia, the reportage on Italian holidays made in 1959 by the unprecedented couple Paolo Di Paolo and Pier Paolo Pasolini for the magazine Successo directed by Arturo Tofanelli: one of the most iconic images portrays Pasolini himself who stroll on the Cinquale beach, in Viareggio, while observing young bathers.

Works on display

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