Date: Thursday, January 30, 2020
Time: From 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm
Location : Instituto Italiano di Cultura, 496 Huron Street, Toronto
Entrance : Free
The Istituto Italiano di Cultura is pleased to support the launch of the book "Where Angels Come To Earth: An Evocation of the Italian Piazza", by Vincenzo Pietropaolo and Mark Frutkin.
The presentation will be moderated by Professor Don Snyder (Ryerson University), M.A., Photographic Studies, Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont /B.A., History of Music, Yale University.
Authors:
Vincenzo Pietropaolo is an internationally acclaimed photographer, born in Calabria, Italy, and living in Toronto. He has published over a dozen art and photography books, and is recognized as one of Canada’s pre-eminent documentary photographers.
Mark Frutkin is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, several of which are set in Italy. His books have won or been shortlisted for major literary prizes, including the Trillium, Governor General’s, Commonwealth Writers and Sunburst awards.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Every type of communal life that goes on in the Italian city touches upon the piazza at some point. It seems likely that if you live near a piazza in an Italian city or village, you will visit that piazza at least once in a typical day, and so will most of your neighbours.
Vincenzo Pietropaolo and I are sitting on a plane returning from Italy after photographing and writing about piazzas in a number of cities and villages. As he pages through the Alitalia in-flight magazine, Vincenzo comes across a two-page advertisement for food and drink, echoes of la dolce vita. Across the top of the ad, in bold letters, it reads: Italia – Il Regno della Piazza.
Italy is indeed the Kingdom of the Piazza, the ubiquitous city square that is a key element in Italian architecture as well as its social, economic and cultural life, and the reason so many Italian cities today remain civilized places to live. Piazzas offer vibrant, diverse spaces that continually recreate and revitalize the urban environment. Many of them also happen to be extraordinarily beautiful. They are stage sets with real-life backdrops: ancient cathedrals, palazzos, baptisteries and fountains, as well as cafes, shops and bars.
A crowd gathers to listen to political speeches near the Fontana del Moro, Piazza Navona, Rome.
This book was inspired by a vision in one such piazza. Late one afternoon, while I sat in an outdoor cafe on Piazza del Comune in the heart of the city of Cremona (the home of Stradivari), in the northern region of Lombardy, I watched the piazza slowly filling up with local people coming from work or home, stopping by for a visit before the sun went down. In twenty minutes, the nearly empty piazza had filled with about two hundred residents: shopkeepers and salesclerks, mothers and fathers, children on tricycles, priests, young people, old people. They stood about or sat on the cathedral steps chatting. Nothing exceptional, just another day in the life of a small Italian city. Within an open area created by a cathedral, a tower, a town hall and a baptistery, all built seven hundred years earlier, they simply visited with their friends and neighbours.