Spadolini, Ancona and the World

Italia Nostra, Teatrino San Cosma, Ancona, 14 April 2016, h 5.15 pm

An image of the audience.

Alberto Spadolini is still today an artist to be rediscovered, and the event, Alberto Spadolini, un anconetano nel mondo [Alberto Spadolini, a man from Ancona who got his way into the world], organised by Italia Nostra, has been a nice initiative that has remembered him from various perspectives. Marco Travaglini, Spadolini’s nephew and tireless promoter of his rediscovery, opened the ball. After him, Federica Bozzarelli, restorer of the artist’s work, followed and, in the end, I traced the path of his relationship with dance.

Marco Travaglini.

Travaglini spoke of Spadolini’s life, his illustrious friends, his work, and collaborations, underlining the fact that, in his investigation, many people and experts from all over the world, helped him. He showed numerous images of his extraordinary photographs and of his paintings, focusing, among other things, on the codes present in some of them, as his friend and main oral source of his rediscovery, Alex Wolfson, has noted. In this sense, Travaglini highlighted the importance of the sphere analyzing it in some paintings, as Tau, which seems to exemplify the history of the artist's soul. Spadolini, who was from Ancona, loved his town, he loved talking the Ancona dialect, and loved going back to Ancona to go to the market and eat the fish broth typical of the area. Before concluding his talk, Travaglini invited Mr. Mosconi, who knew Spadolini, to talk about his experience with him. He specified that he even knows where he was born, “in front of the barracks” in the ‘piano’ suburb, where the working class used to live.

Federica Bozzarelli.

Federica Bozzarelli focused on the restoration of Spadolini’s paintings, done, depending on each case, following different techniques, where she used scalpels to clear the canvas or colour paints to recreate the original luminosity and chromatism. She showed various paintings on which she worked both in their initial and final state. On a couple of occasions, she found other paintings under the canvas she was restoring, as the one they thought was a self-portrait and that instead they discovered was a portrait painted by Teodora Clerici Trmi, as is evident from an article published in Comoedia in 1933. 

I talked about Spadolini as a dancer with a particular attention to his primitivist dances in 1930s Paris next, but not only that, to Josephine Baker. In particular, I have analysed one of his most significant photographs and illustrated aspects of his dance from his solo in the film Marinella (1936) directed by Pierre Caron, starring Tino Rossi as the protagonist.

Thanks to Italia Nostra for the organization of the event and to Marco Travaglini for asking me to take part to it. The rediscovery of Spadò, as he was also called, proceeds and will certainly continue to surprise us.

Rosella Simonari and the audience.