Here we go, again: Betwixt Brown

During a press conference in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, July 25, Slavisa Pesci, an Italian amateur scholar, claimed that the Da Vinci Last Supper contains, when we look hard enough, a composite picture of a figure clutching what appears to be a young child. He also says that a superimposed image (with its mirror image) shows a goblet in front of Jesus Christ - perhaps a depiction of his blessing of bread and wine - and transforms two of the people sitting at the table into knights. The websites where this is all explained have - mysteriously - crashed.

So the fullish story is in the Telegraph. In England there is a tradition called the "silly season" when any story will do.

It is all happening down the road in Padua, and back in Milan

This all from today's Daily Telegraph.

"An Italian council estate ringed with a steel wall to keep its residents inside will be closed today and its African immigrant residents dispersed despite fears that a planned amnesty for thousands of new arrivals will have consequences for countries across Europe.

The Serenissima - or Very Tranquil - estate, Italy's last ghetto, became a symbol of the way Italy mismanaged its immigrants after the local council in Padua built the wall and set up a checkpoint at the exit last year."

And everyone has their angle: ""A move to suddenly make 550,000 immigrants legal is very worrying," said one British diplomat," reports the newspaper. Though it leads with a juicier newsbite:

"Although the estate was constantly policed, gangs loitered on the streets outside. Earlier this summer, Princess Virginia von Furstenberg, an heiress of the Agnelli family, was arrested and cautioned after she stopped her Mercedes in the area to pick up three grams of cocaine."

Meanwhile, back in Milan at La Scala a ballet for a sad anniversary, the Miami murder of Gianni Versace in 1997:

"Thanks Gianni, With Love was put together by French choreographer Maurice Bejart, for whom Versace designed many stage costumes.

About 1,500 guests, including Versace's favourite models, attended the show at the La Scala opera house."

Coffee Perfecto

In 1901 Luigi Bezzera, an engineer from Milan, created the first espresso machine which used steam to make coffee. But espresso as we know it was born in 1947 when Achille Gaggia, a bar owner in Milan, invented a way to brew coffee under pressure.

Double or Quits

"We know more than we can use. Look at all this stuff I’ve got in my head: rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc mam and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms. How many newspapers and magazines do you read? For me, they’re what candy of Quããludes or scream therapy are for my neighbours. I get my daily ration from the bilious Lincoln Brigade veteran who runs a tobacco shop on 110th street, not from the blind newsagent in the wooden pillbox on Broadway, who’s nearer my apartment.

And we don’t know nearly enough.”

Susan Sontag. “A Trip to China.”

The avant garde composer, John Cage, received a 25 year retrospective at the town hall in New York in 1958, the same year he was invited to Milan. He spent four months over the summer here, working on a piece called “Fontana Mix” and doing something really quite strange, even for the “Betwixt” panoply.



Reunited here with a once-estranged Peggy Guggenheim (who is coming shortly, of course) he also became a contestant on a television quiz show called “Lascia O Raddoppia” – that’s “Double or Nothing” to you and me. His topic was mushrooms. And for five weeks he was undefeated: earning a tidy $6000. Not bad for 1958.

“There was only one channel for TV so the whole country enjoyed it. I became very famous. When I would go for a walk with Peggy and all her dogs, people would point to me and her and she said, “I recognize you’re even more famous than I.”

A driver would be nice: Milan

Milan is big, the second city of Italy. The area around the station – a large area, all the way through half-developed Dante-hell close to Garibaldi to the so-so Corso Como, one of those hot spots, that’s not – is an Ektachrome vision of neo-realism. I see: theft, a bottle fight (nasty), street people everywhere, police at both of, hundred yards apart, McDonalds. Lesson: pay more, stay in the centre. But Milan is about global finance and fashion – that means expensive.




It is in Milan that Tom gets really going, squeezing more sights into a single day than Kate Moss could squeeze cat-walk shows. Tim Moore was going to leave pretty quick, but got fogged in (he travelled in November). Instead of leaving: “I bought a bus ticket from a man selling pornographic comic books at a roadside booth.” He describes sight-seeing quite well in his Milan pages…I took the metro.



The first English words I hear in Milano:
“I can’t decide, I think we should hire a driver for tomorrow.” The voice belongs to a six foot plus boy, about 18 or 19, with the Rupert Everett when “Another Country” public schoolboy. This boy is about 100lbs and has a military haircut. His two companions are similarly good-looking with Paolo Maldini long hair, and soft American accents.

“I don’t know, we can get to the castings by metro.”
“It’s not reliable enough.”
“Taxis?”
“Let’s get a driver.”
“We haven’t been cast yet…”

The English boy’s accent is betwixt Harrow, Heroin-chic, and Amy Winhouse: thus perfect for his career. All three are young male models, hustling for work in Milan. A short thunderstorm would wash all three away. I close in on my interview, but they vanish into the crowds. This is the Duomo station stop, leading out to a hugely impressive cathedral – it is big – and hugely impressive prices. This is where tourists and fashionistas can sink eight euros on a bottle of beer, or anything from twelve for a real drink. I go to the cathedral instead.




The next night the entire square is given over to a free concert, hundreds of thousands of people go to watch music, of some kind. Macy Gray and the woman from the Cranberries were there as well. I was fi-fishing: watched it on the television.

“The Cathedral Church is dedicated to our lady, which John Galeatius Duke of Milan caused to be built, anno 1386. This is an exceeding glorious and beautifull Church, as faire if not fairer then the Cathedral Church of Amiens, which I have before so much magnified. All this Church seemeth to be built with marble: herein are many notable things to be seene: in the Quire the bodies of many of the Vicounts of Milan….I ascended almost to the toppe of the Tower; wherehence I surveyed the whole citie round about, which yielded a most beautifull and delectable shew. There I observed the huge suburbs, which are as bigge a many a faire towne, and compassed about with ditches of water: there also I beheld a great part of Italy, together with the lofty Apennines; and they shewed me which way Rome, Venice, Naples, Florence, Genua, Ravenna, &c. lay. The territory of Lombardy, which I contemplated round about from this Tower, was so pleasant an object to mine eyes, being replenished with such unspeakable variety of all things, both for profite and pleasure, that is seemeth to me to be the very Elysian fields, so much decanted and celebrated by the verses of Poets, or the Tempe [general name for rural beauty] or Paradise of the World. For it is the fairest plaine, extended about some two hundred miles in length that ever I saw, or ever shall if I should travel over the whole habitable world: insomuch that I said to myselfe that his country was fitter to be an habitation for the immortall Gods than for mortall men…I saw the auncient Palace of the Viscounts of Milan…I went to the Library of Cardinall Borromaeus, which is an exceeding faire peece of workmanship, but it is not fully finished, so that there is not one booke in it, but it is said that it shall be shortly furnished….




…A certain merchant of Genua hath a very beautifull house in this City…There is a very magnificent Hospitall in this City, wherein there are an hundred and twelve chambers, and foure thousand poore people are relieved in the same. The yearlie revenues of it are said to be at least fifty thousand crownes.







…No City of Italy is furnished with more manuary arts then this, which it yeeldeth with as much excellency as any City of all Chrstendome, especially two, embroidering and making of hilts for swords and daggers. Their embroiders are very singular workemen, who worke much in gold and silver. Their cutlers [knife makers] that make hilts are more exquisite in that art then any that I ever saw…Also silkmen do abound here, which are esteemed so good that they are not inferior to any of the Christian world.



The Citadell is the fairest without any comparison that ever I saw, farre surpassing any one Citadell whatsoever in Europe….it seemeth rather a towne then a Citadell, being distinguished by many spacious and goodly greene courts…also in these courts as it were certaine market places, there are usually markets kept…The munition of the Citadell is so much…For a great part of Lombardy Westward belongeth to the Citadel, for the sustenation of the Presidiary souldiers, who are all Spaniards, being in number five hundred. …When I came forth of the Citadel, after I had surveyed all the principal places, a certain Spaniard imagining that I had beene a Flemming expressed many tokens of anger towards me, and lastly railed so extremely at me, that if I had not made haste out with my company, I was afread he would have flung a stone at my head, or otherwise offered some violence to me. There is such an extreme hatred betwixt the Milanois and the Spaniards, that neither the Milanois doe at any time come into the Citadel, nor the Spaniards into the City, but only in the evening.



….”it is thought there are not so few as three hundred thousand soules in this city. Thus much of Milan.

When Tom was here Milan, those Szfozas and Viscontis, was under the rule of the Spanish, who were not too popular. They kept themselves to the Citadell, but pointed their guns at the city; nowadays it is the fashion-conscious who point the finger, bereft of this year’s male look I retreat to Shakespeare. Cities like this, despite Tom’s engagement here, don’t bring me closer to him. I’ll write more on court and country soon.

Death in Milan (and Rome)

Luchino Visconti, auteur and film-maker, could have entered “Betwixt” in Paris, where, travelling, he met and worked with Jean Renoir on "Une partie de campagne" in 1936. His position as assistant helped by his boyfriend of the time, the German photographer, Horst, and Coco Chanel, another mate...

In 1941 Visconti began work on the production of his first film, Obsession. The film was based on “The Postman Always Rings Twice” by James M. Cain. The idea for the adaptation came from Renoir, and was aimed at righting a perceived romanticizing of the Italian people in domestic cinema up to that time.

“No men, not even Italian men, are plaster saints. Nor are women flowers of virtue. Yet go and find it in our films, if you can, a man who is a bastard or a woman who is a bit of a whore. In Italian films they’re all nice fellows, all honest, all above board.”

Scaramouche: “Cinema” 1941.

Cain’s novel was banned in Mussolini’s Italy, which added to the appeal of adapting it. Pavese, who we’ve met briefly in Turin, was one of many anti-fascists who saw American literature of the time as embodiment of the whole human condition. He had translated Faulkner, Steinbeck, Melville and Dos Passos. Pavese writes:

“America is not another country, a new beginning to History, but the gigantic stage, the giant screen on which, more frankly than anywhere else, our common tragedy is being played out.”

Visconti’s Obsession added a “Spaniard” – a not too oblique anti-fascist symbol (reminding audiences of the struggle in Spain against Franco).




Visoconti enters here because for centuries his family ruled Milan, in Tom’s time they had been replaced by the Szofsas. Luchino was a genuinely betwixt character, the aristocratic homosexual communist who is friends with Puccini, most of Europe’s nobility, and much of its cultural community. When, in the middle of planning Obsession Visconti’s father, the duke, died, Puccini was troubled. How could he, as a communist atheist composer, attend the funeral of such a symbol of old Italy?

De Santis writes:

“He [Puccini] returned from it with amazingly bizarre and luxurious tales, of people in medieval costumes, dwarfs swathed in red [hmm Don’t Look Now] music…”

This was 1941.

Of “Obsession” Visconti writes: “I am interested in the extreme situation, those instants when abnormal tension reveals the truth about human beings; I like to confront the characters and the story harshly, aggressively.”

That summer Visconti’s younger brother was killed fighting in El alamein. His older brother arrested for insulting Germans. He kept working. Obsession is a tough film, aggressively so. One critic writes:

“love and life are seen as curses, death omnipresent…[Obsession is] a slow carnal return to the sources of life, which are also the sources of death.”

“Obsession” was not screened until liberation in 1945. When it was Visconti was still “betwixt”, but he was established as not a dilettante film maker, but as potentially one of the great names in cinema. We will return to him in Venice, naturally; and in Germany too…

Males in Crisis 2

Heavyweight suitcase or Lightweight jacket: the decisions of Milano

NB.At the kiosk next to me here in Lodi a middle-aged man, like me, (except with double chin, goatee and capri pants) is listening to ear-bleeding levels of heavy metal whilst researching Soviet tanks from the 1950s. This crisis is spreading.

Milan Fur update

"Flights going in and coming out of Milan's Linate airport were suspended for three hours Sunday so staff and volunteers could catch hares and rabbits, which have proliferated to such a degree that they've caused problems with takeoffs, landings and radar systems."

In a separate story: males are officially in crisis, says D&G.