Original subtitles

Let’s start at the end. As always.

Piero Portaluppi died on 6 July 1967.

He passed away of old age in his bed,

in his centuries old home,

across the street from the Church of

Santa Maria delle Grazie in Corso Magenta in Milan.

His Milan.

At the same time in London,

the Beatle’s Sgt. Pepper’s album was triumphing

and in Vietnam, the U.S. Marine offensive

was failing on the Mekong Delta.

A few days later, Luisa, the beloved daughter,

rowed a boat into the middle of Lake Maggiore.

As soon as she was far enough

away from shore, with her son’s help,

she dumped some large, black bags into the lake.

They sank to the bottom.

Or so the legend goes.

We don’t know what was in those bags.

We’re not even sure whether the legend is true.

But this is where our story begins.

Because what is left of a man, after sifting

through memories, is but a handful of anecdotes.

The black bags that sank to the bottom

tell the fate Piero Portaluppi was destined to.

Famous during his lifetime,

ostentatious, a champion of his times,

in the forty years following his death, he too sank.

He was forgotten.

The Amateur

Many years later, his great grandchildren found

dozens of 16 mm film reels in an old trunk,

perfectly preserved and catalogued.

They were films shot, edited, and archived

by their great grandfather throughout his life,

left locked up for thirty years.

Piero Portaluppi’s formidable career begins

as Old Europe’s civilization is coming to an end.

On all fronts, the corpses of ten million young, idealistic men

fall in the trenches of the First World War.

Portaluppi also joins the war as a lieutenant.

And he too, son of an engineer,

alongside the proletarians in the trenches,

discovers the dizziness of war and the faith of national pride.

Fighting side-by-side with millions

of illiterate farmers, he, like them,

feels the death of an era and

the beginning of a new one.

However, he gets detailed to the

hydroelectric power plants in Val Formazza.

The family says that after the defeat at the Battle of Caporetto,

he asked to be reassigned to active duty.

No one in the family knows, however,

whether the request was approved.

In Val d’Ossola and Val Formazza, Portaluppi designs

grandiose, fairy-tale-like hydroelectric power plants

for Ettore Conti, a magnate and pioneer of the electricity industry.

Massacres and culture. Catastrophe and progress.

The walls enclose the thundering roar of the turbines inside,

but outside, Portaluppi’s power plants

look like whimsical castles from another age.

The overall appearance is, in fact,

that of a neo-Medieval fantasy.

There is a modern element though;

the electricity powered by mass quantities

of water in movement.

But to the young architect, modernity

is a mere production design.

A gala evening, a social event,

and brilliant

Let’s take a step back. Even Piero Portaluppi

has a family history. Like all families.

His biological father, Oreste, a lower middle-class man,

died when Piero was only ten years old.

The early death of his father causes a seismic fault

of profound insecurity to open up in young Piero.

It manifests itself throughout his childhood

and adolescence as a very pronounced stutter.

Piero compensates with early signs of artistic flair:

as a child he starts to show great talent in drawing.

He expresses this gift by sketching exuberant cartoons

later published in the Guerrin Meschino,

a satirical humour magazine edited by the

Milanese Scapigliatura artistic movement.

Even his aptitude for dancing on the edge

of things and events manifests itself early on.

It will stay with him forever, until the end.

Right before the war, young Piero gets engaged to Lia Baglia,

the electricity magnate, Ettore Conti’s niece.

The couple get married in June 1913.

Lia keeps a secret diary until the eve

of her wedding. After that, the pages are blank:

the story of the Amateur begins.

Casting off his grey-green uniform,

Portaluppi enters the Milanese jet set.

He makes quite a spectacular entrance.

He is talented, vain, playful.

He draws freehand masterfully, drives customized convertibles

and boasts pea-green ties, the only man in all of Milan to wear them.

Lia… his wife.

A daughter is born, Luisa, the pretty daughter, the adored child.

Then they have a son, Oreste, named after his grandfather.

In Val Formazza, the young, eccentric architect

designs and builds a restaurant in a train coach

at 2,300 metres above sea level next to a holiday resort.

It is a day in late spring.

Portaluppi has brought his family for a visit.

The people on the film are shot for

the first time by the Amateur’s camera.

In his life like at his job,

Portaluppi seduces his way around.

He seduces women, society, time.

He shapes the world according to his own tastes.

Pulling faces, doing somersaults, keeping distances.

This seems to be, from the onset, his guiding star.

Even with his family.

His home movies show laughter, joking around, games.

Every day of the week, in every season,

it is always a Sunday in life.

A Sunday in summer.

The camera falls in love with a face.

This is cinema.

In the cinema of the Amateur filmmaker,

the face always belongs to a woman.

Beauty and semi-darkness.

Fixed gazes into the lens. Seductive and seduced.

Our cathedral

His descendants take us to the same places from the past.

Their beauty and life has been preserved.

Untouched by the present.

At the beginning of the 1920s,

Piero Portaluppi goes off like fireworks.

After the electric power plants, he designs factories, villas,

stores, tombs, company pavilions,

residential and office buildings,

refurbishes luxurious mansions and restores ancient churches.

In a few short years, he goes from designing

his famous projects for imaginary cities,

to designing for Milan’s urban planning,

the only true city that exists in his mind.

Portaluppi soon becomes a renowned architect.

He makes a name for himself and buys a house.

The Casa degli Atellani becomes the home of Ettore Conti,

'His Eminence, Senator of the Kingdom’.

And Portaluppi, not intimidated in the least

by past centuries, does away with formalities,

and reinvents it for Conti at the beginning of the 1920s.

He designs a kaleidoscope true to his variegated and flawless taste.

He adorns it with embellishments and décor

inspired by his extravagant passions:

signs of the zodiac, sundials, modern inscriptions,

maxims and plays on words.

Agere, non loqui. Do, don’t talk.

Within its walls, the architect lives with

his wife, Lia, the magnate’s niece.

This is where he showcases his artistic skills.

He studies triangulation,

transcends the customs of his social class

into shapes with a cinematic cut.

This is where he views his daughter,

makes her pose for the camera.

The camera falls in love with a face.

Ettore Conti is one of the

most influential figures of the century.

A great industrialist, a great pioneer,

a great upper middle-class man, banker, president,

Senator of the Kingdom. The Electricity man.

Conti, childless, adopts Lia and, in some way, Piero, too.

A strong bond develops between him and the architect.

They have a lot in common.

Both of them are elegant, attractive, ambitious,

generous, brilliant and self-centred.

The timing is perfect. Everything has been done

and everything still needs to be done.

Assembly lines, the telegraph, automobiles, and airplanes,

“create an abyss between the submissive slaves

from the past and we the free,

we who are confident of the magnificence of the future.”

Electricity lights up the streets

and the movie camera immortalizes it.

But Ettore Conti, the visionary magnate of the electricity industry,

is also the man who weaves an intense correspondence

with Mussolini, ready to march on Rome.

Behold the 1920s: the triumph of Art Nouveau

and Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts.

The Amateur begins to edit an eccentric film, Grandi Firme.

A roster of the faces of his fellow, illustrious, co-stars of the times

stolen for a few frames from history.

Among them we recognise his new clients.

Milano is a rich city in a poor country

Capital of the arts and sciences.

The city’s noteworthy bourgeoisie is proud of its virtues:

frugality, precision, intelligence, initiative.

The enlightened Milanese industrial aristocracy

is not accustomed to taking a back seat to Roman politics.

Perhaps this is the reason it sends a militia

of disgruntled and violent proletariats to Rome.

But for Portaluppi, in his intimate, blissful world,

these are years of long walks along promenades

by the sea, not marches on Rome.

Outings, day-trips, jaunts.

The Promenade des Anglais at Nice,

the beau monde, European capitals, Berlin, Paris,

and gondolas through Venice’s canals.

Above all, they are years filled with beautiful women,

more elegant than they will ever be again.

The years of Chanel N°5.

Women are allowed to smoke,

they cut their hair into a bob, they play tennis,

they raise their hemlines to just below the knee

and drop their waistlines.

Above all, they smile, they always smile,

brunette or blond, into the lens of the Amateur’s camera.

“When faced with the iconoclast rationalism of the new school,

we invoke the gift of a little beauty in order to sweeten

our sour daily lives with necessary excess.”

These are the words of the most

influential art critic of the decade.

The critic’s name is Margherita Sarfatti,

Mussolini’s mistress, companion

and muse in his rise to power.

So, the “gift of a little beauty” is invoked.

During this time, Portaluppi ignores modernism

and provides an abundance of beauty.

In recognition of his prominent role,

he is commissioned to design the Italian Pavilion

for the Universal Exposition in Barcelona in 1929.

He travels extensively throughout a Europe

that has been shaken and inebriated by apocalyptic shocks.

Here, we see him at the International

Convention in Budapest in 1930.

But his formidable decorative creativity continuously eludes

the inflexibility of schools, groups, models.

The Amateur distances himself from

all constraints with acrobatic flair.

He is metamorphic, superficial in depth,

iridescent; he is fresh and effervescent.

Italy, on the other hand, does not distance itself.

The dictatorship strikes like a slap in the face.

When Benito Mussolini arrives in Milan in 1930

for the inauguration of the planetarium,

Portaluppi captures him on film.

We catch a glimpse of the solemn,

imperious stride bursting into a domed chamber.

The chamber is dark.

All the light is prevented from entering from outside.

When the last rays of the sun are eaten up by the moon,

all of a sudden, everything changes…

Because, all of a sudden, darkness falls over the earth.

From outer space, you can see the shadow

of moon passing over this strip of earth…

And you find yourself in full day, but in the dark.

The grand Milanese middle-class

– the one that won’t take a back seat to Rome –

is unstinting, generous and liberal.

Milan is living on fervour so an esteemed

patron, Swiss publisher Ulrico Hoepli,

commissions Portaluppi to design a planetarium

to donate to the city: a place for reflection,

where anyone can “forget the fever that drives each of

us in the pursuit of a personal, specific torment.”

For this work, he conceives an austere entrance that calls to mind,

“with its classical architectural order,

the characteristics of an ancient temple.”

Milan receives a second sky. An artificial sky

on which advanced technological instruments

project the constellations of heaven on a summer’s eve.

Looking at it today from light years away,

one can clearly see how the Planetarium would become one of the

most popular locations in the city.

Generations of students have admired

the artificial sky on leisurely mornings.

The landscape has remained the same as in 1930.

The stars, fixed or not, are surely the same.

Portaluppi is a professor. He is appointed a post-doctoral

position in Architectural Elements and Design.

He teaches but he doesn’t lecture.

He doesn’t theorise, he doesn’t take a stand;

his lessons are impromptu drills.

He allows whatever the wind blows into his classroom,

but he doesn’t give breathing exercises to expand lungs.

But in this way, he allows his young students

reedom of research and expression.

Everything is acceptable in his vision of escapist architecture.

Especially the escapist part.

Banfi, Belgiojoso,

Peressutti,

Nathan Rogers

The professor takes his students on trips around Italy and Europe:

Sicily, Athens, Istanbul. Ancient times and exoticism.

“An architect’s work,” states Portaluppi,

“the attempt to put things in order, is a Sisyphean task.

The stone keeps rolling down to the bottom again.

So everything is acceptable. Even opposites.

Therefore, in collaboration with some of the students

who were doing somersaults on the ship’s bridge,

he designs ''The Saturday Home for Newlyweds''

for the Milan Triennale.

A manifesto of Rationalism that had been

completely foreign to him until this moment.

The students are Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti, Nathan Rogers,

and they would become the leading

proponents of new Italian architecture.

His Majesty Victor Emmanuel III visits the Saturday Home.

Portaluppi welcomes him in full evening

dress and top hat, and his camera in one hand.

With the other, he describes the

work with overly enthusiastic gestures.

The king’s hand springs to his hat various times,

as if controlled by an obsessive-compulsive need.

It is 1933. Benito Mussolini, ''il Duce'', leader of the Italians,

is about to offer an entire empire to the petite king.

Villa Necchi Campiglio is situated in

the aristocratic Via Mozart in the heart of Milan.

But from the street, it is difficult

to imagine anything about the villa,

screened off by a continuous fence and immersed in a garden.

Piero Portaluppi designed it for Cavaliere Angelo Campiglio in 1930.

Work began two years later and it was completed in 1935.

In the garden, a swimming pool,

with a shallow and deep end, and a tennis court,

suggest a niche of healthy open-air living in the middle

of the congested centre of the city.

A tiny bubble of luxury and wellbeing

blown inside the city by the master glassmaker.

Every space is designed as a painting.

Everything is seeped in elegance and beauty.

Everything is designed to accommodate

the architect’s aesthetics in union

with the comforts of technology.

The architecture, a perfect work of art,

is put to use as a private middle-class dwelling.

Inside, total immunity.

Outside, the huge, terrible world.

“… personal items, hats,

a Borsalino…

These are the shoes…”

It is the 1930s and Piero Portaluppi

now belongs to the social class he is working for.

His meticulous, witty and obsessive

ledger is beginning to register earnings with six zeros.

Villa Necchi, Casa Corbellini-Wasserman,

Palazzo Crespi, Palazzo della Banca Commerciale …

The golden clients increase, precious materials are honed,

architectural motifs are recurring elements,

and sketches for railings and flooring

are wearing down his fountain pens.

Milan, only Milan.

The Amateur is completely devoted to this city.

The city of Bishop Ambrogio, Bramante and Leonardo da Vinci.

The moral and economic capital, the city of

the industrial revolution and of labourer’s pride.

The cradle of Socialism and Fascism, of the future and Futurism.

Today, the city is secretly studded

by countless works by Piero Portaluppi.

But the Amateur doesn’t shoot a single frame as

proof of the mark he left on Milan’s urban plan,

He doesn’t leave, save for rare

exceptions, any trace on film.

It almost seems as if he wanted to erase

his own footsteps; invoke his own oblivion.

Portaluppi is in all senses of the genitive case,

the architect to the upper bourgeois.

A bourgeois man, a bourgeois architect,

a bourgeois artist in an era where art,

all art, from left to right,

puts the working-class first, no matter what.

In the meantime, the elusive working-class

vanishes into the masses of the Fascist draft.

Throughout the 1930s, more political works are being commissioned.

Portaluppi seems to have become a

Fascist just as he had become middle-class,

with disengaged irony, with worldly nonchalance.

In 1933 he joins the Fascist party, like almost everyone else is doing

He designs the headquarters of the Milan

Federation of Fascists in Piazza San Sepolcro.

In Rome, the extreme Fascist auditors squash the project.

Portaluppi sketches, adjusts, reworks it.

Later, when he is commissioned to design

the memorial monument to Fascist martyrs,

he withdraws, in good order, and entrusts it to his students.

For that assignment, he lacks conviction.

The Amateur, true to his nature, knows no faith.

It is at this time that Edoardo Persico would?

Stigmatise him as a “façade illustrator”.

According to this vision, Portaluppi is

all about surface, appearance, façade.

This defines, first and foremost his Milan, his beloved city,

conceived as an open-air theatre.

Portaluppi redesigns the church plaza at Piazza Duomo.

In 1934, right before reaching his peak of consensus in the country,

Benito Mussolini gives an impassioned speech

to the jubilant crowd in that same square.

Portaluppi is there, as a filmmaker, as always.

He provides us with an unprecedented and

shocking Duce, filmed from behind, crookedly.

It is footage of an overlooked Duce,

confined to the backstage of his own devices.

The years pass and Portaluppi continues

to shoot, document, and archive

with the same marked flair for the theatrical.

This domestic-social-worldly theatricality is evident

at Luisa’s wedding, the adored daughter.

As are the young bride’s illusions.

Her extremely long train whirls like a sail in

the Atellani garden next to Antonio Castellini,

her illustrious groom.

At this time, his son Oreste is studying engineering

but he rarely appears in his father’s films,

even on this important occasion.

Yet Portaluppi has him in mind to take over his studio in the future.

Everything is always theatrical, frozen in time by the

amateur eye of the man with the camera.

By the mid 1930s, Portaluppi has become a millionaire.

He can realise his dream:

build a home named after himself.

He finds land near the Casa degli Atellani

and builds the walls from scratch.

He baptizes it Casa d’Appartamenti Portaluppi

and plans his studio on the ground floor:

eccentric and articulate, it takes up the entire space

on both sides of the entrance hall.

By contrast, on the upper floors, the apartments

have a more simple and traditional distribution of space,

running off a central hallway that divides the

living rooms from the master bedrooms.

According to some, this is his masterpiece.

The perfect union between the clean lines

of Rationalism and the lavish flair of Art Nouveau.

Between personal pleasures and bothersome

necessities, between art and contingency.

The exterior features a smooth façade

without embellishments and protrusions,

covered in white chrome metallic alloy slabs;

low-quality material imposed by the Fascist autocracy.

However, the interior, in counterpoint,

boasts multi-coloured and exquisite marble.

Concealed behind a wall, there is

a valuable drop-front bar cabinet

that could be taken out during

encounters with his mistresses.

Above the desk, in plain sight, a collage of

photographs of the eyes of his five grandchildren.

This is where his archives are collected today.

The mistresses have disappeared

as have his grandchildren’s eyes,

but what does remain are the hundreds of drawings,

cartoons, collections, postcards from the world over,

anagrams, ledgers, statistics and diagrams that were

“observed, calculated and compiled on the life

and customs of Don Pedro Puerta Lopez”.

A life of numbers and pleasantries.

Including the calculations: “What I ate in one year”,

and “How I passed the time in the year 1905”.

But that year is in the distant past.

As are the brilliant projects for imaginary

cities and skyscrapers designed in the 1920s,

without distinguishing between utopia

and dystopia, between heaven and hell.

At the end of the 1930s, the only thing that exists is the real city.

And the difference between utopia and dystopia,

between heaven and hell, will be felt soon.

Mussolini has attacked Abyssinia with chemical agents.

The United Nations sanctioned Italy,

and Fascist Italy has responded with autocracy.

So, in Milan, grain is grown in Piazza del Duomo

and an anonymous hand reaches out to stroke it.

Mussolini now parades through Milan preceded by a movie camera.

Thousands of children follow him, muskets

on their shoulders, wearing military uniforms.

At every level and institution of Italian education,

teachers are required to swear their loyalty to fascism.

The childhood of the nation has been

completely organized into paramilitary troops.

It is called Balilla National Youth Organization

and it trains the human farm of the Duce’s future soldiers:

his cannon fodder.

In front of the camera, the faces lose their identity.

Portaluppi is enchanted by the initials

of his own name on a street sign.

As always, the Amateur digresses, jokes around,

gazes at his mirrored reflection in the ephemeral.

On the 20th anniversary of its founding,

Mussolini returns with ceremonious solemnity

to Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan where in 1919,

surrounded by a few dozen followers,

he founded the Fasci of Combat.

Now thousands upon thousands are marching.

The multitude of new fascist recruits are

so many that the Duce struggles to walk,

looking a little annoyed by his latest worshippers.

Through his lens, Portaluppi watches other illustrious

figures march by for his film, Grandi Firme.

Time passes, the faces change.

Everyone is donning medals and uniforms,

but the filmmaker doesn’t seem to give this much weight;

he shoots and bears witness.

Among the faces is Giuseppe Bottai,

Minister of National Education.

Portaluppi had written to him after receiving tenure in 1936:

“I am touched and appreciative, I express my infinite pride

in being able to serve my beloved school with doubled fascist faith.”

They are just conventional words of respect.

We won’t give them much weight.

The Amateur, true to his nature, knows no loyalty.

In 1939, the Amateur is Dean of the Faculty of Architecture

and goes on another trip with his students.

They go to Tripolitania, a colony of the Empire.

He shoots evident signs of our mission to civilise,

“Municipal midwife. Service is free for the poor”.

He shoots the carefree class at the

archaeological excavation at Sabratha.

And the exhilarated students on the dazzling white dunes.

A year later, on the same sand

a little further east, Italian soldiers,

almost completely in non-motorised formations,

will advance on foot to conquer

the stark, flat, desolate land;

a uniform, barren plain dotted by valleys below sea level,

afflicted by a brutal climate, lost in the immense desert.

But in the meantime, the exotic trip taken by

the Dean and his students ends successfully.

It is late spring.

At the end of the summer, with fifty-three divisions,

of which six are armoured, Hitler invades Poland.

Starting from 1940, the filmmaker retreats.

The reels thin out.

The Duce has plummeted Italy into the World War

and Piero Portaluppi almost exclusively films children.

He always shoots them in their assumed antics.

The filmmaker’s childhood is a film full of laughter:

it trips, it falls down, it races its bike, a pipe

between its lips, whether it is wearing an Alpine hat

or whether it has whiskers,

or whether it is marching as a Fascist youth.

Perhaps Portaluppi is running away again, distancing

himself with his usual creative flair, he shirks away.

Perhaps, in extremis, he returns to his own fatherless childhood.

A childhood of stuttering and insecurities

put right by his talent for drawing cartoons free hand.

Perhaps childhood is the only way to continue to draw

undeterred on the façade of history,

while the population, summoned onto the scene

of the century, marches towards the apocalypse.

So the grandfather stays in the city but he sends his

grandchildren to a safe place in the villa on the lake.

And every time he visits, he invents games, he draws like

a magician, he shoots them and shoots only them.

When grandpa arrives, it’s always a party.

But childhood, like history, doesn’t forgive.

Childhood requires fathers, not grandfathers.

It does not tolerate jumping, somersaults, creative flair.

During this time, Oreste, his only son, the one

who almost never appears in the filmmaker’s films,

is stubbornly seeking extremes.

He is hurt in one of his many mountaineering adventures,

he is declared unfit at his medical exam,

but later he is able to get a licence as

a Naval Observer by concealing his disability.

He is not a fascist but asks to be stationed in

Sardinia where the risk for aircraft is greater.

For months Oreste flies over the Western Mediterranean.

When he goes down in the sea off Algeria,

his body will not be returned to his father

who will have to bury an empty coffin.

Defeated by the loss, the Amateur breaks down.

When faced with this tragedy,

the only thing left is empty rhetoric.

He crashes too, orphaned by his son.

“Dear Federal, I shout ‘Long Live Italy’ through

a voice strangled by indescribable pain,

but with the pride of a fascist father.

My son, Oreste, my only son, fell as a hero fighting

in the Mediterranean as a Naval Observer.

At 25 five years old, he was an engineer and a volunteer.

Now he rests in the cemetery of Algiers.

I wanted to give you the news first, as a friend and as a hierarch.

I feel more Italian and more fascist than ever.

My tears are filled with pride and glory!”

This was written in a private

letter to the head of the Party in Milan,

but will be made public in the newspaper, Corriere della Sera.

Milan, in the meantime, is overwhelmed.

In mid-August 1943, RAF Lancasters fly over the

city in a series of waves for three consecutive days.

There are thousands of casualties, the city changes face forever.

On 13 August, the bombers hit, among other things,

the Royal Palace and the Poldi Pezzoli Museum.

On the 14th, Santa Maria delle Grazie and the Braidense Library.

On the 15th, bombs burst through the roof

of the Teatro alla Scala, damage the Duomo,

and destroy some of the cloisters of the

Ospedale Maggiore in Via Festa del Perdono.

This is the Maggiore Hospital…

On 15 August, Luisa, the beautiful daughter,

the adored child, leaves her children at the lake

and takes one of the last trains in circulation.

She gets as far as the station at Bovisa. They tell her to get off.

The city is paralyzed. Milan is a corpse.

Luisa walks down the street that separates her

from her parent’s house, the Casa degli Atellani,

right in front of the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

Everything is in flames, burning embers everywhere, tiny fires.

There is no water and fires are being put out with glasses.

Trying to empty the ocean with a glass.

This is what is said of an impossible endeavour,

of unrealistic madness.

The Milanese will succeed. One glass at a time.

The church is destroyed but da Vinci’s Last Supper is unharmed.

They will restore it crack by crack, one colour at a time.

Get in the water. Get in the water with your feet out.

Good. Don’t tuck in…

There. Bend your knees…

Really bend your knees. Then when you’re

out of the water, stand up. That’s all.

Keep your legs parallel.

The war is over.

An endless post-war period begins.

Life, as the saying goes, returns to normal.

Stand up!

Good for you!

Portaluppi is tried on two counts of ethnic cleansing

due to his complicity with the regime.

He defends himself as best he can.

After a brief period of banishment, he is reintegrated and

is reinstated as Dean at the University.

In 1950 the filmmaker also returns.

We return with him to the golden lake.

Yet, something has been irremediably lost.

The 1950s are perhaps the most

vital years of the century for Italy.

Italy grows with the charged energy of an adolescent.

Millions of farmers move to the city

and the GDP reaches unprecedented peaks.

Refrigerators and washing machines replace

the ideals of the Resistance movement.

Italy grows and betrays, but Portaluppi ages suddenly.

He donates the restorations of some of the city’s

most important buildings that had been damaged by bombs:

the Brera Gallery, the Museum of Science and Technology,

the Milan University, Santa Maria delle Grazie.

But his creative vein will be lost forever.

He is given a seat in the royal box at

the Teatro alla Scala in recognition of the restorations

and he never misses an opening night.

He attends singing parodies of the most famous arias:

“Woman is hardwood, you must beat her like a drum''.

He still jokes about everything but his work becomes heavier,

too much marble, too embellished.

There is a sort of involution,

a step back, something has been lost.

Colour has been added to the filmmaker’s films.

The subjects are the usual: Milan, professors,

women in bathing suits, Piero Portaluppi’s initials,

the mirror in the road sign.

But the mirror is shattered.

The Casa degli Atellani receives the news that the body

of their son Oreste, called Tuccio,

buried in an empty coffin in 1942, has been found.

They have him returned to Italy thanks to a ship owner friend.

Portaluppi gets into his customized convertible with his wife,

Lia, and his grandson, Piero Castellini.

The three of them take to the freeway for Genoa.

When they arrive at the docks, Portaluppi lowers

the top in respect for the hearse.

Their grandson will remember his grandparent’s

silence during the entire two-way trip.

Not a word was uttered between them.

Two marble statues. Speechless.

One night during the endless post war period,

Portaluppi withdraws to his tiny recess in the Casa degli Atellani

where he nurtures his obsessive passions

for stamps and postcards, constellations and sundials.

And with the same diligence, he looks through

his editing notebooks for frames of his son.

Then he edits them out, one by one.

The only images saved are one where

he is looking straight into the camera

and a few clips of Oreste dashing off,

hiding, running out of the frame.

The son came into the world, yet he remains uncreated.

An entire era in 16 mm, but the Amateur has no heirs.

“… our fortuitous encounter with the architect,

Piero Portaluppi who designed the adornments

for the “Piccola Scala”, giving the new theatre

the appearance and atmosphere of the grander Scala.

Was this your intention Mr. Portaluppi?

We certainly wanted to maintain the character

in the decorative appearance.

But the theatre is much smaller.

In this way, we trickled it with

the most characteristic elements.

If I talk about the Lyre, the griffon-like lyre;

if I talk about the Greek frets, I’m also talking about

the Caryatids in the royal box.

They were placed there as essences

of the old architectural adornments …

And it gives a golden tone,

and perhaps gives emphasis to

the feminine virtues of the beautiful spectators.

Are you proud of having contributed

to the birth of the Piccola Scala?

Proud because I feel enlivened

by a drive as a supporter of La Scala.

I’ll pass it to you.

I have to go a bit higher.

Look, butterflies, Giuli…