Frippery

USO - (Ludovica Marcacci, Davide Masserini) , Rome, Rotterdam



T
he memories surface, vivid, intense, acute. Grandpa's shoes, Uncle Mario's ski and my desk.

How much that desk know! If only he could talk he could tell my innermost secrets. On him I wrote the best pages of my life, he was my faithful companion in the many bedrooms I had between a move and another, between the different houses I lived in. Sleepless nights on the books: high school first, then the university. I remember purchasing it with my father in one of the many markets we used to visit during the weekends. We took the Vespa and went: Borghetto flaminio, Piazza Verdi, Monti, Portaportese. A tour! How much I enjoyed it, especially in the summer: the warm air through the hair, flowing in the wind, colored dresses and sunglasses.



We used to arrive in these places who were magical for me, still young, enchanted: the stalls full of stuff, the antique dealer, the books with the scent of old, the screams, the smells. The hours passed by: we looked around, we were looking for something that no one knew exactly what it was, but we tried hard, vigorously. Sometimes we even competed for those who found the most beautiful object. And thus we spent our mornings: mornings of smiles, of eavesdropped tales, of advices given to the old women who flocked there to buy the beautiful fabrics with which they might have made clothes for their grandchildren. In these fairytale places every person is a story. Each object hides, conceals, contains a wonder, a story that the owner tells with the look of those who perhaps do not want to completely free the object that is going to be sold.
After many years and years, many of these objects I have them with me, in every corner of the house. I jealously kept them, I kept them carefully. A frame, the set of cups, that beautiful wooden box for magazines. Each of them reminds me of a morning, a story heard, a known old man, a glimpse of a passer-by met, perhaps by mistake.




Download the Italian version.
-Cianfrusaglie



Images:
(1) André Breton by Sabine Weiss, 1955
(2) USA. Nevada. Us Photographer Inge MORATH by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1960
(3) Inside the bazar, photography by Inge Morath, 2009, in Tehran, Iran.

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