Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
THEn these weeks there has been a lot of talk about the fifty years since the death of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.
But if they still exist today the Foundation, the publishing housethe chain of bookstores, the merit is even if not above all of a woman.
A woman who found herself alone, with a small son, and who took care, saved, strengthened the world her husband had created.
Fortunately, the little son has grown up and has revealed the same talent and passion as his parents.
But without that woman, Inge (from Ingeborg, Swedish: Amata), nothing would have been saved.
And to say that she had already lived a previous life, in which she had photographed the most fascinating and controversial men of the twentieth century: Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and the Cuban who had been the liberator but above all the oppressor of his people, Fidel Castro.
When I interviewed her, I obviously asked her what relationship she had with them. She smiled and he replied that the real man of his life had been Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (and after him the Argentine artist Tomás Maldonado); he had only photographed the others.
He had an amused way of telling stories, without nostalgia: a flow in which every now and then a note of embarrassment, or lightness, or anger was perceived (when she spoke of the death of her husband, who according to her had been murdered).
Cuba in the 1950s was very poor, «The children died on the street as in Calcutta. Every day we went out on a boat with Hemingway and an exile from the Balearics, Gregorio Fuentes, the fisherman of The old Man and the Sea. But we hardly ever fished anything: the marlin you see in our famous self-portrait was three days old. Then we went to the Floridita, where in honor of Ernest they made the “Daiquiri doble a la Papa”: practically a salad bowl. At the table, however, he drank only Valpolicella, he had discovered it on the Italian front of the Great War. The news of Stalin’s death reached us; Hemingway was destroyed by it, I found him drunk on the floor ».
What a life, Inge.
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