Vite nell’oro e nel blu

There are lives so great that they seem invented, like certain periods in world history. Like the light that spread across Piazza del Popolo in Rome at sunset in the late 1950s. Bathed in that light, a group of young people sitting at the tables of the Rosati bar – with fashionable hair, cigarettes in the corners of their mouths and Clarks on their feet – look askance at the city re-emerging from the rubble of war. Their names are Mario Schifano, Franco Angeli, Tano Festa and Francesco Lo Savio. They come from the working class and are about to take over the cultural and social scene of the country. Soon, in fact, they would become the communist painters who cavorted with princesses, succulent morsels for the paparazzi and inventors of new pagan mythologies. But in the meantime, they lived their youth, challenging the artistic geniuses from across the Atlantic – Warhol, Rauschenberg, Johns – and frequenting Ungaretti, Moravia, Guttuso, the Agnelli family and the Rolling Stones. Mario Schifano was a refugee from Italian Libya who bore the mark of Mussolini’s imperialist mirage engraved on his skin. Franco Angeli was born in Rome, in the San Lorenzo district, into a family persecuted by fascism. Tano Festa and Francesco Lo Savio, despite their different surnames, were brothers. The former spent his afternoons on the steps of Trinità dei Monti distributing poems to passers-by. The second, fragile and restless, developed radical ideas that soon led him to isolate himself from everything and everyone. They were “the masters of pain”, as a Roman gallery owner called them, misquoting the title of a famous series of artist monographs. Each lives his “golden hour” through the “café society” of the 1960s in a Rome that has once again become the centre of the world. They conquer the most desirable women, go to live in luxurious aristocratic palaces, travelled to every continent, earned and spent money compulsively, betrayed each other to the point of attempting to kill one another, started families and destroyed them, and above all painted obsessively, relentlessly, signing works that marked the Italian iconographic imagination of the second half of the 20th century. But the “golden hour” – that particular type of light that only exists in Rome at sunset, making the buildings look like velvet – lasts very little, then comes the “blue hour”, the hour of shadows that precedes nightfall. The climate of the country changed and their names sank into oblivion. They faced years of decline, of sliding into madness, arrests, drug addiction, blackmail by the underworld, and hospitalisations in hospitals and mental asylums. Shaping an epic that unfolds over half a century of Italian history, Andrea Pomella writes an adventurous novel about four unforgettable lives, capable of touching with their hands – and giving back to us – the defenceless beauty of life.