Whatever part of the world they come from, surprise is what foreigners experience on entering Piedmont. « Italy has such a beautiful region and nobody ever told us about it? » No, they had not been told. There are already so many itineraries recommended by one Baedeker or another which send tourists scurrying around Italy from Venice to Florence, from Assisi to Pompei, right down to Taormina, that not even we realise that the grand tour should start from Turin. We have kept the beauty of our land well concealed, disclosing it a bit at a time only to those able to discover it from themselves.
The reason for this discreetness lies not only in the character of the Piedmontese, a highland people of few words and perhaps also a bit rétro. The nature – and history – of the region itself demand it. Piedmont’s beauty is hidden and unassuming, and does not lend itself to brightening the colour-splashed pages of travel brochures. Secret and intimate even in the lie of the countryside, which is the result of slow glacier erosion rather than the onslaught of the wind that carves valleys or the gnawing hunger of the sea that shapes coasts. A beauty to be felt by the heart, not admired by the eye: it must captivate us mutely, not with a shout about our ears. With its alternation of mountains and plains, valley floors and lakes, its tireless flow of rolling hills, Piedmont has all the qualities needed to stir our hearts: but only if our hearts are willing to be stirred.
Amazement is not the keynote of this measured anthology of creation. Everything is an invitation to reflect, to turn an inward eye, to meditate. The world around us calls for communion with oneself; nature exists so that we can listen, not be subdued by it. It is not by chance that only the sea is missing in the region’s geography. Its charm would be too imperious, too out of tune with our mental code; its vastness would appear distracting, even lascivious. For us the sea is a reflection of crystals, full-moon dreams, childhood fantasies in the farmyard, as in Pavese’s memorable tale where it becomes a myth: so necessary, yet unreachable. Our world is one on earth, rocky earth, to be measured with the plough, to be conquered with the pickaxe.
Whether Gabriella Arduino intended to follow this perception when she started painting her Piedmont is uncertain. Surely enough, it is present in her paintings: prevalently abbreviated views, perspectives of rural brickwork, like those you might find in a family picture album where the tempting appeal of the absolute would be out of place. Glimpses of towns, scenes of outskirts, marriages of campaniles and vineyards, frugal kaleidoscopes of sitting-room furniture and flea-market bric-à-brac.
Gabriella Arduino is fully aware, like ourselves, that Piedmont has its own grandeur, its own profound majesty derived from its origins, from the time when this land was laid down at the foots of the Alps and, as Cesare Balbo put it, gave birth to the « pais dij montagnard / pais d’òmini dur e tut d’un tòch » (mountain-folk’s country, land of dour men all of a piece). On bright mornings, we can gaze at the mountains the encircle Turin and open our lungs to the universe. But we cannot live on highland grandeur. Maybe that is why the heavens deny us such a glorious view as a daily treat by blanketing it so often with fog. We, too, have had a hand at concealing it with our man-made barrier of smog.
Our art, our poetry and even our thoughts have, for most of the year, a veiled background; the Piedmontese set out to subdue colours even further and find safety and protection in greys. No Mediterranean splendour blazes in Gozzano’s subalpine tableaux, nor in Pavese’s tales. The impressiveness of a Gothic cathedral is alien to the fortresses of the Alpine gorges; harsh and stony they stand, almost ghost-like on rainy days, to garrison the valleys. Though no voice is singing them, the notes of our songs can be heard in the air: slow and rhythmic, in step with the highlander’s tread, with the measured breathing that will carry him steadfastly up the mule-tracks.
Gabriella Arduino knows that her name spells both the wing of the angel of the Annunciation and the sword of the warrior. She realises that the angel must flex his wings, the warrior must keep his sword in its sheath, while she spies the city from a window where a workaday cat is lying in the wait, or she strews a terrace/balcony with everyday objects to attenuate the emotions of the countryside; or the view of an island on a lake is barred by a gate in the foreground, or the trunk of a tree is bent horizontally to distract the eye from the magnificence of an 18th-century castle.
The planes of reality are confused, exteriors become interiors, a necessary prelude to true appreciation of the spirit of Piedmont, to absorption of its landscape. The Langhe, lauded by so many writers, are viewed from a window in Grinzane Castle, where Barolo vineyards can be espied through the curtains of the room and cleave their way through Cavour’s books and papers. The apple orchard at Agliè becomes a population of butterflies: spread out on the window sill, pressed between the pages of a book that opens onto a room which intuition furnishes with all the good things of a bad taste inherited from Grandma Hope. The fortified village (bastide) of Candelo is split into two perspectives peering at each other; these should be dominated by the « Teatro Nazionale Cinema » between them, but the letters have faded over the years that only the mediaeval walls and towers have managed to resist. Turin’s Piazza Castello is projected in a long horizontal strip and its geometry is awry. Its real self, indeed, is all the more fantastic for being, as it seems, photographed in such a way that its details are exact, yet topsy-turvied by memory’s penchant for invention.
And how would it be possible to capture the truth of Piedmont without attempting to go beyond its appearance? Though made famous by Olivetti, and nationally considered an industrial town, Ivrea’s narrow streets in its inner city around the Duomo still evoke the days of King Arduin, when bishops and seigniors were constantly at each other’s throats. The Rosa Serafino Herb Shoppe in Turin has survived 125 years with its 19th-century shelves bearing jars of dried helichrysum flowers and cinnamon. An anachronism in such a technological city, but Piazza della Consolata would not be the same without the scent of herbs wafting through the air right into the church, conjuring up visions of exotic roots and alpine flora in the minds of those in prayer.
The religiousness of this region with its traditionally secular culture would appear to be a historical deception, but is, in fact, the surrebutter of its reality. For the best part of two centuries, Novalesa Abbey was given up for dead, a victim of Napoleon’s edicts and Siccardi’s anticlerical legislation transformed into a spa. However, it was reborn with the return of the benedictine monks in the 1970s. Within its recently erected walls Charlemagne planned to conquer Italy one late-8th-century winter. Today it stands apart from the flow of traffic in a hollow of the Valcenischia where the only sounds are those of the waterfalls or the Gregorian plainsong of the monks, for whom ora et labora still remains the rule. On a spur of the Valsesia, the Sacred Mount of Varallo defends the images of the Passion of Christ created by painters who where aware that they were entrusting their art to the more obscure, yet surer faith of the people. San Giulio Island on Lake Orta breaks the series of villas and gardens. It houses treasures, denied to the hasty tourist, in a convent of the Poor Clares, a provocative challenge to the sons et lumières of the surrounding world.
Beauty – bellezza – is a word the Piedmontese say in an undertone. In the local dialect, it is reduce to « blëssa » and even the « e » almost dies in the throat. Its meaning, therefore, must be sought and enjoyed in hermitages and the aisles of churches, and behind the great doorways that camouflage a host of palazzi. Only those with a long experience of Piedmont know the right season, time and place to grasp the naturally unnatural magic of the rice-fields. Only those who are not taken in by the names find the townplanner’s ideal brainchild on a knoll in the Langhe where an unrecorded village Leonardo devised the ethereal geometry of Cherasco. And it took the obstinacy of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-73) to discover Alberto Tallone’s miraculous printing shop in the centre of Alpignano.
Yet there’s always an exception to stand every rule on its head: the Sacra di San Michele (symbol of Piedmont), marvel of marvels, built by medieval genius on the top of a precipice at the mouth of the Susa Valley, so it can be seen from any point of the horizon. The « dizzily holy summit » of the poet Clemente Rebora, who wrote the last pages of the story of his life in one of its cells. A monument that overwhelms when seen for the first time by those coming from afar, just as it continues to fascinate those who have always known it, every day of their lives. In this the Sacra is like Monviso, Rocciamelone and the other peaks with which Piedmont rocks the even tenor of the mind. Yet it is best celebrated as the wedding of a human masterpiece to that which nature had to offer.
Now Gabriella Arduino really must seek help in the angel’s wing if she wishes to capture the mystery of the Sacra; but she also needs the warrior’s sword to evoke its history. She scans the abbey from below in a perpendicular vision of its stones, the superhuman stacking of its arches and vaults, along metaphysical edges, incorporeal loggias, up and up to where the sky turns to heaven, to the threshold of the biblical Michaël ( « Michele », in Italian), whose name means « Who is like unto God? ».
It was the carpenters and masons of our valleys who built the Sacra and set its great pillars on solid rock while Europe was waiting for the end of the first millennium. It is they who remind us today, with the highlander’s traditional humility and in the love tones of our dialect: « That’s Piedmont up there ».
Giorgio Calcagno
Preface to Attimi di Piemonte (Glimpses of Piedmont), Priuli&Verlucca, 2000
Italiano