On the way up to the Alto Adige, we bypassed Rovereto because of our blowout on the autostrada, which delayed us by three hours. We knew we would be too late arriving in Trento if we’d stopped. After visiting Trento, I feel torn. Ready to explore more of the Dolomiti north of here but also pulled to double back. There is something I want to see in Rovereto.
“Let’s go,” Ed says. “You’ll just regret it if we don’t.” Back along the Adige—castles strategically positioned for outlooks, abbeys and church spires, the pleasure of the neat rows of grapes rolling down hillsides—an easy drive.
ROVERETO’S TREE-LINED AND broad main street has no curbs. The sidewalks slope gently down. What a good idea. Though it looks like a pleasant walking town, we drive straight to the object of this quest: MART, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. This is another waving plume in the hat of this region. A stellar art collection housed in a building designed by Mario Botta. I remember well when his San Francisco Museum of Modern Art rocked the sensibilities of the Bay Area in 1994. After reading about his work since then, I am inspired to see what he accomplished in Rovereto.
COULD THIS BE the entrance, a narrow street between two palazzi? Unprepossessing, and no preparation for the surprise of stepping into a soaring atrium. The steel and Plexiglas dome resembles a spider web, with the center an open oculus like the Pantheon’s. Rain and snow can fall into the fountain below. The slot and square windows in the lower walls also remind me of the Pantheon, although with a touch of rigor that recalls slits in castles for arrow shooting, and also the rationalist buildings beloved by the fascists.
The collection features the work of modernist Italian painters and of the Futurists, those bad boys. Although the Futurists’ jarring work is better known, the other painters of the twentieth century, such as Giorgio Morandi, Massimo Campigli, Julius Evola, Achille Funi, Mario Sironi, and Manilo Rho, were more individualistic. Funi’s Ragazzo con le mele (Boy with an Apple), Rho’s Woman in Red, and Campigli’s Donne sul terrazzo (Women on a Terrrace)—which recalls both fresco technique and Etruscan tomb painting—are three favorites. And Alberto Burri! I am a longtime admirer of this painter from Città di Castello, near Cortona. While serving as a medical doctor in World War Two, he was captured and sent to a POW camp in Texas, where he began making art out of found items—cardboard, wire, and cellophane. Much of his work is displayed in his hometown, though he was influential worldwide to many artists, including Robert Rauschenberg.
And how fabulous—Fortunato Depero’s Movimento d’uccello (Movement of a Bird). Reading over the famous Marinetti manifesto of 1909, I laugh at the bombast. Down with libraries, museums, feminism, and morality! The artists of the movement are under thirty and expect to be extinct by forty. The century has turned, ushering in speed, machines, velocity, all manner of movement. Art must embrace disruption and industry. War is “hygienic.” “A racing car…is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Down with Italy’s past culture, even pasta!
A Futurist favorite of mine is Gino Severini, a Cortona boy who dropped his painting of religious subjects and took up fractured motions and wild colors. We get to see his Ballerina from 1913, and Plastic Rhythm of 14 July, and Portrait of Madame MS. He’s good. A trattoria in Cortona displays a print of Severini’s dancehall painting La Danza del pan pan al Monico, Dance of the Pan Pan at the Monico. The colors, angles, and rhythms of the dancers run to the edge of the canvas—no context of a room, just collective motion. How many evenings I’ve waited for my ribollita while admiring his joyous whirl and energy. In old age, Severini returned to Cortona. As his own motion slowed, the long DNA in every Italian painter’s blood must have proven too strong to resist: He took up painting the Madonna once again. A couple of times a week, I walk up the path of his mosaic stations of the cross. All Futurist motion stalled.
We linger and linger. Lively contemporary exhibitions express the museum’s architectural momentum. One is simply a doorway with music and talk seeping out. A collaboration between Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk and Grazia Toderi, Words and Stars combines imagined maps, celestial maps, and real visions of the lights of Istanbul, with prose that dwells on how our minds connect with the movement of light and stars. (Long gone now, but perhaps it will travel.) There’s a drifty ambiguity: The words seem to dissolve as I try to read the handwriting of the earth—its oceans, lights, earth formations.
Botta’s interior is so white. The airiness, the sculptural openings in walls, the monumental stairways, the turns—all take you on a journey. The excitement of the art communicated by its house. Imagine, in this small town. How did this miracle happen?
The Hotel Rovereto is something of a time warp with its plain furnishings and bleak light at the window. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I feel like the solitary figure in Edward Hopper’s Hotel Room. Fortunately, the restaurant serves good local food. As we attack a big fish in salt crust, we ponder the wonders we have seen.
NOTE:
Orhan Pamuk’s novel of a doomed romance, The Museum of Innocence, inspired him to create an eponymous museum in Istanbul. Not to be missed! Personal, intriguing, imaginative, the museum is an Ottoman house transformed into a cabinet of curiosities. Pamuk’s project is obsessive: All objects named in the narrative of his book are displayed.