If Italy has a tarnished reputation, that’s because we don’t cherish and export what is really of value. Or rather, we focus on too few things, always the same, and ignore too many others. Instead of drawing horrible logos or starting implausible websites such as italia.it, why not dig in the “shadow cones” of history, looking for unexpected flagship examples of “Italianity”?
Did you know that it was an Italian immigrant to the U.S. who invented the car bomb? Yes, it happened in 1920. The innovator was an anarchist from Romagna named Mario Buda, also known as Mike Boda. The explosion destroyed the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan Inc. bank on Wall Street. There were deaths and injuries, and tons of documents were reduced to a snow of confetti covering the surrounding streets. The New York Times called the attack “an act of war.” It was “asymmetric war”, of course: on one side, the power of finance. On the other, a shoemaker from Savignano sul Rubicone. To be precise, it wasn’t exactly a car, because the bomb was placed on a horse-drawn wagon. However, it was the first time a parked vehicle was used as a high potential weapon. It’s a record held by Italy, and yet very few people know about it, and those who know prefer to skate over. So much (appropriate) ardour in defending Antonio Meucci against the impostor Graham Bell, whereas there’s nobody saying: “For evil or for good, Buda was the first to have that idea!” The inventor of car bombs. We’re not talking about petty things, are we? (more…)

[This article was published on the Italian edition of GQ magazine in July 2009]

Only a few relatives and aficionados celebrated the quarter-century of the death of Peter Kolosimo, the 1970s “fantarcheologist” and paleo-ufologist who fed the multitudes with dreams and visionary books. He died at sixty-two on March 24, 1984, but we like to think that he just left the planet.
Kolosimo is a figure to be rediscovered: he left us with many questions and his heritage is still meaningful. Timeless Earth, Not of This World, Space-ships in Prehistory, Odissea Stellare, Italia Mistero Cosmico… Those titles have never ceased to arouse our fantasies. And what’s with those lists on the frontcovers, halfway between subtitles and newspaper placelines? “Ulysses as a time traveller. The gods and outer space. Cyclops in America? Mythology of other worlds. Atomic bombs and robots in Homer’s epic.” Or: “Spacecraft graffiti in the rocks. Martians in Vietnam, elephants in America. Unknown races in the Amazon jungles. Atomic bombs and lasers before the flood. Is Gilgamesh still alive?”
Not to mention such blurbs as: “The first comprehensive photographic documentation of space archaeology – 300 pictures.” (more…)

Hendrick’s Dream
3rd prolegomenon to Manituana, Summer 2006
‘Hendrick Peters felt he belonged to a past season of the world. He had been a boy at a time that the English called the “last century”, he remembered the days of great power of the Longhouse. That phase of his life had become an image known on both shores of the Ocean. He had been ambassador to London under Queen Anne, painters had captured his likeness, fixing in time the moment and the man who ferried the Mohawks from one age to another. On his face, the marks of time left a trace that ran through the last sixty years of history.’

The Nameless
Article by Jacopo Guerriero in GQ (Italian edition), n.91, April 2007
‘This revolution is faceless! No photographs, no authors. The author is a commonplace of consumerist perversion invented to make you read happily, but with your pockets empty and your brain fogged by romantic inventions. Step back: western Europe in the early 1990s, was the time of the appearance of the web, of the ‘no-copyright’ movements, the start of a new transformation of the culture industry. You found a mysterious signature that appeared everywhere, in station toilets, in graffiti on the walls, on the tables of a pub…’

When the Indians invented punk two centuries ago
Article by Marco Philopat published in the journal XL, no. 20, April 2007
‘As soon as I’d finished reading Manituana I wanted to cut my hair into a Mohican, like in the old days. Set before the revolution that brought America into being, Manituana is a story from the wrong side of history: the Indians. Published these days, the latest collective work by the literary clan, writing workshop, cultural and political project of Wu Ming, the ‘no names’ of Mandarin Chinese, had the same effect on me as the first punks in Portobello in the late 1970s.’