Paolo Di Paolo. Mondo perduto

Di Paolo, Paolo

Paolo Di Paolo was born in Larino, Molise, in 1925. In 1939 he moved to Rome where he obtained his secondary school diploma in classical studies and, after the war, enrolled in the faculty of History and philosophy at La Sapienza University. He attended the artistic circles of Rome and decided to develop, through photography, his interest in figurative arts. In 1954 he started to collaborate with the weekly magazine Il Mondo, founded and edited by Mario Pannunzio. Di Paolo would become one of its main collaborators, with the largest number of photographs published (573 images).

Society/Rome

Artists/Intellectuals and Film

Particularly rich sections are devoted to Artists/Intellectuals and Film, with portraits of painters, poets, writers and film stars, mostly previously unseen and taken for pleasure. Lucio Fontana at the Biennale, Carla Accardi in Rome, Renato Guttuso on the Salita del Grillo, Mimmo Rotella creating one of his décollages in Piazza del Popolo, Ezra Pound, Tennessee Williams on the beach with his dog, Giuseppe Ungaretti with a cat in his arms, an unusual portrait of Oriana Fallaci “playing” at being a diva at the Venice Lido, Kim Novak ironing in her room in the Grand Hotel, Sofia Loren joking with Marcello Mastroianni in a studio at Cinecittà, Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni walking while reading a newspaper, and Simone Signoret and Yves Montand kissing at the Aventino. Then there are the “impossible” encounters captured for the weekly news magazine Tempo: Giorgio De Chirico together with Gina Lollobrigida, Salvatore Quasimodo with Anita Ekberg, Luchino Visconti with Mina, Nilde Iotti with Renato Rascel, and Alberto Moravia with Claudia Cardinale. With each of his portrait subjects, Di Paolo created a relationship based on empathy, trust and complicity that made every shot unique and unmistakeable: “Many of his photos” – writes his daughter Silvia Di Paolo – “remained unpublished because they were so intimate that it would have been inappropriate to give them to the newspapers.” Like those of Yves Montand in Rome, Oriana Fallaci in Venice and Anna Magnani on the beach.

La lunga strada di sabbia

n June 1959 Paolo Di Paolo was in Milan to meet Arturo Tofanelli, the director of the weekly magazine Il Tempo and the monthly Successo, to agree the usual summer service on the holidays taken by the Italians. He already had a proposal for the title, “The long road of sand”. Tofanelli proposed a travel companion, Pier Paolo Pasolini, then considered “a young author”: he had already written Le ceneri di Gramsci, Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta but he had not yet become a director. A complex, delicate relationship developed between them, which would bring them together only for the first leg of the journey, from Rome to Ventimiglia, but which would then strengthen into mutual respect and trust. They then set off from Rome towards Ventimiglia, the first reverse leg of the “long road”, with Di Paolo’s car, a MG-TD Bertone Arnolt, but they had different objectives: “He was looking for a lost world, of literary ghosts, an Italy that no longer existed – Di Paolo recalls -, I was looking for an Italy which looked to the future”. They would face the next two legs separately. The extraordinary tale told in images by Paolo Di Paolo would be published only in the three editions planned by Successo, while for the writer The long road of sand would become a text – integrated with sections that the monthly magazine had not used – that was published a number of times.