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Let’s start at the end.
As always.

Piero Portaluppi
died on 6 July 1967.

He passed away of
old age in his bed,

in his centuries old home,

across the street
from the Church of

Santa Maria delle Grazie in
Corso Magenta in Milan.

His Milan.

At the same time in London,

the Beatle’s Sgt. Pepper’s
album was triumphing

and in Vietnam,
the U.S. Marine offensive

was failing on the Mekong Delta.

A few days later, Luisa,
the beloved daughter,

rowed a boat into the
middle of Lake Maggiore.

As soon as she was far enough

away from shore,
with her son’s help,

she dumped some large,
black bags into the lake.

They sank to the bottom.

Or so the legend goes.

We don’t know what
was in those bags.

We’re not even sure
whether the legend is true.

But this is where
our story begins.

Because what is left of
a man, after sifting

through memories, is but
a handful of anecdotes.

The black bags
that sank to the bottom

tell the fate
Piero Portaluppi was destined to.

Famous during his lifetime,

ostentatious,
a champion of his times,

in the forty years following
his death, he too sank.

He was forgotten.

The Amateur

Many years later, his
great grandchildren found

dozens of 16 mm film
reels in an old trunk,

perfectly preserved
and catalogued.

They were films shot,
edited, and archived

by their great grandfather
throughout his life,

left locked up for thirty years.

Piero Portaluppi’s formidable
career begins

as Old Europe’s civilization
is coming to an end.

On all fronts, the corpses of ten
million young, idealistic men

fall in the trenches
of the First World War.

Portaluppi also joins
the war as a lieutenant.

And he too, son of an engineer,

alongside the
proletarians in the trenches,

discovers the dizziness of war
and the faith of national pride.

Fighting side-by-side
with millions

of illiterate farmers,
he, like them,

feels the death of an era and

the beginning of a new one.

However, he gets detailed to the

hydroelectric power
plants in Val Formazza.

The family says that after the
defeat at the Battle of Caporetto,

he asked to be
reassigned to active duty.

No one in the family
knows, however,

whether the request
was approved.

In Val d’Ossola and
Val Formazza, Portaluppi designs

grandiose, fairy-tale-like
hydroelectric power plants

for Ettore Conti, a magnate and
pioneer of the electricity industry.

Massacres and culture.
Catastrophe and progress.

The walls enclose the thundering
roar of the turbines inside,

but outside,
Portaluppi’s power plants

look like whimsical
castles from another age.

The overall
appearance is, in fact,

that of a neo-Medieval fantasy.

There is a modern
element though;

the electricity powered
by mass quantities

of water in movement.

But to the young
architect, modernity

is a mere production design.

A gala evening, a social event,

and brilliant

Let’s take a step back.
Even Piero Portaluppi

has a family history.
Like all families.

His biological father, Oreste,
a lower middle-class man,

died when Piero was
only ten years old.

The early death of his father
causes a seismic fault

of profound insecurity
to open up in young Piero.

It manifests itself throughout
his childhood

and adolescence as a
very pronounced stutter.

Piero compensates with
early signs of artistic flair:

as a child he starts to show
great talent in drawing.

He expresses this gift by
sketching exuberant cartoons

later published
in the Guerrin Meschino,

a satirical humour
magazine edited by the

Milanese Scapigliatura
artistic movement.

Even his aptitude for
dancing on the edge

of things and events
manifests itself early on.

It will stay with him
forever, until the end.

Right before the war, young
Piero gets engaged to Lia Baglia,

the electricity magnate,
Ettore Conti’s niece.

The couple get married
in June 1913.

Lia keeps a secret
diary until the eve

of her wedding.
After that, the pages are blank:

the story of the Amateur begins.

Casting off his
grey-green uniform,

Portaluppi enters
the Milanese jet set.

He makes quite a
spectacular entrance.

He is talented, vain, playful.

He draws freehand masterfully,
drives customized convertibles

and boasts pea-green ties, the only
man in all of Milan to wear them.

Lia… his wife.

A daughter is born, Luisa, the
pretty daughter, the adored child.

Then they have a son, Oreste,
named after his grandfather.

In Val Formazza, the young,
eccentric architect

designs and builds
a restaurant in a train coach

at 2,300 metres above sea
level next to a holiday resort.

It is a day in late spring.

Portaluppi has brought
his family for a visit.

The people on the
film are shot for

the first time by the
Amateur’s camera.

In his life like at his job,

Portaluppi seduces
his way around.

He seduces women, society, time.

He shapes the world
according to his own tastes.

Pulling faces, doing
somersaults, keeping distances.

This seems to be, from
the onset, his guiding star.

Even with his family.

His home movies show laughter,
joking around, games.

Every day of the week,
in every season,

it is always a Sunday in life.

A Sunday in summer.

The camera falls
in love with a face.

This is cinema.

In the cinema of the
Amateur filmmaker,

the face always
belongs to a woman.

Beauty and semi-darkness.

Fixed gazes into the lens.
Seductive and seduced.

Our cathedral

His descendants take us to the
same places from the past.

Their beauty and life
has been preserved.

Untouched by the present.

At the beginning of the 1920s,

Piero Portaluppi goes
off like fireworks.

After the electric power plants,
he designs factories, villas,

stores, tombs, company pavilions,

residential and
office buildings,

refurbishes luxurious mansions
and restores ancient churches.

In a few short years,
he goes from designing

his famous projects
for imaginary cities,

to designing for Milan’s
urban planning,

the only true city that
exists in his mind.

Portaluppi soon becomes
a renowned architect.

He makes a name for himself
and buys a house.

The Casa degli Atellani becomes
the home of Ettore Conti,

'His Eminence,
Senator of the Kingdom’.

And Portaluppi, not
intimidated in the least

by past centuries,
does away with formalities,

and reinvents it for Conti
at the beginning of the 1920s.

He designs a kaleidoscope true to
his variegated and flawless taste.

He adorns it with
embellishments and décor

inspired by his
extravagant passions:

signs of the zodiac,
sundials, modern inscriptions,

maxims and plays on words.

Agere, non loqui.
Do, don’t talk.

Within its walls, the
architect lives with

his wife, Lia,
the magnate’s niece.

This is where he showcases
his artistic skills.

He studies triangulation,

transcends the customs
of his social class

into shapes with
a cinematic cut.

This is where he
views his daughter,

makes her pose for the camera.

The camera falls in love
with a face.

Ettore Conti is one of the

most influential
figures of the century.

A great industrialist,
a great pioneer,

a great upper middle-class
man, banker, president,

Senator of the Kingdom.
The Electricity man.

Conti, childless, adopts Lia
and, in some way, Piero, too.

A strong bond develops between
him and the architect.

They have a lot in common.

Both of them are elegant,
attractive, ambitious,

generous, brilliant
and self-centred.

The timing is perfect.
Everything has been done

and everything still
needs to be done.

Assembly lines, the telegraph,
automobiles, and airplanes,

“create an abyss between
the submissive slaves

from the past and we the free,

we who are confident of the
magnificence of the future.”

Electricity lights
up the streets

and the movie camera
immortalizes it.

But Ettore Conti, the visionary
magnate of the electricity industry,

is also the man who weaves
an intense correspondence

with Mussolini, ready to
march on Rome.

Behold the 1920s:
the triumph of Art Nouveau

and Benito
Mussolini’s Blackshirts.

The Amateur begins to edit an
eccentric film, Grandi Firme.

A roster of the faces of his fellow,
illustrious, co-stars of the times

stolen for a few
frames from history.

Among them
we recognise his new clients.

Milano is a rich
city in a poor country

Capital of the arts
and sciences.

The city’s noteworthy bourgeoisie
is proud of its virtues:

frugality, precision,
intelligence, initiative.

The enlightened Milanese
industrial aristocracy

is not accustomed to taking
a back seat to Roman politics.

Perhaps this is the
reason it sends a militia

of disgruntled and violent
proletariats to Rome.

But for Portaluppi, in his
intimate, blissful world,

these are years of long
walks along promenades

by the sea, not marches on Rome.

Outings, day-trips, jaunts.

The Promenade
des Anglais at Nice,

the beau monde, European
capitals, Berlin, Paris,

and gondolas
through Venice’s canals.

Above all, they are years
filled with beautiful women,

more elegant than
they will ever be again.

The years of Chanel N°5.

Women are allowed to smoke,

they cut their hair into
a bob, they play tennis,

they raise their hemlines
to just below the knee

and drop their waistlines.

Above all, they smile,
they always smile,

brunette or blond, into
the lens of the Amateur’s camera.

“When faced with the iconoclast
rationalism of the new school,

we invoke the gift of a little
beauty in order to sweeten

our sour daily lives
with necessary excess.”

These are the words of the most

influential art critic
of the decade.

The critic’s name is
Margherita Sarfatti,

Mussolini’s mistress, companion

and muse in his rise to power.

So, the “gift of a little
beauty” is invoked.

During this time, Portaluppi
ignores modernism

and provides an
abundance of beauty.

In recognition of his
prominent role,

he is commissioned to
design the Italian Pavilion

for the Universal Exposition
in Barcelona in 1929.

He travels extensively
throughout a Europe

that has been shaken and
inebriated by apocalyptic shocks.

Here, we see him
at the International

Convention in Budapest in 1930.

But his formidable decorative
creativity continuously eludes

the inflexibility of
schools, groups, models.

The Amateur distances
himself from

all constraints
with acrobatic flair.

He is metamorphic,
superficial in depth,

iridescent; he is fresh
and effervescent.

Italy, on the other hand,
does not distance itself.

The dictatorship strikes
like a slap in the face.

When Benito Mussolini
arrives in Milan in 1930

for the inauguration
of the planetarium,

Portaluppi captures him on film.

We catch a glimpse
of the solemn,

imperious stride bursting
into a domed chamber.

The chamber is dark.

All the light is prevented
from entering from outside.

When the last rays of the sun
are eaten up by the moon,

all of a sudden, everything changes…

Because, all of a sudden,
darkness falls over the earth.

From outer space, you
can see the shadow

of moon passing over
this strip of earth…

And you find yourself in
full day, but in the dark.

The grand Milanese middle-class

– the one that won’t
take a back seat to Rome –

is unstinting, generous and liberal.

Milan is living on fervour
so an esteemed

patron, Swiss publisher
Ulrico Hoepli,

commissions Portaluppi
to design a planetarium

to donate to the city:
a place for reflection,

where anyone can “forget
the fever that drives each of

us in the pursuit of a
personal, specific torment.”

For this work, he conceives an
austere entrance that calls to mind,

“with its classical
architectural order,

the characteristics of
an ancient temple.”

Milan receives a second sky.
An artificial sky

on which advanced
technological instruments

project the constellations
of heaven on a summer’s eve.

Looking at it today from
light years away,

one can clearly see how the
Planetarium would become one of the

most popular locations in the city.

Generations of students
have admired

the artificial sky on
leisurely mornings.

The landscape has remained
the same as in 1930.

The stars, fixed or not,
are surely the same.

Portaluppi is a professor.
He is appointed a post-doctoral

position in Architectural
Elements and Design.

He teaches but he
doesn’t lecture.

He doesn’t theorise,
he doesn’t take a stand;

his lessons are
impromptu drills.

He allows whatever the wind
blows into his classroom,

but he doesn’t give breathing
exercises to expand lungs.

But in this way, he allows
his young students

reedom of research
and expression.

Everything is acceptable in his
vision of escapist architecture.

Especially the escapist part.

Banfi, Belgiojoso,

Peressutti,

Nathan Rogers

The professor takes his students
on trips around Italy and Europe:

Sicily, Athens, Istanbul.
Ancient times and exoticism.

“An architect’s work,”
states Portaluppi,

“the attempt to put things
in order, is a Sisyphean task.

The stone keeps rolling down
to the bottom again.

So everything is acceptable.
Even opposites.

Therefore, in collaboration
with some of the students

who were doing somersaults
on the ship’s bridge,

he designs ''The Saturday Home
for Newlyweds''

for the Milan Triennale.

A manifesto of
Rationalism that had been

completely foreign to
him until this moment.

The students are Banfi, Belgiojoso,
Peressutti, Nathan Rogers,

and they would become
the leading

proponents of new
Italian architecture.

His Majesty Victor Emmanuel III
visits the Saturday Home.

Portaluppi welcomes
him in full evening

dress and top hat, and
his camera in one hand.

With the other, he describes the

work with overly
enthusiastic gestures.

The king’s hand springs
to his hat various times,

as if controlled by an
obsessive-compulsive need.

It is 1933. Benito Mussolini,
''il Duce'', leader of the Italians,

is about to offer an entire
empire to the petite king.

Villa Necchi Campiglio
is situated in

the aristocratic Via Mozart
in the heart of Milan.

But from the street,
it is difficult

to imagine anything
about the villa,

screened off by a continuous
fence and immersed in a garden.

Piero Portaluppi designed it for
Cavaliere Angelo Campiglio in 1930.

Work began two years later
and it was completed in 1935.

In the garden, a swimming pool,

with a shallow and deep
end, and a tennis court,

suggest a niche of healthy
open-air living in the middle

of the congested
centre of the city.

A tiny bubble of luxury
and wellbeing

blown inside the city by
the master glassmaker.

Every space is designed
as a painting.

Everything is seeped in
elegance and beauty.

Everything is designed
to accommodate

the architect’s
aesthetics in union

with the comforts of technology.

The architecture, a
perfect work of art,

is put to use as a private
middle-class dwelling.

Inside, total immunity.

Outside, the huge,
terrible world.

“… personal items, hats,

a Borsalino…

These are the shoes…”

It is the 1930s and
Piero Portaluppi

now belongs to the social
class he is working for.

His meticulous, witty
and obsessive

ledger is beginning to register
earnings with six zeros.

Villa Necchi, Casa
Corbellini-Wasserman,

Palazzo Crespi,
Palazzo della Banca Commerciale …

The golden clients increase,
precious materials are honed,

architectural motifs
are recurring elements,

and sketches for
railings and flooring

are wearing
down his fountain pens.

Milan, only Milan.

The Amateur is completely
devoted to this city.

The city of Bishop Ambrogio,
Bramante and Leonardo da Vinci.

The moral and economic
capital, the city of

the industrial revolution
and of labourer’s pride.

The cradle of Socialism and
Fascism, of the future and Futurism.

Today, the city is
secretly studded

by countless works
by Piero Portaluppi.

But the Amateur doesn’t
shoot a single frame as

proof of the mark he left
on Milan’s urban plan,

He doesn’t leave, save for rare

exceptions, any trace on film.

It almost seems as if he
wanted to erase

his own footsteps;
invoke his own oblivion.

Portaluppi is in all senses
of the genitive case,

the architect to the
upper bourgeois.

A bourgeois man,
a bourgeois architect,

a bourgeois artist
in an era where art,

all art, from left to right,

puts the working-class
first, no matter what.

In the meantime, the
elusive working-class

vanishes into the
masses of the Fascist draft.

Throughout the 1930s, more political
works are being commissioned.

Portaluppi seems to
have become a

Fascist just as he had
become middle-class,

with disengaged irony,
with worldly nonchalance.

In 1933 he joins the Fascist party,
like almost everyone else is doing

He designs the
headquarters of the Milan

Federation of Fascists in
Piazza San Sepolcro.

In Rome, the extreme Fascist
auditors squash the project.

Portaluppi sketches,
adjusts, reworks it.

Later, when he is
commissioned to design

the memorial monument
to Fascist martyrs,

he withdraws, in good order,
and entrusts it to his students.

For that assignment,
he lacks conviction.

The Amateur, true to his
nature, knows no faith.

It is at this time that
Edoardo Persico would?

Stigmatise him as a
“façade illustrator”.

According to this
vision, Portaluppi is

all about surface,
appearance, façade.

This defines, first and foremost
his Milan, his beloved city,

conceived as
an open-air theatre.

Portaluppi redesigns the
church plaza at Piazza Duomo.

In 1934, right before reaching his
peak of consensus in the country,

Benito Mussolini gives
an impassioned speech

to the jubilant crowd in
that same square.

Portaluppi is there, as a
filmmaker, as always.

He provides us with an
unprecedented and

shocking Duce, filmed
from behind, crookedly.

It is footage of an
overlooked Duce,

confined to the backstage
of his own devices.

The years pass and
Portaluppi continues

to shoot, document, and archive

with the same marked
flair for the theatrical.

This domestic-social-worldly
theatricality is evident

at Luisa’s wedding, the
adored daughter.

As are the young
bride’s illusions.

Her extremely long train
whirls like a sail in

the Atellani garden next
to Antonio Castellini,

her illustrious groom.

At this time, his son Oreste is
studying engineering

but he rarely appears
in his father’s films,

even on this important occasion.

Yet Portaluppi has him in mind to
take over his studio in the future.

Everything is always theatrical,
frozen in time by the

amateur eye of the
man with the camera.

By the mid 1930s, Portaluppi
has become a millionaire.

He can realise his dream:

build a home named after himself.

He finds land near the
Casa degli Atellani

and builds the
walls from scratch.

He baptizes it Casa
d’Appartamenti Portaluppi

and plans his studio
on the ground floor:

eccentric and articulate, it
takes up the entire space

on both sides of
the entrance hall.

By contrast, on the upper
floors, the apartments

have a more simple and
traditional distribution of space,

running off a central
hallway that divides the

living rooms from the
master bedrooms.

According to some,
this is his masterpiece.

The perfect union
between the clean lines

of Rationalism and the
lavish flair of Art Nouveau.

Between personal pleasures
and bothersome

necessities, between
art and contingency.

The exterior features a
smooth façade

without embellishments
and protrusions,

covered in white chrome
metallic alloy slabs;

low-quality material imposed
by the Fascist autocracy.

However, the interior,
in counterpoint,

boasts multi-coloured
and exquisite marble.

Concealed behind
a wall, there is

a valuable drop-front
bar cabinet

that could be taken out during

encounters with his mistresses.

Above the desk, in plain
sight, a collage of

photographs of the eyes
of his five grandchildren.

This is where his archives
are collected today.

The mistresses have disappeared

as have his
grandchildren’s eyes,

but what does remain are
the hundreds of drawings,

cartoons, collections, postcards
from the world over,

anagrams, ledgers, statistics
and diagrams that were

“observed, calculated
and compiled on the life

and customs of
Don Pedro Puerta Lopez”.

A life of numbers
and pleasantries.

Including the calculations:
“What I ate in one year”,

and “How I passed the
time in the year 1905”.

But that year is
in the distant past.

As are the brilliant
projects for imaginary

cities and skyscrapers
designed in the 1920s,

without distinguishing
between utopia

and dystopia,
between heaven and hell.

At the end of the 1930s, the only
thing that exists is the real city.

And the difference between
utopia and dystopia,

between heaven and
hell, will be felt soon.

Mussolini has attacked
Abyssinia with chemical agents.

The United Nations
sanctioned Italy,

and Fascist Italy has
responded with autocracy.

So, in Milan, grain is
grown in Piazza del Duomo

and an anonymous hand
reaches out to stroke it.

Mussolini now parades through Milan
preceded by a movie camera.

Thousands of children
follow him, muskets

on their shoulders,
wearing military uniforms.

At every level and institution
of Italian education,

teachers are required
to swear their loyalty to fascism.

The childhood of the
nation has been

completely organized
into paramilitary troops.

It is called Balilla National
Youth Organization

and it trains the human farm
of the Duce’s future soldiers:

his cannon fodder.

In front of the camera,
the faces lose their identity.

Portaluppi is enchanted
by the initials

of his own name
on a street sign.

As always, the Amateur
digresses, jokes around,

gazes at his mirrored
reflection in the ephemeral.

On the 20th anniversary
of its founding,

Mussolini returns with
ceremonious solemnity

to Piazza San Sepolcro
in Milan where in 1919,

surrounded by a few
dozen followers,

he founded the Fasci of Combat.

Now thousands upon
thousands are marching.

The multitude of new
fascist recruits are

so many that the Duce
struggles to walk,

looking a little annoyed
by his latest worshippers.

Through his lens, Portaluppi
watches other illustrious

figures march by for
his film, Grandi Firme.

Time passes, the faces change.

Everyone is donning
medals and uniforms,

but the filmmaker doesn’t seem
to give this much weight;

he shoots and bears witness.

Among the faces
is Giuseppe Bottai,

Minister of National Education.

Portaluppi had written to him
after receiving tenure in 1936:

“I am touched and appreciative,
I express my infinite pride

in being able to serve my beloved
school with doubled fascist faith.”

They are just conventional
words of respect.

We won’t give them much weight.

The Amateur, true to his
nature, knows no loyalty.

In 1939, the Amateur is Dean of
the Faculty of Architecture

and goes on another
trip with his students.

They go to Tripolitania,
a colony of the Empire.

He shoots evident signs
of our mission to civilise,

“Municipal midwife. Service
is free for the poor”.

He shoots the
carefree class at the

archaeological
excavation at Sabratha.

And the exhilarated students
on the dazzling white dunes.

A year later, on the same sand

a little further east,
Italian soldiers,

almost completely in
non-motorised formations,

will advance on foot to conquer

the stark, flat, desolate land;

a uniform, barren plain dotted
by valleys below sea level,

afflicted by a brutal climate,
lost in the immense desert.

But in the meantime,
the exotic trip taken by

the Dean and his students
ends successfully.

It is late spring.

At the end of the summer,
with fifty-three divisions,

of which six are armoured,
Hitler invades Poland.

Starting from 1940,
the filmmaker retreats.

The reels thin out.

The Duce has plummeted
Italy into the World War

and Piero Portaluppi almost
exclusively films children.

He always shoots them
in their assumed antics.

The filmmaker’s childhood
is a film full of laughter:

it trips, it falls down, it
races its bike, a pipe

between its lips, whether it
is wearing an Alpine hat

or whether it has whiskers,

or whether it is
marching as a Fascist youth.

Perhaps Portaluppi is running
away again, distancing

himself with his usual
creative flair, he shirks away.

Perhaps, in extremis, he returns
to his own fatherless childhood.

A childhood of
stuttering and insecurities

put right by his talent for
drawing cartoons free hand.

Perhaps childhood is the only
way to continue to draw

undeterred on
the façade of history,

while the population,
summoned onto the scene

of the century, marches
towards the apocalypse.

So the grandfather stays in
the city but he sends his

grandchildren to a safe
place in the villa on the lake.

And every time he visits, he
invents games, he draws like

a magician, he shoots
them and shoots only them.

When grandpa arrives,
it’s always a party.

But childhood, like
history, doesn’t forgive.

Childhood requires
fathers, not grandfathers.

It does not tolerate jumping,
somersaults, creative flair.

During this time, Oreste,
his only son, the one

who almost never appears
in the filmmaker’s films,

is stubbornly seeking extremes.

He is hurt in one of his many
mountaineering adventures,

he is declared unfit
at his medical exam,

but later he is able
to get a licence as

a Naval Observer by
concealing his disability.

He is not a fascist but
asks to be stationed in

Sardinia where the risk
for aircraft is greater.

For months Oreste flies over
the Western Mediterranean.

When he goes down in
the sea off Algeria,

his body will not be
returned to his father

who will have to bury
an empty coffin.

Defeated by the loss, the
Amateur breaks down.

When faced with this tragedy,

the only thing left
is empty rhetoric.

He crashes too, orphaned
by his son.

“Dear Federal, I shout
‘Long Live Italy’ through

a voice strangled by
indescribable pain,

but with the pride of a
fascist father.

My son, Oreste, my only son,
fell as a hero fighting

in the Mediterranean
as a Naval Observer.

At 25 five years old, he was
an engineer and a volunteer.

Now he rests in the
cemetery of Algiers.

I wanted to give you the news first,
as a friend and as a hierarch.

I feel more Italian and
more fascist than ever.

My tears are filled
with pride and glory!”

This was written in a private

letter to the head
of the Party in Milan,

but will be made public in the
newspaper, Corriere della Sera.

Milan, in the
meantime, is overwhelmed.

In mid-August 1943, RAF
Lancasters fly over the

city in a series of waves for
three consecutive days.

There are thousands of casualties,
the city changes face forever.

On 13 August, the bombers
hit, among other things,

the Royal Palace and
the Poldi Pezzoli Museum.

On the 14th, Santa Maria delle
Grazie and the Braidense Library.

On the 15th, bombs
burst through the roof

of the Teatro alla Scala,
damage the Duomo,

and destroy some
of the cloisters of the

Ospedale Maggiore in
Via Festa del Perdono.

This is the
Maggiore Hospital…

On 15 August, Luisa,
the beautiful daughter,

the adored child, leaves
her children at the lake

and takes one of the last
trains in circulation.

She gets as far as the station at
Bovisa. They tell her to get off.

The city is paralyzed.
Milan is a corpse.

Luisa walks down the
street that separates her

from her parent’s house,
the Casa degli Atellani,

right in front of the Church
of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

Everything is in flames, burning
embers everywhere, tiny fires.

There is no water and fires are
being put out with glasses.

Trying to empty the
ocean with a glass.

This is what is said
of an impossible endeavour,

of unrealistic madness.

The Milanese will succeed.
One glass at a time.

The church is destroyed but
da Vinci’s Last Supper is unharmed.

They will restore it crack by
crack, one colour at a time.

Get in the water.
Get in the water with your feet out.

Good.
Don’t tuck in…

There.
Bend your knees…

Really bend your knees.
Then when you’re

out of the water,
stand up. That’s all.

Keep your legs parallel.

The war is over.

An endless
post-war period begins.

Life, as the saying goes,
returns to normal.

Stand up!

Good for you!

Portaluppi is tried on two
counts of ethnic cleansing

due to his complicity
with the regime.

He defends himself
as best he can.

After a brief period of banishment,
he is reintegrated and

is reinstated as Dean
at the University.

In 1950 the filmmaker
also returns.

We return with him
to the golden lake.

Yet, something has been
irremediably lost.

The 1950s are perhaps the most

vital years of the
century for Italy.

Italy grows with the charged
energy of an adolescent.

Millions of farmers
move to the city

and the GDP reaches
unprecedented peaks.

Refrigerators and
washing machines replace

the ideals of the
Resistance movement.

Italy grows and betrays,
but Portaluppi ages suddenly.

He donates the restorations
of some of the city’s

most important buildings that
had been damaged by bombs:

the Brera Gallery, the Museum
of Science and Technology,

the Milan University,
Santa Maria delle Grazie.

But his creative vein
will be lost forever.

He is given a seat in
the royal box at

the Teatro alla Scala in
recognition of the restorations

and he never misses
an opening night.

He attends singing parodies
of the most famous arias:

“Woman is hardwood, you
must beat her like a drum''.

He still jokes about everything
but his work becomes heavier,

too much marble,
too embellished.

There is a sort of involution,

a step back,
something has been lost.

Colour has been added to
the filmmaker’s films.

The subjects are the usual:
Milan, professors,

women in bathing suits,
Piero Portaluppi’s initials,

the mirror in the road sign.

But the mirror is shattered.

The Casa degli Atellani receives
the news that the body

of their son Oreste,
called Tuccio,

buried in an empty coffin
in 1942, has been found.

They have him returned to Italy
thanks to a ship owner friend.

Portaluppi gets into his customized
convertible with his wife,

Lia, and his grandson,
Piero Castellini.

The three of them take to
the freeway for Genoa.

When they arrive at the
docks, Portaluppi lowers

the top in respect
for the hearse.

Their grandson will
remember his grandparent’s

silence during the entire
two-way trip.

Not a word was uttered
between them.

Two marble statues.
Speechless.

One night during the
endless post war period,

Portaluppi withdraws to his tiny
recess in the Casa degli Atellani

where he nurtures his
obsessive passions

for stamps and postcards,
constellations and sundials.

And with the same diligence,
he looks through

his editing notebooks
for frames of his son.

Then he edits them out,
one by one.

The only images saved
are one where

he is looking straight
into the camera

and a few clips of
Oreste dashing off,

hiding, running
out of the frame.

The son came into the world,
yet he remains uncreated.

An entire era in 16 mm,
but the Amateur has no heirs.

“… our fortuitous encounter
with the architect,

Piero Portaluppi who
designed the adornments

for the “Piccola Scala”,
giving the new theatre

the appearance and atmosphere
of the grander Scala.

Was this your intention
Mr. Portaluppi?

We certainly wanted to
maintain the character

in the decorative appearance.

But the theatre is much smaller.

In this way, we trickled it with

the most
characteristic elements.

If I talk about the Lyre,
the griffon-like lyre;

if I talk about the Greek
frets, I’m also talking about

the Caryatids in the royal box.

They were placed there
as essences

of the old architectural
adornments …

And it gives a golden tone,

and perhaps gives emphasis to

the feminine virtues of
the beautiful spectators.

Are you proud of
having contributed

to the birth of
the Piccola Scala?

Proud because I feel enlivened

by a drive as a
supporter of La Scala.

I’ll pass it to you.

I have to go a bit higher.

Look, butterflies, Giuli…