Aeroplane to Aeroplano

A short biography of Mario Sironi.  by Elena Pontiggia (translated and edited by Leonardo Pavese).  Posted by permission from the Associazione Mario Sironi   “My greatest pleasure has always been to deal with matters of art; and I spent countless hours at my table when other people my age had fun. This passion was so strong in me, and art seemed such a great thing to me, sublime and unreachable, that I had always considered it an immense deity of which, unfortunately, to me mere mortal was only conceded to breathe the perfume.” This is what Mario Sironi, in 1903, at the age of eighteen, wrote to his cousin Torquato. Sironi was born in 1885 in Sassari, on the island of Sardinia, where his father worked at the time, but he was brought up in Rome, not far from Villa Borghese. “He considered himself a Roman, more than anything else; and of the Roman he also had the accent.” That is how Amedeo, Margherita Sarfatti's  son, who spent much time with Sironi, remembered him.

Sarfatti by Wildt  Between Fascism and anti-fascism. By Ivan Buttignon (Translated by L. Pavese).           At the end of 1922, with Benito Mussolini firmly seated as President of the Council of Ministers (the executive branch of the Italian government), Margherita Sarfatti began to delineate her cultural project in a modernist sense. With Mussolini’s permission, Sarfatti founded the artistic movement Novecento Italiano (the Italian 20 th century) with the goal of creating an entirely new Italian art that would reinvent the Italian tradition from Roman to medieval art, merging it with modernity and therefore becoming the figurative transposition of fascist ideology. But let’s take a step back. In an artistic sense, by the end of the year 1919, the Futurist artists were feeling very much disoriented. And after Mussolini’s May 1920 sharp turn to the right, they began to feel disoriented in the political sense as well. They rejected the movement to the right and deno