About – Papierfiligrana

Montreal, Spring of the 2005, one of the elevators at McGill University, Macdonald Engineering Building.

Got on with me in the elevator a Lady, academic or amministrative staff I couldn’t say, more than 40’s less than 50’s and with a specific interest for my face, or as I would have discovered quite soon, for something that my face was “wearing”.

“Which is the brand of your glasses?”

Surprised for that question (they were simple prescription glasses, not last trend and fashionable sunglasses, nothing that could catch someone’s attention), I answered: “Gucci”.

The lady, with a slight vein (not even that slight to be honest) of …anger I could say: “ Italian, of course! All beautiful things are always Italian” and “Where are you from?”

Me, I don’t know if more proud or shy (she almost made me feel guilty): “Rome”

“You are lucky, we can’t find here those beautifull things”.

There are so many reasons why we could say the same for Canadians and any other people, but it is true that in Italy we are pretty lucky for many reasons, although we are not aware, not completely, of it.

Why beginning with such an ordinary story? There are at least two reasons why:

1) in Italy we are so, luckily, accustomed to Beauty that we don’t recognize it as something extraordinary, it’s basically the rule hence we don’t care about it, but we notice, more or less consciously, its absence;

2) the characteristic almost everybody think about when speaking of made in Italy is aesthetic quality in all its shapes, from the beauty of fashion and design to the taste and healthiness of food.

Here is the point, I will be so happy if Beauty would not be taken as granted, something which we feel only the absence of, I will love if it would be taken into account how much knowledge and knowhow is necessary to create Beauty, how much craftsmanship is the manual expression of ancient knowledges that should not be less respected just because they have been absorbed after centuries and are basically in the cultural DNA of our Country.

Be aware: there is no Beauty without very very deep knowledge and sophisticated understanding of the matter and quite often Beauty is show through the language of Arts but is created from the language of Sciences. Since in 2019 all the world remembered Leonardo, because of the 500 years from his death and he is the one that best represents both Arts and Sciences (and is also the reason why my websites is named 1519b2i, 1519 because of the anniversary plus two B and one I, i.e 1519:Behind Italian Beauty), I will use his words “la sapienza è figliuola della ‘sperienza” (knowledges comes from experience) and “…studiate le matematiche e non costruite senza fondamenti”(study Sciences, do not build without foundations).

To me those glasses were simple prescription glasses, nothing special. I liked them of course, but I chose them for technical not aesthetic reasons, a simple mean of work. Yet, what the others were seeing pushing them into watching me was only one thing: those “only prescription glasses” were simply beautiful…As simple as that.