Once upon a time there was a district in Florence In a black and white memory book
“Once upon a time there was a district in Florence” is the book published by Masso delle Fate and edited by Fabrizio Borghini, journalist and writer, scholar of cinema, art, and history of Florence with the preface by Cosimo Ceccuti, published and sold out in a few days. A true publishing case so much so that the first reprint is almost impossible to find both in newsstands and in bookstores.
A full-bodied book of 384 pages and tells, through over one hundred testimonies of Florentines from the most diverse social and cultural backgrounds, the childhood and adolescence of the post-World War II generation up to the only real temporal watershed in Florence: the November flood 1966 lived in the districts of the city. From the historic center to the outskirts of the time, between the pages, enriched by 400 photos all in black and white and of the time, Borghini had the intuition to recall games, characters, festivals, in a Florence that we realize, of page after page, being a distant relative of the city it is today. Above all, there remains the common thread that united the children who still live in the area of the very distant from each other, but it was represented by the Circo Gratta that moved constantly mounting its modest tent at the Isolotto and at Porta Roman, in via Pietrapiana and at the Statute, in Bellariva and San Jacopino.
Among the many authors of the amarcord, names such as Carlo Conti who remembers his Poggetto from the Sixties, Marco Masini who left his heart at the Ponte Rosso, Daniela Morozzi romantically still in love with the Cure, Sergio Bini who reveals that he became Bustric by attending the performances in Piazza Tasso by Evaristo Caroli, that is the Scratch, but also Paolo Vallesi who misses the green meadows of Novoli before overbuilding .. Leafing through pages to form a mosaic in black and white – what that world was like not only in photos , but on TV, cinema and newspapers – which tile after tile reconstructs the popular identity of a city. A must have.
Tweety GF