This folio is printed tri-monthly in Urbino, and is sent directly to those who request it, including a L 25 stamp for postage costs. The ordinary edition is of 200 copies, illustrated with clichés, for the price of L 100 for each copy, and a separate edition of 50 copies on a special paper, with original numbered and signed etchings reserved for art-lovers, for sale at the price of £ 1000 for each copy. In each issue are published writings of good authors. Subscriptions are accepted for the four yearly issues, at the price of Lire. 400 for the ordinary edition, and of Lire 4000 for that on special paper. Those friends who wish to contribute to the publication should apply to Mr. Leonardo Castellani, No. 4 via Pellipario, Urbino, as should those interested in the insertion of paid advertising, news, literary announcements, etc. (1).

 

This inscription, drafted with courteous exactness and not without elegance, would appear in almost identical form in the twenty issues of the magazine that Leonardo Castellani, in his dual roles of editor and author, sent to press from May, 1957 to December, 1961  (2)• Obviously the numbers and prices were to change, already from the first issue of the second year. But a few invariables did remain («in each issue will be published the writings of good authors-) and the splendid formal framework remained intact. It takes us back intentionally to that bright and sagacious inclination, where ability serves the intellect and a learned artisanry finds itself supporting aesthetic expression, of which the engravings, widely present in «Valbona- present themselves as perfect specimens.

The debut issue, printed in fact in May, 1957 (8 pages on an elegant straw-yellow paper) opens not by chance with a page by Benvenuto Cellini on the art of etching, entitled, Per fare acquaforte da intagliare, or «How to prepare etchings for incision».

 

The etching to be incised is made in this way, that is: take half an ounce of 'solimate', an ounce of vitriol, half an ounce of 'allume di rocca' (*), a half an ounce of verdigris and six lemons; in the juice of said lemons incorporate the above-mentioned things, which you will take care to have first crushed well; then boil the stated things sufficiently, that is, a short time, so as not to allow the mixture to thicken too much.

 

In the following issues much other complicated advice was to be given, arriving finally to the particular moment of engraving.

 

One draws over the varnish with a tempered steel stylet, that is, a sharp knife necessary for the art of the stylus. The varnish is then removed carefully from the said plate with hot oil with a sponge, so as not to eat away the intaglio. The said plate can then be used, printing with it on paper in the same manner used with those engraved with the bulin; yet it is quite true, that if this job can be carried out with great ease, it gives these works something that those carried out with the bulin do not have ... (3).

 

In the following folios the often elegant writings of authors of the preceding centuries would be proposed (again Cellini see text, Antonio da Bologna and Marco da Ravenna in the final issue of 1959, III, 4; or Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Alberti). Most often the selected texts are angled on the action and the emotion of engraving.

Such was the piece by Pietro Giordani (II, 3), on the nobility of the art of the intaglio which, when it is valid, can with its own means emulate the superior possibilities of painting («The relief will be represented in part with the incision, and in part by the different degree and strengths of the colors-). Or that of the Abbé Pietro Zani (IV, 1) telling of his interminable research, in his own words «fabulous», inside that «immense ocean of prints- that was the Paris National Collection (this in 1797, on «the twenty-first day of November-).

The prose of these «good authors- recommended below in the frontispiece adapts itself with ease to the turnings of a conceptual and aesthetic method, of which it is a relevant part: both as a corresponding system of the graphic image that then tells its story and, in part, dispels the shadows from its technicalities; and in its own autonomy in literary writing, in any case well-mirrored and almost strengthened in a formal design refined precision.

Turning the initial page, that entrusted to Cellini, we come across two superb works of prose by Giuseppe Raimondi: Un paesaggio di Corotik Corot landscape) and Alla trattoria, (At the inn). The first describes a small canvas found in the Strasbourg museums and reproduces a scene in Orleans; the second reconstructs a conversation («those strong words of Lumbardy, almost like objects-) snatched in an inn two steps away from the Gerolamo Theatre in Milan.

This then is compared with an image of literature, when placed in the figurative arts, inserted in the cultured discourse of the essayist. The point of tension remains however centered on the pictorial axis, not cooling down or melting within it, and yet not erasing it. And thus it is natural that the journal should then be illustrated and illuminated by two etchings by Castellani himself, one of which was absolutely beautiful (etchings printed in the edition on special paper), and that also contained two penetrating «doodles» by Mino Maccari. Engravings and drawings would be the rule in each issue. The works by consecrated artists (such as Bartolini, Carra, Morandi and Licini) are alternated with those of less well-known, younger authors: Gulino, Manfredini, Piacesi, Bruscaglia, many of whom belonged to the Urbino scene of engravers in the 1950s and 1960s, all in any case chosen by Castellani from the extremely limited and select circle of his friends and apprentices.

The spirit of the entire operation was naturally Castellani's. Busied with the deciphering of the intellectual and interior vitality of the creative act in the aspects of a lively and azurine daily life, withdrawn from the indistinguishable flow of time, Castellani was not only master of art and literature, as has written Carlo Bo but also master of «the truth in life, of that which forces us to exalt day by day in the need for perseverance and patience- (4).

The «every-day motifs-, as Castellani would entitle his notes, compose a writing style that is both reflective and, in appearance, much like a diary. In reality, it is an investigative and critical kind of writing, as seen already in the first issue. The description of a few drawings by Carracci, exhibited in Bologna, and interpreted by means of the carefully weighed and analytical filter of the catalogue, are evidenced little by little in the memorial tract and of critical, or rather hermeneutic judgement. And yet, the fecundity, not naturalistic but entirely existential and formal of the objects that surround us, of the still-life works waiting to enter into the aura of those things that live with us, begins to exist in the descriptive moment.

 

And yet this world of still, falsely indifferent objects awaits us every day. The detachment from the background can be light or strong, the smoke of the shadows and the whites of the light anything but violent, or strongly contrasting, all the objects useless, and yet, nevertheless, the still-life busies us, detaining us to consider how difficult it is to intermediate with its existence. We who love the tangible truth of aspects, have learned from these still objects — from these objects which are both diligently reconciled and which we observe day by day — how much our uncertainties weigh upon us, and how the mute, abandoned things know how to give us, more than anything else, the value of time and the persuasion of existence (5).

 

The strategy of thinking in writing — that 'beating of wings' that experience brings to mind - cannot be placed outside of the expressive boundaries of the selection. Penetrating more profoundly into the drawings of Carracci, Castellani exposes to us the most pictorial atmosphere fleeing from mere mimetic imprint, instead elaborating, or rather re-elaborating the scenes as a writer, giving them dynamism and conferring life upon them, personalizing the vision to the point of animating it with the proportions of literature.

Here then the sanguineness of the butcher put into words:

«The large beret is lifted up, as if out of importance, on his nape, and the right foot with the toes slightly raised is about to move, or it has just been moved, to shift a weight. With a bony skeleton and heavy body that extends itself within the white mass of the smock and of the shirt, illuminated by something that is anything but tranquil." And with a beautiful conclusion. «The tepid model has entered the scene living a powerful and rending naturalism" (6).

With the second issue or «folio», the picture focuses on the geography of the region. Foreseen in the call to the artistic dimension (thus the article by Luigi Bartolini on the printing of etchings and the entire illustrative wealth), but taken up again in a decidedly less precise discussion. The objective is transported to those Paesaggi marchigiani (Landscapes of the Marche Region) which favour a certain freedom in reasoning and for this help in the very act of engraving on the plate. In the text we have just recalled, the vision of Urbino is restricted to the Mercatale area, that is, to the clay-paved square of the market before it comes to life with people and buses; and it is almost repeated in the third issue, ever clean and accurate, with the memories of Vincenzo Ciardo of the years of his youth, Tempi miei di Urbino, that were those between 1908 and 1913, when he came to study painting at the Fine Arts Institute then directed by Luigi Scorrano of Lecce, a disciple of Domenico Morelli.

 

Life in Urbino cost less than elsewhere, and there were many students who came for this reason, too. With seventy-five cents, well-managed, one could buy two meals sufficient even for the heartiest of appetites, at the extremely popular «Rosetta» in the Mercatale piazza, the large square that opens up at the foot of the city, where the Fair of Saint Crescentino takes place in June. I always remember the formidable chorus of moos of the thousands of cows lined up in compact rows, the festive chaos of the crowd, the accordions of the street-singers.

 

Thus in «Valbona» appears the image of Urbino, the «enemy figure» that remains, as Volponi wrote in those years  (7). The unmeditated relationship between the nature of the place and its culture thus enters in other terms.

But how is the host city categorized in «Valbona»? (8) Leafing through the pages of this minuscule and precious publication, we must say that — perhaps out of discretion, or out of fear of seeming 'provincial' - the references are a bit rationed out to say the least. The announcement of an exhibit of etchings by Simone Contarini in the terraced rooms in Raphael's House, organized by «Mr. Andrea Emiliani» (who would produce in narrative experimentation that was tendentially essayistic, Un solo, breve ricordo (A single, fleeting moment) and Una sera d'estate (A summer evening) (⁹); a closing note regarding Nini Giovambattista da Urbino, taken from the Oliverian manuscript No. 936 of the Marquis Antaldo Antaldi of Urbino, 1805, where it is told that - almost a kind of destiny for the people of Urbino — of his flight from the cultural centre of the Grand Duke to dedicate himself to the artistic work and engraving he was barred from by merit of the "honorable citizenship of the family”, (III, 3); the transcription in notarial language of a 1623 inventory of the Ducal Wardrobe (III, 4); an outing in a light cart by Francesco Serantini to the gates of Urbino: «We entered a motionless, desert-like street, empty, the color of the old homes tempered in the heat; there was a closed, spell-bound mansion. We exited into a square. Straight ahead a street rose upward, another descending to a gate. There was nothing but the sun, and that sense of loneliness lingers in me every time I think of Urbino», (IV, 1). Not much more was included.

The illustrative part was better nourished; it attempted to collect, together with the artists recognized as such on a national level, the young engravers orbiting around the Scuola del Libro. Renato Bruscaglia, who appears as early as Folio 2, and then Fiorella Diamantini, of Senigallia, with an effort typical of her work on zinc plates, entitled Fiori (Flowers) (I, 4), and the 1958 Natura morta (Still-life) di Nunzio Gulino (II, 1). These were coupled with yet another beautiful work of Castellani and a drawing in pen of Bruscaglia, Walter Piacesi (II, 4), Arnaldo Battistoni (III, 3) and still others. Altogether, they were the so-called Urbino school of the Fifties (apart from a few important absences, see Carlo Ceci).

But the synthesis point was always Leonardo Castellani, both in the notebook recollections of a local landscape or cultural event — the return, for example, of Piero della Francesca's Flagellation to the Ducal Palace after its restoration — and in the presence of his sketches, drypoint, and etchings, concrete signs of a point of unification of all his different experiences.

And, in a certain sense, it was the perfected and carried out formula of the operation to give that image of the city. The idea that in fact supports «Valbona» presumes and valorizes the autonomy already in the aristocratic detachment really from the cultural and social dynamism of the enclave of Urbino, including the University. This could be seen in the intellectual map that connects the present to the Renaissance past (from where, for that reason, so that even that contact with philologists and the erudite locals), merging writing with artistic expression; and equally in the courteous and punctual elegance of the graphic model, luminous and contained as the architectonic structure of Urbino and as the shapes of the Montefeltro landscape.

Even in connection with the national culture and its events, it is always Castellani who composes and almost impaginates the branching articulations. The founding nucleus from which the reproductions of the guest artists branch out, first and foremost Morandi and Bartolini, then Mino Maccari, who sketched the profile of his friend Morandi, in the days of their first encounter «senza cappello e con il capello», that is, «without hat and still with hair» (II, 3) and Tono Zancaro, Guidi, Licini, Orfero, Tamburi, Carlo Carra — is that described by Castellani. Who, next to the system of enunciation of his research, declined and declared already in the first folio, draws a network of experiences and suggestions, to which he remains faithful, placing himself politely in the centre. Which is what happens in the selection of literary material, localized, with only a few exceptions, in the circle of acquaintances and cultural and human occasions of this great engraver.

Certainly, the layout of "Valbona", its concrete format, refined and always measured by the high tone of the graphic arts, introduces a certain idea of literature. The short page by Antonio Baldini to the editor Vallechi (I, 2) regarding the disorder and easy enthusiasm in the reading of books, shows traces of a pinch of that flowery language when he admits to an obscure «vice»: «I am ashamed to admit it: without books, I cannot live».

Balanced and equally inviting in that doling out of something precious, almost like an ancient wisdom and truth, are the notes of Leonardo Sinisgalli's Notebook (II, 4 and III, 3); drenched in pictorial and visual good sense were the poems of Antonio Zampighi and of Lorenzo Montano, a bit like the traveller's diary of Raoul Lunardi of Sassoferrato, guests in the last issue of December 1961 (V, 4). They are pages that go well with the notes that Castellani was publishing in his magazine, with a presence that was also quantitatively relevant, ever more excentuated as slowly the last year came to a close.

Organized within the limits of a detached and delicate completeness, the poets' contributions in the end bring to light a vaguely existential cote, an intrinsic reflection of melancholy. «The time that carries us onward robs us/ of the love of ourselves-, recites the incipit of a lyric poem by Diego Valeri (¹⁰), who also sent to the magazine verses of Toulet and Apollinaire defining then in some way the European proscenium (ⁿ). Wrote Luigi Bartolini:

«On that roof terrace there was a beautiful woman / (I don't know where) (she has gone - far away -) My youth has gone away - I don't know where — far away». (IV, 2)

That recovering of one's composure in the warmth and glare of things, already present in the Valerian text, returns in a selection by Carlo Betocchi, in which the love expressed for a sort of 'ordo intellectualis' studded with reality and azurine visions, well interwoven with the images of Castellani and the superb composure of «Valbona».

 

Now that I am getting older, and that I no longer care to pass judgement, I don't know if it is out of avarice or love, but I am content to observe, even if time is short, and not much more will be granted to me. More than a place for events, I have become a deposit for images, the color of dry leaves, that come to rest in me, outside and in, one on top of the other, some right-side-up, some upside-down. And it often happens to me, like in the image of these leaves, to glimpse the world outside of me that in an effusion of September light alters and penetrates all of my most remote emotions; the landscape that I liked 'cleansed themselves' when I was in the flower of my manhood. Oh, how I see myself with other images, in my own rooms, altered by an irritated confusion, mixed up with the resentments of my age, by the acids that corrode it, but without giving up, as if vindicated by its silver crown of wild, bristly, stinging thistle. And so I would say that there is never a true disorder nor an inert old age, where a loving eye marries the patience that smells of lavender, and spreads peace (IV, 3).

 

It is all a kind of literature, passed on according to an elite, controlled writing style, that is brought back to an interior, every-day reality by the bending of days and time. Under this aspect the examples fade beyond personalities, whose experience and maturity delineate a path which is at the time both existential and expressive.

Recurring names are those of Bartolini, a bit of a classic in the Marche region and a master of the engraver's art, and then Sinisgalli, Libero De Libero (whose verses are included in the same that hosts Betocchi's prose), Giuseppe Raimondi and G.B. Angioletti.

The real surprise though is the presence of Sciascia, contacted by Castellani after having read a short story of his in a newspaper (this before the discovery of their shared passion for engraving). With Il soldato Seis (Seis, the soldier) presented in the March 1958 issue (II, 1), a breath of reality tied to history and society entered «Valbona». Sciascia tells of an encounter he had in the Sicilian capital city, "Palermo veiled by the mist of sirocco», with a Spanish priest and an ex-official of the Glorious Third Regiment. The latter, after having spoken of the legendary commander Lister, pulled out a box crammed full of photos. Likewise, he described «snow at Tervel, mud at Tervel, mud in the days at Guadalajara, the assault of the Moors and the soldiers on Navarra, the ranks of our legionaires along those of Castille and Catalonia».

And then, he describes a «tarjeta postal» from a young soldier from Motilla, Miguel Seis. The postcard, with that search for clues typical of Sciascia, unleashed his creativity: «in my imagination the adventure of the 'campesino' and the soldiers of the Republic, and its destiny was illuminated". And with it the procedure — as the readers know well — of Sciascia's narrative writings.

Another contribution, this time regarding the village of Sambuca, would appear the next year (III, 2). And in this case, the aplomb of the piece grows with the mystery of the reality recounted. The very name of the place, for example: Sambuca Zabut, tells us of the Mediterranean and Arab past of Sicily. «I like to imagine that it was the Arabs-, adds Sciascia, «who discovered the zabuqak. a remote place. If you exclude the Arabs (from the history of Spain) — said Ganivet to Unamuno — perhaps nothing else will remain of me but my legs. I mean that, in suppressing them from the history of Sicily, not even its legs remain for it to stand on; everywhere I see the Arabs, and I follow their tracks passionately. And how could we not see them in Sambuca, where one need only turn the corner from corso Umberto to find the lanes and narrow alleys of the Arab quarter. In a small couryard of a very white house, with arched door-windows leading out onto a small harbored terrace, creates a spell much like a Sevillean scene; and there are windows with wrought iron grates, and on the windows and balconies are grates overflowing with flowers-. Imagination melds with reality, the narrative prose with a 'meta-writing' style, essay-like and moral, ever-present in Sciascia's work.

This is not, in «Valbona», the only moment of contact with a militant, modern culture. And this irregardless of the higher or lower quality of the texts and of the guest authors. In the last issues, almost entirely ascribed to and occupied by Castellani with his 'notes', the space for --current events- is enlarged. We have already recalled Lunardi, then in a new position. But there is also a column about books, entitled Readings, edited by Giancarlo Scorza and launched in the first folio of the fourth year.

The volumes reviewed concern the sources used by Goya {Some emblematic sources of Goya by Georges Levitine), the ways of Zen Buddhism interpreted by Watts, and Palma Buccarelli's Jean Fautrier, much discussed at the time. Among these were also the Roman novels of Pier Paolo Pasolini, introduced in «Valbona» with an account of the linguistic controversy that saw them in line with the great Pasticciaccio by Gadda and vivisected by an analysis that reveals the merits (the -'discovery of a separate world-) together with its -limits and not insignificant defects-. Among these, the very language used: monotonous and -always crowded-.

Una vita violenta (A Violent Life), for its more organized and traditional form, narratively speaking, was placed against the antecedent — and indubitably superior — Ragazzi di vita (roughly translated, Child offenders). It was exactly these innovative means of Pasolini's world and writing which made one grimace, above all at the heavy and contradictory pessimism: a «black desire-, according to the reviewer, «to depress these already squalid events, with the gratuitous sadism of repugnant details dear to the tastes of this writer-.

When and if in short, the literary culture of the moment peeks in, it presents a 'fighting face'. But the truth is that «Valbona» did not intend to veer away from that typical anachronism and purposeful abstraction, that was its most concrete and militant trademark. In any case, it was already significant that, even if in its underlining — often moralistic — of negative proportions, the positions of attention to Pasolini's novels prevailed. And it was within these limits that we would place the silence regarding Volponi (still a young man, but already with several books published and furthermore very close to Bartolini's work) and, instead, the admiring and respectful consideration of an expressive lignee left to oscillate between hermeticism and the revealing weight of the creativity at work in the province.

The first issue of the last year, that of 1961, opened with an intense selection by Mario Luzi, entitled Case marine (Houses by the sea) that, having both tendencies (tradition and modernity, a European inspiration and 'humus loci'), expresses in his peculiar guises the sign of a kind of synthesis.

 

I don't know if it is because of a real memory or from an imaginary evocation that I represent the journey of the families of other days from the inland regions of Tuscany toward these houses, these small cottages along the Livorno coast. Decorously 'worn-out' in style, discreet in their ravines and entrances from the cliffs, ever shaded by tall pines, contorted by the southwesterly gales; they do not refuse modern people, dominated as they are by restlessness and so many different tics. The children and grandchildren of their first owers probably still live there in the summer months, and sleep and eat well there. But their appearance does not deceive us; their affability, more or less standoffish, does not deny hospitality to the boys in blue-jeans and their loud and dishevelled companions; yet nor does it hide the tenacious agreement with the men and ways of life of earlier days. It was a mediocre life, but firmly delimited and enjoyed — the architecture and design of these houses, so sure of itself, tells us so. It repeats their conventional decorating when it is sober, and is when it is naively pretentious. It satisfied the leisure of the senses, the discreet consciousness of privilege; but it was enough to stimulate dreams.

 

The dream was that of the young people of inland Tuscany, a hope of abandon, of freedom, the promise of flight. But then, once arrived in the coastal villages, there is a falling back on the former habits, intimately harboured in the tumultuous substance of life.

The quality of Luzi's inspiration is such as to create a concrete, poetic bridge between a climate of modern classicism and the new experiences. A balancing point, in its uniqueness and extremely aristocratic completeness, equal to that held by Castellani himself in the drawings, the engravings and prose in the Notebooks.

With the passing of time, as we have said, the presence of the director becomes ever more solid, to the point of coinciding with almost every page of «Valbona».

Everything, like the initial folios, is fully harmonized with contributions of his 'guests'. But side by side with the beautiful reproductions of etchings and drawings are now impressed annotations of the daily life motifs, that are the essence of the work along, with the readings and with visits to artistic monuments, such as the frescos of Piero della Francesca found in San Sepolcro, or the Madonna of Monterchi; a 'caique' of the head of Raphael; landscapes of the Marche region.

Engraved expression always keeps in any case its place of honor. One reads the page of the discovery of an old wooden printing press at the Florentine Academy:

 

Of well-calcultated proportions and a beautiful antique color, it possesses a balanced and dignified architecture, inviting you to circle around it sympathetically. You would like to have it for your own in your studio. With a roller whose solidity and weight can be calculated by eye, the press is adorned by a wooden wheel beside an open wing. This large wheel, which then engages smaller notches, is trimmed, or really equipped, with a strong lateral set of wooden teeth, completely intact, which, pegged by handles driven in with strong roots, guarantee manufacture at the highest levels of quality artisanry. It has the harmony of a pulpit, while the large toothed wheel, thus intact, would seem to belong to a glorious machine (I, 4).

 

The description is precise and lyrically concise: an example of prose in which the act of writing well translates the fluidity of an extremely precise discussion that must catch the visualized object with words. It is the same value that regulates the work of the printer.

 

I am a calcographer: a trade that was once rare and, they tell me, noble. For long years I have prepared plates, acids, I print, I make up varnishes, I correct the inks, and do not despair; but I am not able unfortunately to have clean hands, even on Sundays. So I don't have tempting advice for you. As for hard work, I assure you, there's a lot of it to do, having to 'barter' it with that which is called artisanry, manual ability, laboratory; whereas Luck — as everyone knows — limits itself to smiling from afar. It's true that modern appraisals look more at the economic factor, and yet I have remained 'tied down' here, and it doesn't upset me to think that my work is the only thing that consoles me. If you agree with me, that is, if you look at work not as a condemnation or as an obligation, you could certainly try your hand at calcography; but don't let my words convince you. I believe that each one of us must save himself, or fall, by his own hands» (I, 4). It is the answer to a Roman reader, who was given — if he really wanted to try that imprudent adventure that is calcography — the 'recipe' for the liquid varnish with which to prepare the plate.

 

To a gentleman in Viareggio and to another in Bergamo - in the always unexpected, new and in many ways surprising «Open letters- (in the above-cited issue) —

it is explained how the column, in harmony with the praxis decided upon, came to be included in «Valbona».

«Mine must be considered an obstinacy, a deceitful insistance, the presumptuous affectation of the provincialist. But if everything is born with its own physiognomy, and that physiognomy has a value above all if it persists in its innate form, well, then, I will remain irregardless of my fortune — politely, with courtesy — in the truth that I have preferred-. This in contrast with that popular and mercenary maneuvering that plays on the sacredness of the single price in favor of collectors, who were perhaps not authentic «lovers» of the art form, but receivers of extremely exact and luminous pages, to which in the end they remained indifferent. It was a vision — that of Castellani — that sounded much like that of a certain Benjamin, an author who was certainly not included among those he associated with or read (¹²).

Still on the theme of collection: decentralized and provincial, in his own way preserved from the degradation of the art market, Castellani returned in the first issue of 1958. The art-lover is put on trial in A Provincial Collector, as the title of the sharp-witted prose underlines, when a gentleman from Pesaro shows off his unusual collection of paintings to the illustrious visitor. A Guerrieri, a presumed El Greco, vaguely like that of a sidewalk artist, and perhaps a Magini. «Two gaily coloured butterflies 'mutate' the air thickened with the truth, while a gracious hand recalls the Flemish handiwork".

This descriptive skill that exalts in the analysis of the pictorial subject was seen again in Ritratto di due giovani (Portrait of two youths) of the excitable, hypo-chondrial Pontorno («The two youths seem to be resigned to a strange and unpardonable offence where time cannot in any way mitigate the burden), and by this, as in the other examples, the accuracy of the observations does not preclude the possibility of an intimate and philosophical interpretation. As is the case with a Maffei which is to say the least astounding, the Glorificazione del Podestd Gaspare Zane:

 

On the right-hand side, and in a space no bigger than a large palm, from beneath a yellow brocade that hides a black mark — something that is anything but identifiable with something recognizable — emerges a dark hand with long fingernails, either from a fetish of some kind, or of a mummy, that shows a smooth, pointed face, bloated, lunatic, with bottomless eyes, with above a strip of blue sky. Its pumpkin-shaped, or if you refer, potato- shaped form is marked by an expression like that of a face about to attempt a smile; and that is the sinister and solitary appearance, in a painting which, in its entirety, is perfectly organized to the smallest detail, so that the discovery seems out of place — a practical joke, a grotesque, a grimace: a meaning unable to be fathomed.

 

Here one penetrates then into the inner, secret 'laboratory' of Castellani the writer, of which the pages of «Valbona», which would later be organized in homogeneous volumes (¹³), present multiple examples. Here then we have Ogni giorno non muta, (Every day is the same) included in the September 1958 issue, where a poem of Castellani also appears; Ilpesce rinsecchito (The dried fish) in the second issue of the third year; a topic to paint a portrait of like II mazzetto (The bouquet) (III, 3); or else that Impudico ramarro (Immodest green lizard) placed at the bottom of a burette in a vertical position (IV, 1); and a visit to the studio of an old friend, Pio Semeghini (IV, 2). The writing, calculated but all then veered onto the «reflection of interiority» of intellectual acquisition, keeps some of the antique masters of art criticism and of cultural journalism, but likewise denounces the lesson of memorial prose and of the variegated 'Longhian' 'halos'.

In December, I960, Castellani's position accentuated even more his identification with the folio, as it was edited and elaborated almost entirely by Castellani himself. The tone is as always sophisticated and discreet, full of thoughtfull and a courtesy that is no less defilated, expressed incidentally in the subtitle of the Notes that began the last issue of I960: «Parlare sottovoce», that is «Speak softly-. A need, underlines the author, for a listener who is trusting and participating, but reasoning, in fact, in a lower tone, within the extremely restricted context of the friends gathered around the magazine.

 

 

______________________________________

(*) Double sulphate of alluminium and potassium.

(1) The elegance of the typeset is equal to that of the prose. Note the attractive nonchalance of the loftily reduced .-cliches- of the acute accent in the original folio.

(2) The Valbona collection includes: ... 20 issues, four for each year, from 1957 to 1961. The «folios» vary in format: in 1957, 24,8 x 17,5 cm; in 1958 and 1959 25,5 x 19 cm; in 1960 and 1961, 25,5 x 18 cm. «The run, always on Umbria Fabriano paper, was stable after the initial experimentation: in 1957 fifty issues were with original copper-plate engravings and 200 «normal edition- with cliches were printed for each of the four 8-page issues. In the following years, Castellani printed only 100 copies (80 - XX) with the original engravings but increased the pages to 12. The «magazine» was then defused in one hundred copies for each issue and sent directly to Castellani's subscribers and friends.
The collection includes 20 ..folios- that include altogether 48 original copies (mostly etchings, but also aquatints and steel drypoints), of which however 5 were on the front page ... The were printed directly by Castellani, in the manner of the old masters, assisted at times by his apprentices, Bruscaglia and Piacesi, or often by his wife, Edvige. A few plates were returned to their authors, while others are now part of the Castellani Collection, as are the four splendid brass plates by Bartolini-. (Gastone Mosci, Notizia su Valbona, in Valbona, 1957-1961, reprint edited by the University of Urbino.)

(3) The selection by Cellini occupies the entire first page of the introductory folio of May 1957 (I, 1). To identify each issue, from here on we will use either the chronological date or the numbers of the year and issue, as above.

(4) Carlo Bo, Urbino, anni Cinquanta, in Valbona, 1957-1961 (cited).

(5) Once again, from Motivi di ogni giorno (the Everyday motifs), of the introductory issue.

(6) Idem.

(7) «La nemica figura che mi resta / l'immagi-ne di Urbino / che io non posso fuggire, / la sua crudele festa / quieta tra le mie ire» is the incipit of Le mum di Urbino (The walls of Urbino) (Paolo Volponi, Le porte dell'Appennino (The gates to the Appennines) Milan, Feltrinelli, I960, p. 65).

(8) The printing works which printed it was S.T.E.U. in Urbino, up to the task in terms of quality and competence.

(9) Repectively in the June 1958 and December 1958 issues.

(10) Compare «Valbona», year II, No. 3.

(11) In the September 1959 and June I960 issues

(12) The reference is naturally to the collec-tionism of the Moderne, «a real tenant-, wrote Benjamin, «of the interieur, universe and guardian of the private individual- (Walter Benjamin, Angelus Novus, Turin, Einaudi, 1962, p. 148).

(13) Fro ex., in La collina di Epsom (Epsom Hill).

(14) Carlo Bo, cited