The new book by Maurizio Costanzo
Curtain! Maurice Costanzo he just lifted one come on personal toneswhich is very much in line with what has been asking for forty years to be opened at the beginning of each episode of the unmissable Costanzo Show. His is hot off the press new book, Smemorabilia – Sentimental catalog of lost objects – for Mondadori. A book in which the backbone is nostalgia of a man who, through his contradictions, squeezes his sponge of 84 springs so that people, objects, circumstances and some anecdotes of a life are not lost. Because if on the one hand it is better to live than to tell oneself, on the other hand, his nostalgic nature leads him to think about what is no longer there.
It is precisely what is no longer there, overcome by the passage of time, which Costanzo tells with personal considerations and feelings. But the book has the function of involve everyone. Each of us will find the cue to hook up our memorabilia and create a personal notebook of everything that emerges from the drawers of memory.
The introductory part of the book is one touching autobiography, with unpublished curiosities that crystallize many still images. Starting from his television living room, where he emphasizes the unnecessarily serious people we have become, peep out the many personalities he was lucky enough to knowinterview, and with some of whom to make friends.
Between anecdotes and memories
Even if he doesn’t fail to remember how much really close people then they are very few for everyone. Maurizio dedicates this book to some of them, and then dwells on some curiosities. How: when the mother of Raffaella Carrà she asked him to help her daughter write the essay for admission to the Academy of Cinema. He, having sensed her great talent, did so and she was admitted.
The roundup of famous faces leads him to dwell on myth of Alberto Sordi, which defines a generator of melancholy just like him. In the book he tells of one dinner in honor of the Deafafter the actor, for an entire day, had received from the Mayor of Rome, Rutelli, the honor of wearing the Mayor’s sash.
Of when he collected the actor’s sympathetic confessions, and walking along the edge of the swimming pool of his beautiful villa, Alberto wondered what he was doing. He didn’t enjoy it very much, and after lunch, unable to take his indispensable nap, disturbed by the intense traffic in the central area, he asked passers-by… “But ‘ndo vintages”.
Surely the reference to Monica Vitti is emblematicwho once went to see him in his offices, where a girl, Maria, worked, said to him: “Look, he has a weird voice, like mine, but he’s smart”. She was De Filippi, and Maurizio married her.
And then Donald Trump, still far from being the US president. And then Gorbachev, to whose wife, who had just died, he had a Neapolitan song dedicated to her that she loved so much, moving him. And how not to remember Indro Montanelliwho called him “Constantine”.
The emotions of unlost memories they also stop at experiences that are disappearing, such as slow dancing, which has triggered enormous upheavals. In the space of a few minutes, the musical notes flattered the senses until they exploded in a diapason of excitement capable of mortifying any courtship.
Music led Maurizio, as a young man, to frequent two clubs in Rome: in one Fred Bongusto played, and in the other Fred Buscaglione. Loving slow, melodic songs would seem to make him belong to another time. But as he says himself: “I will be ancient, so what?”.
News craftsman
Among many songs, only one encompasses a bit all the topics covered. It is a slow sung by the extraordinary voice of Mina and the title If by phoningwritten by Costanzo himself in ’66.
He rattles off a series of objects in the book, giving the idea that, by telling each other, the topics emerge spontaneously, in the wake of a Proustian connection of sensations, smells, episodes. Facts, things, to which the chapters are dedicated: the ragpicker, table football, brilliantine (an adult dream that smacked of male charm), the pinball machine, which animated the free time of several generations, playmenthe Moka, as an irreducible lover of caffeine, then declined in Dek so as not to have to give it up as he had already done with tobacco.
His professional life, from an early age centered on the typewriter, could not fail to occupy an important part of the book. With the legendary Letter 22 of Olivettithe keyboard made the journalist’s job an artisanal fact, its incessant clicking entered the brain, as powerful as the pof of the tennis ball, marking the construction of those pages that would become news.
His love life, on the other hand, considers it another slalom between ups and downs, up to Maria. And on Maria De Filippi you observe: “Living for me is Maria, my impossible forgetfulness”. And here the curtain falls.
edited by Elena D’Ambrogio
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