More than trash, better than trash. Cafonal forever

My copy of “Cafonal” has been sitting for years alongside the large volumes and coffee-table books of the ‘masters of photography’ – Martin Parr, Weegee, Eggleston, Diane Arbus – but it’s the only one I ever actually pick up. The others remain on the shelf purely for aesthetic reasons. Each time I open “Cafonal”, with its solemn, mournful format reminiscent of a Great Encyclopaedia of Decay, I sink—just as I did the first time—into that magnificent, old, glittering shambles: I lose myself amongst the little trains driven by Laura Biagiotti, Alan Friedman’s sweat, or Tremonti picking his nose at the launch of a book by Massimo Franco, whilst Achille Bonito Oliva lies half-fainting, being spoon-fed like a baby by a young girl at the buffet. I am spellbound by the gallery of wigs, hairpieces, crumbling sandwiches, prosthetics, turtle-shell cleavages, rubber breasts, flutes, python-print shoes and Botox oozing under Pizzi’s flash.

Page after page features marquises, countesses, entrepreneurs and Knights of Malta dressed as Lorenzo the Magnificent or Mary, Queen of Scots, or in ‘safari’ attire, alongside pot-bellied centurions and ladies of uncertain age but still very much into animal prints – jaguar-print, leopard-print and heavily tiger-striped. The chapter on the ‘Berty-Nights’ features Rifondazione secretary Bertinotti on a socialite tour, escorted by Valeria Marini, with Rifondazione member Pizzi finding his very own Hannah Arendt there – Lella Bertinotti, looking magnificent in a fur coat and a huge felt hat, the sort worn by Jamiroquai. Among my favourite photos – though it is impossible to choose – is ‘the little train of the hungry’: Mario Monti and Fisichella leading a line of men in suits and ladies in tailored outfits stretching into an English-style garden, each holding a saucer, pilgrims in procession towards who knows where, an air of apocalypse all around, like Von Trier’s Melancholia. We may not have had Balzac’s Comédie humaine or The Man Without Qualities, but we had Pizzi and Dagospia, who in one fell swoop made up for the gaps and shortcomings of novelists and filmmakers too preoccupied with other matters to grasp the epoch-making significance of the Cafonal. Pizzi’s true innovation – the one that alone would be enough to secure him a place in the textbooks – is the timing of the shot. That gulping instant, much like Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’. That frozen still image in which the marchioness, the undersecretary and the cardinal vicar open their mouths wide at the sight of a teaspoon laden with something drowned in cream and stare into the void – not with Parr’s detached, British irony, but with Zagarolo’s deeply felt empathy.

‘Cafonal’ is first and foremost a book of faces, like the album Fellini kept in his studio at Cinecittà: thousands of improbable, bizarre, monstrous faces, lined up with the obsessive regularity of an archive. Not the individual portrait but the taxonomy, the species. Pizzi studies the blush, the touch-ups, the plastic cheekbones, and the closer he gets to noses and lips, the more the human features are lost, until all that remains are a host of colourful little parrots. Today, those pages are leafed through with nostalgia. Time has carved boredom beneath the faces, has drawn out the horror vacui from the drug-fuelled euphoria of the little trains, like the gloomy face and dark circles under the eyes of Piero Fassino, who occasionally turns up between one party and the next, looking as though he’s wondering why he’s been invited there. Cafonal and its sequel – Ultracafonal – will one day be studied as ruthless documents of a demi-monde frozen in time at the dawn of the 21st century: ‘Roma godona’, as people began to say back then in the wake of his photographs and Dagospia’s storming of the Italian journalism scene. Yet Rome, which has been ‘Cafonal’ for two thousand years, was, if anything, becoming a scaled-down model of the whole of Italy and then of the world too – and even Kim Kardashian, who arrived there in those years, seemed to be a creation of Pizzi’s. Cafonal as an existential category, more than just trash, better than trash. Cafonal in Dubai, Sharm el-Sheikh, Ibiza; Milanese Cafonal at Fuorisalone and Neapolitan Cafonal at the Castello delle Cerimonie. Pizzi’s photographs are magnificent, perpetually poised between run-of-the-mill paparazzi snaps and Flemish compositions à la Brueghel or Jordaens. Sorrentino gave it a go with La grande bellezza: whilst leafing through the big book, he confessed, he had felt ‘the vertigo of absolute emptiness’. Pizzi, who had provided the raw material for the film, dismissed it in four words: it needed to pack a bigger punch. He was right. Under Bigazzi’s lens, the ‘Cafonal’ becomes sublime – that is to say, forgiven – and critics were immediately steered towards more noble lineages: Fellini, La dolce vita, Scola’s La terrazza. Then came the Oscar. The hedonistic city of Rome organised a party in honour of itself. At Palazzo Ferrajoli, there was ‘an ideal Oscar for the Eternal City’, with guests arriving by carriage, wrapped in heavy coats and furs – the sort of things people in Rome still pull out even when it’s twenty-five degrees. Inside, there were plenty of ostrich feathers, diamond bracelets, sagging and very ageing breasts, queues at the buffet, and ravenous glances. And, of course, Pizzi was there too. And in those photos from the ‘Great Beauty’-themed party, there was everything that La Grande Bellezza itself simply lacked.