How this black shines

In this age of anxious prudishness, a book whose very first page features a quintessentially Tuscan phrase – ‘maremma strega impestata ladra’ – cannot fail to immediately catch our attention. How This Black Shines begins in a fruit market in 2025 with Enrico, an elderly man who has “an elephant’s memory” and a mind overrun with memories – “every painting seen, every person touched, every book leafed through” – accompanied by an old dog. A friend turns up and says to him: ‘Look, they’re about to hold an exhibition of that painter you knew, and you’re the last survivor, the last witness – tell us all about it!’ Being the last one makes you precious. Thus, interspersed with Enrico’s memories, we journey through the life—told in the first person—of the painter he had known: Lorenzo Viani, born in the late nineteenth century in that Viareggio where mushrooms are gathered in the pine forests in the shadow of the Apuan Alps, among men covered in marble dust, chestnut fritters and the first seaside resorts, and where one might even encounter Puccini at a restaurant. That same Viareggio where Shelley’s body washed up on the beach. As a boy, Lorenzo steals chickens and scribbles with the tips of sooty sticks, and ends up working for a barber who introduces him to anarchist ideas – Fortunato, ‘an imaginative blasphemer and lottery player’ – who tells him, like an oracle: ‘no anarchist will ever regret his actions’. A painter, then – that’s what he wants to be. And after art school in Lucca, where else to go but Paris? There, too, he goes hungry, but he goes hungry whilst rubbing shoulders with Picasso and the various expats of Montparnasse, sleeping in buildings constructed from the scraps of the Eiffel Tower. Subsequently, the narrative addresses his anarchist activism, military service, the trenches, and encounters with d’Annunzio. Through precise descriptions of the period’s situations, settings, and ideas, Amerighi enables readers to encounter the characters—those human beings who profoundly influenced Lorenzo Viani—and we come to know them as well, carrying away something of their stories. Perhaps only art experts or those from Versilia know instinctively whether Viani really existed, or whether he is merely a character invented here by the author (it’s nice in such cases to leave room for doubt), but certainly within these pages there is a Viani who becomes very real indeed, in his emotions, his journeys and his sufferings, as recounted by Amerighi. The author clearly relished his research and the freedom to blend fact and fiction, interpreting events—and readers sense this enjoyment. “Paintings have legs,” Enrico says at one point, “they walk through time.” Perhaps it is because we are reading this book in the days immediately following the death of Francesco Guccini, but there is something distinctly Guccinian about the universe painted or rediscovered by Amerighi, like a cinematic ballad set in that era, “the times when the holy war of the paupers began”.

    

Marco Amerighi
"Quanto splende questo nero
" (Bollati Boringhieri, 352 pp., 18 euros)