THOUGHTS

In the past, works for shared use – cathedrals, palaces, monuments, fountains, buildings serving various community purposes – were built with great beauty and harmony. Great engineers, prominent architects and artists were commissioned to create them. Aristocrats and merchants competed to finance outstanding works that would elevate their families and seal their names in history. Today, magnificent and imposing works of great artistic value, created for the benefit of the community, are rare in Europe. Behind this undoubtedly lie economic problems, but also (and perhaps above all) motives of another kind, involving social control.

Beauty brings pleasure to the senses, but it is not merely aesthetic enjoyment. Beauty is also a psychological and, ultimately, ethical phenomenon, both individual and collective. For the ancient Greeks, beauty arises from the harmony of its various components. And harmony means balance. It is no coincidence that, for Dostoevsky, beauty is associated with Goodness, with the divine, that is, with the highest form of spirituality. Beauty, ultimately, is joy. Take beauty out of human lives and you take away, along with aesthetic enjoyment, their sense of harmony and their impulse to seek inner balance. Without this, individuals inevitably become more vulnerable to psychological imbalance, despondency, depression, unhappiness.

Those visiting a city head for its centre, where they can enjoy fountains, monuments, cathedrals; those going out of town choose forests, lakes, mountains, and will rarely (unless for particular reasons) choose to subject themselves to the sight of crumbling suburbs, rusty warehouses, uniform public housing and streets strewn with potholes and rubbish, where ugliness and squalor prevail, and where millions of human beings with limited financial means are relegated and forced to be born, live and die.

The current system does not seem interested in promoting material and psychological well-being, but rather in imposing depressing cultural and social models, if not irrational and even subliminally satanic ones, that keep individuals more occupied with the struggle for daily survival than with personal development. Less free, more easily dominated.

In recent decades, trash has systematically been elevated to art, architecture, music, fashion. Ripped jeans, for example, a must-have for millions of very young people, what are they really if not actual rags? Symbols of destitution to which our eyes must grow accustomed. Poverty becomes normal. And tattoos, which so few people now refrain from getting? In distant times, they formed part of a sacred, magical symbolism, serving tribal cohesion and belonging among threatened peoples who defended their land and their identity. In more recent times, they were symbols of seafaring, piracy, convicts. Today, amid the prevailing superficiality, they have lost those social and spiritual meanings, descending into the usual “fashion” (and are fashions not imposed by someone, from above?) that leads millions of individuals to permanently disfigure their bodies, in keeping with the same mindset that seeks the violation of Nature, Beauty and Harmony, bowing to their exact opposite. Through these mechanisms, globalist think tanks work to level, diminish, oppress, cage human beings and destroy their reason and their souls. With the proliferation of Artificial Stupidity and thousands of databases, they are creating the perfect Matrix.

And yet it moves!, said Galileo. Evil, Deception, Chaos, all that makes no sense, that violates the laws of the universe, prevail in the short term, because they play dirty, but are destined, ultimately, to shatter against the powerful architecture of Goodness and Truth, towards which all things tend…

I finished Vanessa’s portrait, I nearly completed the first draft of a new screenplay (the miniseries Whispering Place, a multi-award winner in 2024 and 2025), and I am working as Production Designer on the film The Yellow Dress (by Deborah Grimes). Zero time for anything else. As usual. I wonder how Leonardo managed the million things he took on during his short life. But then, he was a genius. One of a kind. Among his other marvelous machines, he must have invented a time machine, too. Shame he didn’t leave any notes on how to build one.

The lawn in our back garden is hidden beneath a thick carpet of rusty leaves. The winds have had their fun with them and now the sycamore branches look like bare arms stretched out at the sky. I return to my paintings, eager to finish “Emperor Paul” from the Glorious Ghosts series. I have a line of portraits waiting and so little time, wish my day had 48 hours (at least)!

Since I lost my good friend Ismail—perhaps the finest producer I ever met in my capacity as a director—I could not bring myself to move forward with that script. Too many memories, and traumas too, such as a painful (and unjust) misunderstanding with the Italian star I had so desperately wanted for the film. I had championed her cause to Ismail and James Ivory, overcoming their initial skepticism by showing them clips from her movies and photographs to prove she was perfect, even unique, for the role. I never understood the origin of that misunderstanding, nor the reason behind it. A mix-up by her agent, as Ismail had speculated, perhaps? I wrote a long letter to the actress (whom I have never stopped admiring) and, as I was leaving, I asked my father to mail it. He forgot... The project limped along for a few more years with various drafts, but after Ismail’s sudden passing, I became convinced it simply wasn't meant to be, that the story was ill-fated or perhaps obsolete, and I abandoned it.

Only now, more than twenty years later, have I grasped what Ismail truly meant; I want to take that screenplay out of the drawer where I kept it buried for so long. I want to rewrite it—if only in his memory—and turn it into a novel, just as I did with The Paper Man [L’Uomo di Carta]. Bacause Winter, though a period drama, is centered on the theme of technology versus humanity. What could be more relevant today—now that we have come so far in terms of innovations, inventions, and scientific applications—than the risk of human nature being lost in this progress? As one of the characters says: “Is it really progress?”

I have always believed that ideas—at least the truly good ones—come to us (rather than us generating them) from some multidimensional realm situated between universal reality and our minds. Intuition, then, is the moment when an idea—one of those drifting around this outer realm like pollen or winged seeds—encounters us and finds fertile ground in which to take root, grow, and blossom. This would explain why certain ideas are sown in more than one mind, giving rise to inventions or discoveries that come to light almost simultaneously. If this is true, then to capture ideas, we must cast our nets wide and open our inner worlds as fully as possible to draw them in and snare them. It might sound easy, but preparing the soil is the hardest part of the hunt; it requires long, patient labor—hoeing, plowing, and nourishing the earth—to make it receptive to the growth and blossoming of these idea-seeds. Sometimes, the seeds land in the field of our minds quietly, almost unnoticed, long before their time; we fail to recognize them until the tiny sprout has grown into a massive tree that is impossible to ignore. Then, all that remains is to embrace its trunk—as some people do in forests—or climb it and feast on its fruit. Something similar happened with my old script Winter, which was honored with a Solinas Award and subsequently optioned by the Merchant / Ivory Productions. The last time I spoke with Ismail Merchant (it was in London in 2005, never imagining it would be our final conversation as he passed away shortly after) he encouraged me to rewrite the screenplay based on the latest draft, which he had approved, saying, “Because when an idea is significant, it is worth the effort and the patience.” He was a perfectionist, and the films he produced are gems.

The calendar says it is summer, but here it feels like March. Irish weather at its most mischievous. Yet the countryside has never been so green; one could dive in, swim, and roll in the grass, as if in a sea.

Summer in Italy is clinging to its final days, defying winter, which will win in the end, regardless. But, as Shelley said: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

Longing for my easel, I spend my nights reading through stacks of books: history, essays, diaries, biographies, and scientific texts, including Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It is all for my second book, set between 1860 and 1880; I am building the protagonist—a naturalist—and other characters (both historical figures, like kings, queens, advisors, grand ladies, conspirators, assassins on the one hand and fictional ones on the other), but above all, I am trying to get a feel for that era. How did people think? How did they live, travel, eat, suffer and love? Were they like us. perhaps a little less stressed, a bit more daring, more inclined to dream? Whether a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, or even three thousand years ago, the only real difference lies in technology. Today, despite such a leap forward in science, there has been so little inner progress. It is as if evolution never touched the human essence, only our ingenuity. Both my parents dedicated their lives to biochemistry, microbiology and genetics. I spent my childhood and adolescence in the laboratories of the Dorn Institute (Marine Biology) and the IIGB (International Institute of Genetics and Biophysics) in Naples. At eighteen, I wanted to study ethology and make films about animal behaviour. My heroes were Konrad Lorenz, Jacques Cousteau (whom I had the honor of meeting), and David Attenborough. I even attended the first year of Zoology at the uni, and drew up a list of topics for a potential future thesis—topics that Danilo Mainardi found “original.” Then, for various reasons largely beyond my control, I took a different path. Yet the passion remained. Through observation, I have become convinced that most animals are capable not only of feelings and thoughts—sometimes even complex ones—but also of perceiving beauty and meditation. New studies in marine biology are revealing that cetaceans possess a language as articulate as our own. I fear they do not speak very highly of us…

There is a special character in the new story I am writing: a raven. After some reflection, I concluded that his inner stream of thought could only be expressed in a simple yet poetic way. I discovered Japanese haiku and fell in love with the form. My raven delivers his monologues in haiku.