Until Sunday, Parma hosts the best of collectibles and designer design. Unmissable are the exhibitions dedicated to hats, Carlo Colombo and Bruno Pizzul
Goethe said that collectors are happy people. And perhaps this very aspect contributed to the success of Mercanteinfiera, the great international event dedicated to antiques, collecting and designer design. Now in its forty-fourth edition, the exhibition-market awaits over 6 thousand buyers from all over the world thanks to an exhibition itinerary that includes a thousand exhibitors between Italy and abroad. “Authentic collecting does not arise from possession, but from relationship”, explained Ilaria Dazzi, brand manager of Mercanteinfiera, “Those who collect do not do so to accumulate, but to interpret. An object enters the collection when it touches something profound, when it triggers a dialogue with our identity and with time. The collector is a figure balanced between impulse and method, driven by a desire for meaning that not everyone understands. For some it is a mania, for others a form of knowledge. It is certainly a way to resist dispersion, to order complexity, to create connections between eras, cultures, languages.” From this perspective, the exhibition, scheduled until Sunday 19 October, becomes a cultural observatory, where objects, knowledge and stories intertwine. Between fashion, design, modern antiques and collecting, in Parma we talk about past knowledge to be told and passed down. It is therefore no coincidence that the collateral events are all in this direction. Four special exhibitions will accompany the autumn edition of Mercanteinfiera: The book of books. Ancient Bibles, between splendor and devotion; From every end of the world: stories, peoples, events through the hat; The Living Archive of Antonio Colombo: Art, Cycling and Design And Homage to Bruno Pizzul.
Five centuries of the Bible on display
Made in collaboration with Video Type and with texts by Luca Cena, The book of books. Ancient Bibles, between splendor and devotion is an exhibition that takes you through the history of sacred books, showing extraordinary masterpieces starting from Biblia Latina cum postillis Nicolai de Lyraprinted in Venice by Ottaviano Scoto in 1489. Followed by La Biblia Breves in Eadem Annotationefirst sixteenth-century critical edition and the Gothic masterpiece of Missale Romanumwhich flow into the art of Miniature Biblean edition only 45 millimeters high with 876 pages and 28 illustrations, created in honor of the coronation of King George V. To close the journey, the Books of Genesis and Exodusprinted in Arabic in 1876 in Beirut, which represents a bridge text between civilizations, translated and transmitted by scholars, missionaries and intellectuals.
History of the hat between ethnography and fashion
There is a common thread that unites a Japanese samurai helmet from the Edo period with the ceremonial boater designed by Elsa Schiaparelli in the 1960s. Hair plays a role in all cultures and Mercanteinfiera investigates its role with From every end of the world: stories, peoples, events through the hat. Created in collaboration with the curator Martina Barison, the exhibition reveals curiosities and quirks of the art of headgear through a journey of 40 objects, including the headgear of the Kayapó of the Amazon, the original Borsalino hatbox and the cardinal’s hat that belonged to Pope John XXIII, just to name a few. “We wanted each hat to tell not only a time or a place, but also an emotion, a tension, an aspiration”, underlined Barison, “It is not exotic folklore: it is a portable museum of cultures, in which distances are shortened and differences are affirmed through the visual power of an object. The ambition is to look beyond ethnography, opening a horizon that embraces fashion, cinema and design contemporary. Hats that become works of art, capable of entering the great fashion houses and the imagination of our time. The hat will never go out of fashion, it will never die. It is a silent witness, a sign of resistance”, concludes Barison”.
Art, cycling and design
There is the essence of the most authentic Made in Italy in the retrospective The Living Archive of Antonio Colombo. Art, cycling and design. In the spotlight, there is the entrepreneurial path of the Colombo family starting from the founder Angelo Luigi who in 1919 began as a manufacturer of steel pipes. The company stands out for its innovative capacity, so much so that it participated in the VI Milan Triennale, where it obtained the exclusive production of Marcel Breuer’s furniture from EMBRU. Between ’46 and ’50 the AL Colombo tubes formed the chassis of the Maserati and Ferrari racing cars, driven to victory by Fangio, Ascari and Villoresi. In recent years, bicycle tubes continue to represent the ideal terrain for experimentation in the mechanical and metallurgical fields. And this is how the Columbus brand was born in 1977, led by Antonio Colobo, which signed the track successes of Coppi, Anquetil, Baldini, Rivière and then Bracke, Ritter, Merckx, Moser and Oersted, to name just a few.
The voice of football
With Homage to Bruno PizzulMercanteinfiera remembers the most loved sports commentator of all time. Created in collaboration with the Pizzul family, the exhibition traces the journalist’s biography and career through a series of objects and the memories of his son Fabio, who underlines, “These objects tell him better than many words. He didn’t collect objects, but books, because he always said that if one reads, one knows how to tell stories”. Also paying homage to Pizzul are the testimonies of big names such as the coach of Milan and Real Madrid, Fabio Capello; of the ex-player Eraldo Pecci and the journalists Luca Ponzi and Stefano Bizzotto.
