Ottone Rosai ^©  

(Firenze, 1895 - Ivrea, 1957)

Poets, musicians and writers, who have passed through it in the last eighty years, have defined via di San Leonardo the most beautiful street in the world. Before Ottone Rosai some of the most significant Macchiaioli painters had painted glimpses of it. We owe none of these to the way he managed to show it - find out , you would say - and then you love Rosai madly.

It became his kingdom from the end of the summer of 1933, but the original shock, in truth, was via Schiaparelli, the short and bristling humpback alley you meet on the left, a few hundred meters after the historic Chalet Fontana, coming from Viale dei Colli. Caponi and Donnini, who had helped Rosai - their Master - in the move from the customs shed in via di Villamagna, told how they had discovered it, while they were going to number 49, that is to the house, rented, where they were headed. / span>

« Brass stopped petrified, with his mouth wide open, as if he had seen the Madonna. His gaze bounced between the walls, the cypresses and the two villas on their respective sides. Although we were with the cart cluttered with luggage, he asked us to stop and put it on the ground. He took his pencil and notebook out of his pocket and quickly stopped on the paper every stroke of what for him was an amazing apparition. "

In Rosai's painting, the birthright of the cycle called « via San Leonardo» was born with the 1934 masterpiece of the same name, documented - also on the cover - in the first volume of the General Catalog Raisonné of the Works of Ottone Rosai (Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori, Milan, 2018, p. 377, n. 107), edited by me.

Although, in fact, in that case, the subject is via Schiaparelli, for that and each of the following« views-visions »Rosai elects a toponym of sentimental nature: via San Leonardo, precisely.

The tribute to his road is - also - in these words:« L a most surprising revelation reserved for me by life. Of an incomparable rarity due to its shape designed not by engineers, but by the very course of the land as it is located at the top of a hill overlooking Florence, little more than a path wide, it proceeds sinuously and full of secrets and surprises arriving, with its walls slightly higher than a man, with the olive trees that overlook them, with some secular cypresses that announce the discreet and almost intimidated presence of a villa every now and then, up to the large square of Poggio Imperiale [...]. < / span>

But this road is long and the church and the villas and houses are distributed so harmoniously in the space and each so right in its point it reminds us of the charms and pendants of royal necklaces designed by distinguished artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The same sky that rests on the plants and on the roofs seems to adapt to them from time to time by inventing and varying its color. Via di San Leonardo in Arcetri has been standing still for centuries, it is there as if enchanted, as if a coronation worthy of such a queen crowned Florence. Few travelers pass beyond those who live there and are in love, or poets or artists or some tramp ».

This sumptuous homage to one of the many different angles of via San Leonardo, which smells of late autumn, new oil and roasted chestnuts, so dear to Rosai for having asked Parronchi to publish it in the 1947 monograph, cit . , is to be considered a valuable page in the work of the author of the decade to which it belongs.

One per iodo, that, characterized rather, and in an essential way, by the Self-portraits (insisted, however, until the turn of their earthly parable), from the Crucifixions < span style = "font-size: 14px;"> and from the series of Nudes , but evidently also inhabited by gems, like this one, which are, indeed, sentimental" returns ", as usual on the left bank of the Arno: now in piazza del Carmine, now in via Toscanella . With greater diligence, however, in via San Leonardo, his favorite eden.

Vasco Pratolini, who translated the painting of his friend and mentor, Rosai, into very refined writing, in a passage of Family Chronicle (1947) is an ideal tribute to him: «We used to visit you on the hill, almost every day. We went up Costa de 'Magnoli, Costa Scarpuccia, it was summer, July; each time, once the ascent was over, I wanted to stop and look at St. George and the Dragon, carved on the door; grandmother pulled me by the hand. The olive trees were white in the sun, they emerged with all the branches from the walls in which Via San Leonardo is embedded. Beyond, the perfect, gently sloping plowed fields; a great chirping of cicadas, and butterflies lost in the light. We never met anyone, rarely did a voice come from the fields. The gates of the villas were always closed. I walked on purpose, clicking my heels so that the echo was stronger. Between the walls and the paving there was at times a grassy edge: poppies grew there. The peasant houses had tall half-closed doors, painted green like the umbrellas that are used in the countryside […]. »

Giovanni Faccenda

General Catalog Editor

Reason of the Works of Ottone Rosai

(Editorial Giorgio Mondadori)