La grande bellezza
A whole wall covered with ancient Roman stone plaques with inscriptions in classical Roman lapidary lettering, the venerable mother of all serif typefaces, serif coming about as a result of the way the chisel was used to incise the stone. It is highly significant that a resource resulting from such a purely technical problem has turned into something so beautiful when the original reason for it has disappeared.
The Trastevere, the district on the other side of the river, always reminds me of Fellini’s scene in Rome where the restaurant tables, right in the middle of dinner, cheerfully make way for a tram to pass by. Until a short time ago there were two topics that couldn’t be mentioned over dinner without causing radical confrontations: bull fighting and the bidet. Then there was another one: Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza.
