I met Massimo Vitali when I was still in my mother’s belly. We were in Milan, in a house downtown when the Cinque Vie was still a neighborhood and there were still real stores like Eliseo’s, the produce seller who wrapped vegetables in lead-laden newspaper pages, or the salumiere Aldo with a pencil behind his ear to do accounting. Massimo was our neighbor along with Giovanna Nuvoletti, his wife back then, with their children Leone and Viola, my buddies for a long time.
Then that core group of people, which also included such personalities as the famous Corriere della Sera journalist Guido Vergani, dissolved.
Everyone went his own way, took new paths, found new neighborhoods, apartments, neighbors.
Years later, at a gala dinner in a theater in Florence, I found myself sitting next to Massimo who (sorry) came across as a bit gruff and did not seem to want to start a conversation. Then I told him who I was and I found a friend, indeed more, a family member. Then I got to know more about his work.
In a super cool hotel in Miami, at the André Balazs’s Raleigh, I had already seen a mega photo of his of the Italian beach. It was wonderful, sparkling.
In the years that followed I often crossed paths with many other images featuring groups of vacationers that revealed a kind of diffuse ordinariness of the popular, at the same time reassuring, aesthetic and fabulous.
