Italy to live, to write, to sing, to paint. Over the centuries, ainfinity of foreign artists fell in love of this extraordinary land, its natural and artistic beauties, its inhabitants, its culture, its rhythms, silences, sounds, music and colors. It would be impossible to name them all, but let's make a small list of illustrious friends of the Bel Paese.
Italy on the go, to describe
Among the travelers, tourists, convalescents or seasonal workers, we mention "only" Goethe, Byron and Keats, Hemingway, Tolstoi, Hesse and Wilde. And the most emblematic, although probably less famous: the French Stendhal, from which the homonymous syndrome of "excess exposure to beauty" took its name. During his Grand Tour, as the writer himself tells on the pages of his Rome, Naples and Florence, while admiring the harmony of the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, he was seized by an intense crisis of vertigo. A real pathology, known today as Stendhal's syndrome.
For his part, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German "Dante" immortalized his Italian tour in his Journey to Italy. His was a full-blown vacation. An "escape" from the suffocating Weimar court, of which he was minister. Goethe stayed in Naples in 1787, and wrote about it in love.
Inspired strangers
Infatuation and passion also made another illustrious German victim, the Nobel Prize Hermann Hesse. The author of Siddharta, The care e The steppe wolf he came to us seven times.
Even the poet George Byron, better known as Lord Byron, was struck by our country. In 1816, the great exponent of English romanticism met Venice, Rome, Padua, Bologna, Florence, Umbria and Liguria. Wonders such as Lake Trasimeno, the sources of Clitunno and the Marmore waterfall inspired him in his long poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
Morte a Venezia is another masterpiece intrinsically linked to Italy. It is from the German Thomas Mann, and to him we also owe a remarkable film of the same title, by the great Luchino Visconti.
"Seasonal" foreign workers in Italy
Among the "luxury seasonal workers" who worked for months and months in Italy there is one Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He gave concerts all over the peninsula but above all in Milan, where he was also a guest of the governor. He wished to live among us, but the working ties with Queen Maria Theresa of Austria did not allow him. He came to Italy for duty, albeit moral, too Ernest Hemingway. He was a volunteer in World War II. He also left us blood, and the mission in the Grappa for which he was wounded earned him a medal. Hot-blooded, the of him, like few others. Italy (he knew above all the Veneto) remained strongly in him. Farewell to Arms is inspired and set in the Bel Paese.
Along the boot he painted Picasso, who spent two months between Rome and Naples. He set up the Cubist movement from the stands of his Roman studio in via Margutta.
Foreigners singing to Italy
Even illustrious singers have succumbed to the tricolor charm. They sang about Italy Elvis Presley (Heart of Rome), Dean Martin (with the immortal That's love), Billy Joel (Scenes from an Italian Restaurant), Frank Sinatra (Three coins in the fountain) to Tony bennett (Autumn in Rome). More recently, the French Phoenix they titled their latest album Ti amo. And there are those who could not avoid singing in Italian. David Bowie sang the text of Mogol entitled Ragazzo solo, ragazza solo", from her S. With my tears is the italic version performed by Rolling Stones of their As Tears Go By. Erlend Øye, from the Norwegian duo Kings of Convenience, domiciled in Sicily, he wrote and interpreted The first summer for a friend's graduation. Berliners deserve a separate discussion Ithaca, more German than sauerkraut, who sing exclusively in Dante's language.
To feel Italian, home in Italy
There are also many artists sensitive to Italic beauty to the point of buy you a house. In addition to the well-known cases of Sting, amateur producer of olive oil from his estate in the Tuscan Valdarno, e George Clooney with his villa on Lake Como, we add the talented Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, who has a house in Pietrasanta. Like him, too Colin Firth he married an Italian. As indeed also Willem Dafoe, married in Rome.
George Lucas, alma mater of Star Wars has restored a former monastery on Lake Trasimeno. They are instead "Apulian" Meryl Streep (house in Tricase), Helen Mirren (Tiggiano) and Gérard Depardieu (historic center of Lecce). And the director too Francis Ford Coppola, which has a farm near Ugento. Mickey Rourke, John Malkovich, Ferzan Ozpetek e Mick Hucknall of Simply Red (to stop at the best known ...) are among the foreigners who have bought a house in Salento and Valle d'Itria.
The lakes and the cities of art in the north, on the other hand, have conquered Robert Pattinson (villa in Menaggio, Lake Como) Leonardo Di Caprio (Verona), Elton John (villa on the Venetian island of Giudecca).
The charm of the hills of central Italy have broken through E, which he has to buy in Paciano, in Umbria, and on Will Smith which he bought in Sermoneta, Lazio.
Main photo: Rui Rocha - Flickr (CC)
