The "brilliant and graceful" Umbrian tailor depicted by Oscar winners Tornatore and Piovani. The new European tour of the eclectic pianist, who battled multiple myeloma. Farewell to the femme fatale, who found her perfect home in the South of France as a free spirit devoted to her animals.
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2025 bids farewell with three flashes:
- the exaltation of Brunello Cucinelli thanks to two Oscars diverted to a commercial: we are talking about director Giuseppe Tornatore and musician Nicola Piovani;
- the rebirth of Giovanni Allevi, who after three years of exhausting battle with multiple myeloma is back on the road, announcing an extraordinary Tour for 2026;
- the disappearance of BB, alias Brigitte Bardot, who passed away at the end of December at the age of 91, leaving behind an infinite number of moments worth framing.
An intriguing season finale, there's no doubt about it.
Flash 1: Cucinelli.
In mid-December, the chronology brought us "Brunello, the Gentle Visionary," a documentary film about the tailor capable of infusing spirituality and beauty into everything he touched, ever since he chose the most effective strategy to free himself from the sad situation into which his father had fallen, so much so that he showed himself in tears to his son over a humiliation suffered at work. Mr. Umberto passed away in 2022 at the age of 100. He was Brunello's mentor, who repaid him with enormous satisfaction thanks to his cashmere creations and more. In "Letter to his Father," the now-famous son sketches the figure of the father who found inspiration in agriculture to help the seeds of his son's genius germinate in an entirely different field.
Perhaps that Letter has escaped most people's notice. We offer a few excerpts with the simple aim of underscoring the values of a relationship worthy of framing:
“Solomeo, May 27, 2022
“I have understood, over time, when old things become golden and new ones involve us so closely that sometimes they almost leave us breathless, the meaning of the word and figure of the “father”.
“For me, in my youth, my father was a quiet, sober, courageous, and gentle man who, while he led his daily life in the role of the small family farm, was in reality, even if I didn't realize it yet, my sure guide and my constant point of reference.
“I didn't know it, but in those years when I was shaping my future, every solid concept of action towards the family, towards Creation and towards people was slowly taking shape and drawing its deepest reasons from this very man.
My father Umberto's attitude toward pain was always courageous and silent, and I think of his relationship with the war he fought, which he never spoke about, not about blood, not about death. But he remembered the human episodes, those that can arise even in the most difficult moments, like when, out of extreme thirst and without any sustenance, he and other comrades were forced to drink water from a puddle where their horses had urinated. And only rarely, due to an old pain in his shoulder, did he recall the heavy bombs he had carried on his back so many times. He had heard so many bombs explode, but he had never seen them, just as he had never seen the blood and the wounds and the deaths, or at least he was glad it was so.
The most important lessons for my education and for my future worldview came during the most beautiful period, that of peasant life. Looking back to that time that now seems enchanted to me, those infinitely high and infinitely blue skies where the ever-cheerful clouds chased each other in a thousand shapes from one side of the horizon to the other above the mountains darkened by woods and the meadows enameled with flowers, today I come to think that my father was so strong because the laws of nature echoed in him: nature had formed and nourished him. It is true that, according to the customs of the time, my father was not in the habit of picking me up or caressing me, nor did he concern himself with my schoolwork; my mother was there for these things, and how often, in the evenings, tired from so much work, after cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, she devoted herself with attentive affection to me, to my study: what a beautiful memory I have of the Nibelungenlied, the work that I had to memorize and that she patiently repeated to me as I read and reread, And in my imagination, sublimed by exhaustion and the fire in the fireplace, I seemed to be one of those heroes! These were the roles: maternal affection on the one hand, paternal wisdom on the other, made up of experience and practicality…”.
Worth framing. Exactly.
That letter originates from Solomeo, Cucinelli's enchanted village. But the writing has roots far beyond that hill in the province of Perugia, which we've often worn out in our to-ing and fro-ing across Italy. But it didn't impress Tornatore. Without mincing words, we can state that "Cinema Paradiso" is something entirely different. Just as the soundtrack to "Life is Beautiful" is something entirely different—without intending to offend Piovani, of course.
Tornatore and Piovani won't be adding any more Oscars anytime soon thanks to Cucinelli. You can bet on it. Nor will their documentary on the Umbrian designer match the box office takings of Checco Zalone, who walks to Santiago de Compostela with a "Camino" that in just four days grossed fifteen times the "booty" of the genteel gentleman from Solomeo. The Tornatore & Piovani duo has given us the opportunity to dust off Brunello's letter three years later, and that's enough (as far as we're concerned).
Flash 2: Allevi.
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Waking up at dawn to the radio broadcasting the words of a reinvigorated Giovanni Allevi means a day of optimism lies ahead. This happens just before Christmas, when, while the darkness is still deep, the words of the gray-haired musician reach our ears.
Between May and June, Allevi spoke often about his battle with myeloma. He enhanced his return to the stage with the announcement of a truly exciting tour, starting with the performance in Pavia. The fear of losing him seems to have been swept away in an instant. Born in 1969, at 56, he made a statement worthy of a gladiator of the disease: "They say I have a 5 percent chance of living, but I'll make it to 95!" We wish him twice his expectations.
Of all the musicians who have passed through Gargano for the annual Jazz Festival held on the beach at Peschici by Donato Di Milo, the long-haired Allevi is the one who struck us the most for his spontaneity as well as his skill in playing the piano for a few intimates in the ballroom on the ground floor of Matteo D'Amato's hotel on the main beach of the "Perla".
And we will never forget the wide-eyed happiness he felt at the pleasant news of having solved a problem that had plagued him since the early 2000s: his project to replace the bicycle that had been stolen from him in Milan had finally come to fruition. In the city, he practically traveled exclusively on two wheels. By bike, Giovanni reached the venues for rehearsals and performances. Not even keeping an upright piano at home, he practiced, composed, and performed before Milanese audiences exclusively in places accessible in everyday life thanks to his bicycle...which had been stolen. With a new one at his disposal, the problem was erased.
Allevi is a master of the musical staff, which he almost never uses. He demonstrated this once again on December 27th at the Parco della Musica in Rome, where his new European tour, "Piano Solo 2025/26," kicked off from the Santa Cecilia Hall, building on the success of his Buenos Aires performances of tried-and-tested pieces interspersed with previously unreleased sonatas. He will stop on Friday, January 9th at the Dal Verme in Milan, where we'll be lining up, along with dozens of other passionate supporters of the Marche native (he's a native of Ascoli Piceno), hoping to overcome the expected sell-out, before boarding the following Sunday for Malta. The tour also includes stops in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, and much, much more of Italy, from North to South and vice versa.
The first title fully explains the documentary that kept us glued to the video and the tour permeated with songs like "Back to Life", "Go with the Flow", "Our Future", "Come sei veramente", etc. And then MM2, the unfulfilled and priceless cello virtuoso, and so on.
Bone marrow cancer is a tough beast to beat. Allevi seems to have made it, and he surprises once again, as he did that night on the beach in Peschici after a short performance for a few close friends over a cold beer.
Flash 3: Brigitte Bardot
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She passed away on a chilly morning, even in her native Côte d'Azur. Le Figaro lauded her with a front-page headline: "A Free Woman." And an editorial that leaves no room for doubt: "The Scent of Eternity." Italian newspapers are also emblematic. Some examples: Il Corriere della Sera: "BB, cinema icon and first animal rights activist." La Repubblica: "1934-2025. Free and magnetic. Farewell Brigitte Bardot." La Stampa: "A dream called BB."
It's Brigitte Bardot, of course: an icon of female beauty, a controversial mother, and a supporter of right-wing parties. For everyone, she's that little girl with her shirt tied under her breasts and her hair loose, like her soul, devoted more to dogs, cats, goats, donkeys, and so on, than to her family.
BB left the cinema that wanted her to be more beautiful than talented at just 38 years old. She left the Parisian salons and "retired" to the south of France: to that enchanted kingdom dreamed of by many, called La Madrague.
There, in Saint-Tropez, BB lived his most intense years, dedicated, for example, to that big dog who, in the back seat of the battle-hardened Mehari, drooled on Milena Gabanelli's scarf. Gabanelli had flown to the French Riviera to illustrate a cultural project to BB, and whom BB herself had tracked down—we're talking about Gabanelli—in a narrow street in the historic center of the fashionable town. Milena would ask Brigitte questions, and the guest would drive the orange Mehari and talk to the big dog and the cats...
Everyone, absolutely everyone, wrote about Bardot's farewell, highlighting her beauty. It took the usual, incomparable Michele Serra, a sort of contemporary Fortinbras, hours and hours after the first publications to read about a watershed moment in the life of the woman everyone dreamed of: that beauty that erased every flaw in her acting, which certainly wasn't the best in the history of cinema.
And there, in Saint-Tropez, we often noticed that orange Mehari parked in the harbor area, where Leonardo DiCaprio's yacht often docked. There, BB v would shuffle up and down the old town, so free and "superior" to the others that it aroused in everyone a certain jealousy towards the life lived according to one's own taste and custom.
We remember as if it were yesterday the day we parked our Piaggio Cinquantino next to the Mehari because, coming from Port Fréjus, just beyond Saint-Maxime and shortly before Saint-Raphaël, we had reached that magical place in search of a couple of little gifts for Giulia and Andrea Alessandra. She, BB, was "hidden" in a light scarf and sipping coffee, just steps from the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption (where she will be given her final farewell on January 7, 2026) and the municipal marine cemetery where she will likely end up being buried, despite having expressed to Le Monde years earlier her desire to surrender herself elsewhere to the land and the sea. Namely, in her La Madrague, in the shade of the two-story rural villa and next to her most beloved animals, who preceded her on the journey... across the bridge.
R.I.P.
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