Le “carte lacere” di Leonardo Sinisgalli: un’indagine espansa tra architettura, arte e arredamento

In 1964, about a decade after the founding of the “Civiltà delle macchine”, Leonardo Sinisgalli tried his hand at creating a new company magazine for Mobili Italiani Moderni (MIM) in Rome. The house organ takes the name “La botte e il violin” (The Barrel and the Violin) and, although it is the least enduring of the Lucanian engineer-poet’s publishing initiatives, it represents an auroral moment of reflection on the possibilities of the “expansion” of design disciplines and their history. Eight issues were published between 1964 and April 1966, full of contributions signed and illustrated by leading exponents of Italian art and culture. These included Gillo Dorfles, Giulio Carlo Argan, Mario Praz and Enrico Crispolti, alongside artists, designers and architects of the calibre of Orfeo Tamburi, Corrado Cagli and Alberto Savinio. Each issue opens with an editorial, the “carte lacere” – printed in italics, without a title – a table of contents listing the articles and illustrations in the issue and closes with a column dedicated to poems, stories, literary and artistic reviews. Following in the footsteps of magazines such as Pirelli and “Civiltà delle Macchine”, edited by Sinisgalli himself, the magazine focuses on the search for disciplinary pluralism and aims to establish a dialogue between the architectural sciences, design and the various expressions of the humanities. In the editorial of the first issue, Sinisgalli himself indicates the editorial line and the intention to “graft” a debate and reflection between the beautiful and the useful outside of a specific disciplinary sphere but as the spirit of the times. The bimonthly therefore investigates the modern spaces of the home and the city from a lyrical point of view, with a particular focus on architecture and design, art and literature, but it also restores the Lucanian poet’s gradual awareness of the debatable political, economic and cultural changes taking place in 1960s Italy. Sinisgalli’s thesis in relation to the theme of design and with reference to the domestic sphere is that, indeed, a broadening of the criteria of inclusion and the acceptance of marginal practices is taking place.