Dentro le Case – Gianni Berengo Gardin / Luciano D’Alessandro (signed)

This volume, sponsored by a real estate company, gathers photographs of the interiors of Italian houses taken by Gianni Berengo Gardin (Northern part) and Luciano D’Alessandro (Southern part)
The volume, which is elegantly wrapped in a black case, also contains some texts. Among these, a wonderful introduction by Cesare Zavattini (remember ‘Un Paese’ with Paul Strand?) from which the following is arbitrarily taken and translated:

“Am I a pessimist? I have a friend, G.T., an optimist, who fills me with good news to keep my spirits up. Yesterday he phoned me that in Massachusetts they happily experimented with glass shelters that are impermeable to any deadly physical and chemical penetration, laser-proof in short, that allow not only to feel safe indoors but to observe at the same time, not without solidarity, what happens outdoors. Very expensive shelters, therefore accessible to few people. But G.T. who is rich, assures me that I will be able to count on his hospitality, as he will count on my discretion about the number of relatives I can bring with me, only first degree blood relatives.
An hour ago, G.T. came in person, shouting, “We’re saved.” He was shaking a newspaper with the announcement of the wheeled houses, a German patent: entire cities would move from their official place to places not marked on maps, unknown to the enemy.
Faced with such fervour, I feel guilty. Something positive, golly, is in life and also in the house (…)
No, I’m not a monster and I too enjoy a new shutter, a bold distribution of rooms, and when the wooden floor finally appeared in my apartment, I had to hide the emotion (as I realized that the entrepreneur would take advantage of it to increase the cost). So I appreciate the line of an unexpected ceiling, of a refrigerator so beautiful that you want to preserve yourself in it, I appreciate the red fire lane that almost from the street solemnly leads into my house, and the toilet, in my childhood called loo, which with the movement of a panel becomes a reception room. All evidence of a dialectic of the “materials” proceeding with their own logic and their own language and rhythm until one day, just like in fairy tales, all of a sudden they will start talking and then we will have to admit that we have always possessed things superior to us.”

This copy is numbered and signed by Gianni Berengo Gardin