On a brutally cold, yet sunny February day in 2021, I called Lora Guerra, the poet and wife of one of Italy’s most important poets and screenplay writers Tonino Guerra. Russian by birth and upbringing, Lora has been living in Pennabilli for decades. I wanted to hear her thoughts on love. In the depths of winter now more than ever, we need to be reminded of the “invincible summer” living inside each of us. I could not think of anyone else who could express it better than Lora, through vivid stories about loving life in its many facets and reincarnations: a man, a place, friends, art, nature, animals, poetry and music.
Lora met and fell in love with Tonino in Moscow in 1975, and she still cannot explain it. It was magic beyond words since neither of them spoke the other’s language. Two years later, she miraculously pierced through the Iron Curtain and found herself in Rome with Tonino. Sitting at the same table with Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, she almost fainted from excitement.
Falling in love with Rome, with its high sky and warm light, was instant. To her, it still is the most amazing city in the world, the embodiment of all human endeavors. A place where one can touch time, and easily move through it. Yet later in the 80’s, the end of the golden age of Italian cinema was approaching, and Lora and Tonino left Rome for the countryside, for Pennabilli.
The change was quite radical. They had to construct a new life and literally a new house for themselves on the very steep hill of Roccione. Pennabilli and its people did not let them suffer alone for long. Next to the ruins of the medieval walls of the Malatesta castle, Gianni, the visionary who brought Tonino to Pennabilli, and Enrico, the future founder of Festival of Street Artists, laid the bricks and the electrical wiring of the home where Lora still lives today. They also created the unique window Tonino enjoyed over the years, one overlooking the whole mountain range and allowing him to “hear God coughing.”
Tonino called the old new house “La Casa delle Mandorle” (The House of the Almonds) to reflect its abundance of almond trees, which are blooming at this very moment. The universe conspired, and Lora and Tonino lovingly embraced Pennabilli for its people, its mountains and the unique, amphitheatrical shape of the city, which allows one to feel the presence of nature and space at any location.
From this place, they generated a volcanic eruption of creativity. Tonino (then 80 years old) and Lora connected in a titanic collective effort with many local artists and artisans, and their passion brought to existence countless art objects and museums both in Pennabilli and in the river valley Marecchia.
It was love that led them to conceive “the garden of the forgotten fruits.” This was the first installation made by Tonino Guerra, created in a former vegetable garden belonging to monks. It hosts trees once part of the local scenery and now gone, as well as several modern sculptures. It was in this garden that Tonino brought the Dalai Lama to plant a mulberry tree, channeling an extraordinary local legend with Tibet.
The museums and art installations built are too many to list here, but one of my favorites is the one-room museum called L'Angelo coi Baffi (The Angel with the Moustache). Known as the smallest museum in the world, it is always open. It is hosted in a former chapel and consists of a single poem written by Tonino Guerra, a single painting by Luigi Poiaghi, a ladder, some stuffed birds and grain spilled on the brick floor. The poem, written in both Romagnolo dialect and in Italian, is about the unexpected power of lighthearted, but determined actions, to bring to life even the impossible. To me, this poem has a special meaning.
Born in 1920, in a small town in Valmarecchia, Tonino's childhood and youth were deeply rooted in the culture of the still dominant agrarian society. 50+ years later, when he moved to Pennabilli, Tonino saw the rapid disappearance of a way of life that had hardly changed for centuries. What he loved was fading away… To him Pennabilli and its valley became the focus of his life, a symbol of everything simple and universal that makes human life worth living. And he dedicated all his energy to keeping Pennabilli alive through beauty, poetry and art. Another Italian genius, Pier Paolo Pasolini, recognized it, and as Lora told me, he wrote to Tonino, “you managed to accomplish for your town what I only dreamt of.” Not by chance, both Pasolini and Guerra started a trend in modern Italian poetry – writing in dialect. A lost cause? Perhaps, but how much warm humanity and love one can find in this venture. Our future might still need these qualities.