ppoli61

@ppoli611674629039 · 27 Nov 2020

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Aldo Palazzeschi

#peopletoknow #placestoknow 

Aldo Palazzeschi (1885 - 1974) dedicated a memorable piece to our Pancaldi baths, published in Stampe dell'Ottocento, F.lli Treves, Milan, 1936
His print is really a print, described with the astonished eyes of a child who, on the first of August, on a hot day, soaked in sweat, traveling in a carriage and in a railway carriage with his parents and the maid, arrives at the " porta a mare ” in Livorno, where he sees for the first time the blue, sparkling expanse, the white crests of the waves.
During the trip, his mother chatted all the time with a showy lady, who described in great detail the life that  unfolds on the worldly and luxurious establishment, a place "of all the delights", gossiping about the ladies who frequent it, on the number of clothes, shoes and hats of this and that.
It is not difficult to imagine the warm and salty air, the scorching sun from which the ladies protected themselves with their parasols, the wind-swollen curtains of the bathhouse, the marquis, the countesses, the actresses, the bejeweled singers who, walking, sported a new dressing every day - first and foremost a princess who even came with twenty-eight trunks, a hundred dresses and two hundred pairs of shoes. At dawn, secret duels were held and, afterwards, they were talked about with a shiver of emotion.
Above all, the sea is indifferent.

“The sea was very calm, deeply blue, and it seemed to be victoriously settled after a competition with the sky to who was more; in the sky it was only the sun and it filled everything with its heat, and in the sea a small group of white sails at the bottom, five or six, and some white crests towards the shore, bows of cotton, which appeared and disappeared as from the cracks of a dress. "