Studio visit
Alberto Casiraghy
11,000.
No, let me write it differently: E L E V E N T H O U S A N D, so it’s clearer.
Eleven thousand is a neutral number in itself, unless it refers to something specific; but if I speak of a publishing house that has published 11,000 different titles, then the number takes on an extraordinarily high specific weight. I’m talking about “Pulcinoelefante” editions by Alberto Casiraghy, with the quaint “y” adopted long ago to distinguish himself among the many in his area with the same name and surname.
Eleven thousand titles that have now been acquired by the City of Milan, housed at the Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano.
Each title is a little jewel made of thick cotton paper: eight pages in all, including the cover, containing a brief poem (or aphorism, or thought) printed with a letterpress using movable type, and a small original work by a different artist each time.
Forty copies at most for each edition—no more.
Which means, by simple math, that the people Alberto has met in his lifetime must number in the thousands. And indeed, after talking with him for a while, you get the feeling he’s known them all—though one stands out among the others: Alda Merini, with whom he formed a collaboration that led him to create about seven hundred of his booklets just for her.
“Maurizio Cattelan slept on that couch there,” he tells me, changing the subject. “He came here when he was little more than a boy and even left me a work. They tell me today it would be worth €25,000. But try finding it in here…”
Right—you try finding a sheet of paper from decades ago amid these shelves crammed with books, piles of notes, stacks of magazines, mountains of sketches and projects scattered everywhere.
Not even the walls are spared from this impending horror vacui.
But the most precious thing he shows, with deserved pride, are certain drawers; open them and you discover a universe of lead movable type he uses to compose the words in his editions; open others and you see endless wood engravings with the most bizarre figures: fantastic animals, monstrous figures, complex geometric elements…
We go upstairs and are greeted by a wall of African masks, for which he has sincere affection and through which he reads a good part of 20th-century art—and it’s hard to disagree.
We open a door and a stunning series of works on paper appears, one more beautiful than the next—imaginative, colourful: “Colour helps me know that I’m alive.”
“You know, I’ve always drawn,” he says, “but mostly my works ended up in the editions; during Covid, though, I couldn’t see anyone, so I started painting in other formats too, and I’m having a great time.”
I listen and get the impression his life is far richer than all the contents—remarkable as they are—of his home.
He tells me the pulcino-elefante drawing is his creation from when he was sixteen or seventeen; that he has worked as a printer, as a luthier of Renaissance instruments, as a set designer for advertising—and so I discover that many of his maquettes I’ve seen on TV, promoting famous brands. “A world swept away by the computer,” unfortunately.
And then: Casiraghy is also an illustrator, a poet, a writer of maxims and aphorisms, which have been published in separate volumes.
Speaking of aphorisms, I take one home in particular, which he willingly repeats: “The important thing is to keep the door open. If the door is open, things come.” And people too.
People… Indeed, you get the impression he really likes people; there’s nothing of the surly, solitary creative about him—quite the opposite. There’s a kind of benevolence in his approach, a free sweetness, an amiability dissolved into his every gesture that compels you to love him.
“Here,” he says, handing me a bottle: “This is wine produced in Portacomaro, Pope Francis’s birthplace, from the grapes of a vineyard planted in his honour. They asked me to design the label.”
“Thank you. Cheers!” — “Viva te.” — “Viva noi!”
