Brin

Irene Brin was a pseudonym of Maria Vittoria Rossi (1914-1969), an Italian journalist and writer. She was born in Sasso di Bordighera, in the same house where she died at the young age of 55. She belonged to an upper middle-class family, her father a general, her mother an Austrian noblewoman. She started her career as a journalist signing her pieces Mariù, at the Giornale di Genova and at Lavoro. Leo Longanesi appreciated her brilliant, acute, and cultivated articles (her favorite authors, always quoted, were Saint-Simon, Proust, and Musil) so much that he wanted her immediately at Omnibus, the first weekly magazine published in Italy on the eve of World War II and almost immediately shut down by the Fascist regime. He invented the pseudonym by which she would become famous. Her perfect knowledge of foreign languages, a subtle and kind sense of humor added to a special sense of intuition, not to mention her great style, all combined to immediately make her the first great journalist of costume in a small and provincial Italy. These extraordinary qualities of hers are best exemplified in Usi e Costumi 1920–1940, published in Rome in 1944 by Donatello De Luigi. She married Gasparo Del Corso, a brilliant officer and owner of the art gallery L’Obelisco. Together, they were the first to introduce Rome to the works of Cocteau, Matta, Magritte, and DalÕ. Donna Irene, as her friends called her, was very beautiful and extremely myopic, but abhorred glasses; she always dressed in a sophisticated and non-conformist way. The apartment in Palazzo Torlonia where she lived, furnished with black velvet couches, Coromandel screens, and splendid modern paintings, reflected her refined taste. Other than writing a widely read advice column for the weekly La Settimana Incom, which she signed “Countess Clara,” she worked for various Italian magazines such as Bellezza, and for American magazines as well. She was a real talent scout and struggled so that Italian tailors could throw off their Parisian oppressors. Bista Giorgini, the inventor of the Florentine runways that launched the Made in Italy movement, found in her an intelligent ally. In order to make the great Italian tailoring shops of the post-World War II period known across the Atlantic, she organized “8 Countesses 8,” a tour through America in which eight very beautiful and aristocratic Roman ladies turned themselves into fashion models. In her book Lato Debole, Camilla Cederna wrote about her: “I met her one Summer in Liguria a very long time ago, in a mittel-Europa kind of hotel that no longer exists. She was extremely beautiful with very pale eyes wide open on a world that she observed untiringly. She was very young and already had a column, every Sunday, in Il Lavoro of Genoa. It was just a few sentences about facts, events, and meetings, signed Mariù. Was that half column enough to make it obvious that the first Italian journalist had been born, and to stir admiration, envy, and a lot of suspicion … in those years when a woman who wrote would imitate Tuscan writers such as Nunziata and Bista while making the bed (abballinare le matarassa); or, withdrawn into her own provincialism, would sort out rustic escapes with the farm manager, or crazy run-ins with satanic violinists; if she wasn’t telling stories about wretched adventures with aviators and sheiks; or, from the purple pages of some periodical, would suggest for readers a light blue taffeta for a beautiful bed blanket? … She was the first one to sense and to identify, with painful bitterness, and especially to write about, the mean acts of second-raters and social climbers, and their small balancing acts, the hypocrisies and stupid stratagems of the falsely generous … She was a modest person, had great dignity, but was extremely discreet; she didn’t realize that for Italian journalism she was a master, an example, and a pioneer. No one had ever heard her talking about herself, except if just in passing, or with laughter.” In 1981 the publishing house Sellerio reissued Usi e Costumi 1920-1940, followed in 1991 by Dizionario del successo, dell’insuccesso e dei luoghi comuni, and Le Visite, and in 1994 by Cose viste 1938-1939.