Calzini
Raffaele (1885-1953). Italian writer and journalist, and special correspondent for Corriere della Sera starting in 1926. For that Milanese daily he covered the fourth presentation of the Italian High Fashion Show organized by Bista Giorgini, to which Florence granted the use of the Sala Bianca in Palazzo Pitti for the first time. It was Tuesday, the 22nd of July, 1952, with a temperature of 42úC in the shade and thunder storms. No one in town paid much attention, as if that gathering of tailors, dressmakers, models, journalists, and buyers from the U.S. and Europe was elitist and of interest only to those in the field, like a meeting of the Carbonari society. But Corriere della Sera didn’t feel that way, and it sent a great correspondent, a very refined, Proustian writer (La tela di Penelope; Segantini, romanzo della montagna) to Florence. Raffaele Calzini wrote a very dignified piece, and it was published on page three: “There were the American buyers, the representatives of the international press, the tailors and dressmakers, and the guests such as Mrs. Churchill, an entire world that was curious, elegant, competent, critical, and refined, composed of shopkeepers and aristocrats, all sitting in three rows on the four sides of a rectangular room that was completely decorated with stuccos like a box of candies and illuminated by eleven rock-crystal lamps among the most beautiful in the world, seemingly doubled in size by the large mirrors hanging on the side walls and at the back. Through two small doors, as in the stage set of a sitting room, models would enter, walking quickly and carefully, one after the other (one of them stumbled and let out a childish cry), performing their ritual presentation: a harmonized and by now classic composition of gestures, steps, pirouettes, curtseys, and swaying, halfway between mime and dance.”