Viola

Sandro (1931). Italian journalist and major writer in the panorama of Italian publishing over the last half century. Born in Taranto, at an early age he was already reporting, in January 1958, on the fifteenth edition of Italian High Fashion, the runway presentations in the Sala Bianca, for L’Illustrazione Italiana. He was the first journalist to “focus” on an essential component of the “color” of the runway presentations: the fashion journalists. From then on, as a feature reporter, he was sent to cover the fashion events in Florence, as well as Paris, Milan, New York, and London, where he focused on the “specialists.” Viola noted: “Dressed in fatigues, assailed by haste, the fashion journalists present at the Sala Bianca suggested, with the sheer power of their disenchantment, their skepticism, and the depth of their boredom, the image of the veteran boxing reporter, an image that the American cinema created through the wonderful acting of Humphrey Bogart, who made that role the very emblem of disillusionment.” He worked at L’Espresso, he was a correspondent for La Stampa, and he was one of the founders of La Repubblica where he was an editorialist and for which paper he traveled as an international correspondent, as a political analyst, but with the love of things seen and tasted that is more typical of the literary correspondents of another era. In journalism, and not only in journalism, he is one of the last, elegant dandies.