Vittorio Corsini

Between

2018

Ferruccio Parazzoli is one of the most significant contemporary writers; his novels are characterised
by a constant attention to ethical problems and by the overturning of the fantastic and the
metaphysical in humble everyday life. Corsini places two chairs and a statuary marble sculpture on
the back of the Oratory of Santissima Annunziata in Ghizzano in order to prepare people to listen to
Parazzoli's narration, Before the night. The chairs placed close together recreate the intimate and
private atmosphere that characterises the conversation between the two main characters of the story:
"(...) This one you see", the professor resumed, "is the Saint of Saints, my private oratory. Here,
peace reigns. Do you want to know what these walls were covered with before this colony of Saints
proliferated? Books, only books, now useless books. The metamorphosis originated many years ago
when ..." He took off his glasses, leaned his head on the back of the chair and began to tell, as if he
was telling a dream (...)".

Vittorio Corsini: the story by Parazzoli is intimate, which is why there are two chairs, one facing the
other, one telling the other its story. The story remains between the two and it has no other
destinations. The non-classical, irregular column, from which the sound comes and which
represents the story, is divided into two pieces, because the same story is never identical between
the sender and the recipient.

Tiziano Scarpa: "Vittorio Corsini decided to play this story of family mourning by installing two
chairs, facing one other: he proposes a conversation made up of listening and of silence. In the
middle, he also placed a kind of marble column, fluted, fractured like the remnant of an ancient
temple once refurbished; it narrows in order to highlight the surface of the top shelf: this is to
contain only what matters, and nothing else.There on top is a pile of very red glass drops; like
rosary beads, hemoglobular marbles. I listen to the story while staring at them, because receiving a
story is contemplating the freeze-dried experience of others, coagulated blood that is cared for,
polished, made to shine".

Pietro Gaglianò: "A series of dialogues between apparitions unfold in the Oratory of Santissima
Annunziata in Ghizzano. Behind the altar, in the center of the apse, a wooden Annunciation from
the late fourteenth century embodies the original model of this type of parliament. Two figures,
spiritually stretched towards the sky, are reflected onto the two chairs installed by Corsini, also
made of wood; the chairs face each other on the right side of a simple nave and it is easy to imagine
on them the conversation between the two characters in Ferruccio Parazzoli's story. All these
diptychs straddle the visible and invisible and invoke an act of faith for their existence. The same
exchange, poised between salvation and the inconceivable, is multiplied in the collection of exvoto
kept in the church; all this is renewed in the marble sculpture, consisting of two drums of noncongruent
columns with a handful of red beads on the top. Finally, in the dialogue between the
writer and the artist, Corsini responds to Parazzoli's spiritual perspective with an animism of
objects, almost a pagan suggestion of a life hidden in the still matter".

Bibliography

VOCI un coro a Peccioli per un progetto di Vittorio Corsini, con una narrazione di Tiziano Scarpa e un testo critico di Pietro Gaglianò, Gli Ori 2021, Pistoia.