An overwhelming crowd gathered in the Abbey Church of Santa Maria Assunta gave their final farewell to Francesco Vaccarone. This morning relatives, friends, acquaintances, from today and yesterday, gathered in Piazza Beverini for a collective ritual which, in truth, had already begun yesterday in the funeral home set up at Camec. Precisely that museum that Vaccarone had seen born on the ashes of the former Court and where in 2012 he had held the anthological exhibition of which he was proud as well as countless workshops for children and teenagers who involved him with his proverbial availability and that desire for generational exchange which accompanied him throughout his life, first as a young painter in the footsteps of his masters then as a mother hen and cultural memory of the territory, an intellectual habit that led him to generously open his studio to all those who wanted to understand and understand. A man, not a figure or a character, known by everyone and who knew everyone, also thanks to that exploratory and curious spirit that is typical of the great, those capable of leaving the comfortable confines of their own position and giving themselves to the world with a feeling always new. Few in this city have been able to do it the way he did it and not at home many, many, didn’t want to miss their final farewell.
A crowd like on few other occasions. It was a very well-attended function, celebrated by Don Ivo Corniglia, assisted by Mosignor Piercarlo Mendinelli and Don Luca Palei, enhanced by the various interventions that followed one after the other, in front of a moved and participatory audience. In the front row his wife Gabriella with their children Alessandra and Leonardo, surrounded by hundreds of friends and naturally the highest city officials and many people from outside the province. Everyone, of any social and political background, held in one big embrace: this too, knowing how to be above parties without ever abdicating critical and clear but never dogmatic thinking, was Francesco Vaccarone. That frankness that breaks down walls and creates bridges of inclusion, of words, of feelings, which fills a church despite the atheism that accompanied him throughout his life. “Francesco Vaccarone has finished his earthly journey, but he is an artist: his works, which have traveled the world, also stopping in prestigious public and private spaces, will continue to give us beauty, harmony, reasons for reflection – the message of the Aidea association of which Gabriella Peroni, Vaccarone’s wife, is the tireless president -. He celebrated the last – think of the cycle dedicated to homeless people – he “shared”, through his paintings, solidarity towards those who had been affected by the misfortune of environmental disasters. He allowed us to live in his Eastern Liguria and in beautiful Sicily, the land of his origins. He “paced”, through his instruments, with poetry, music, literature, with every aspect of that culture of which he himself was the bearer. All his art will always make him present among us. We will, however, miss his generosity as a man and an artist, his availability, we will miss his irony, we will miss his provocations which made the political, social and cultural fabric of our city more alive and active and far beyond. We will miss his spirit as a free man, without prejudice, like the regal seagulls depicted in his paintings. All of us, volunteers, collaborators and teachers of the AIDEA Association, greet you and thank you”.
Also at the pulpit was an emotional Valerio Paolo Cremolini, intellectual and art critic, but above all a great friend of Vaccarone: “How exciting, dear brother… you called me that. The city you love is united in pain, with Gabriella in mind who celebrated 60 years of marriage with you. I express gratitude for sharing the beauty of your painting, for making me dream, approaching the warmth and also the harsh realism of many of your works”. Inevitably Cremolini returns to the last painful period in which the disease took its course: “You never conveyed desperation, you told me that you enjoyed the protection of your family, nurses, doctors, numerous friends. I believe that the silence that gripped you in the final days of your life flooded each of us with affection. You loved life, every earthly existence and in God’s plan, death is proposed as a passage with which we all would not like to measure ourselves. Vaccarone demonstrated his intelligence and his inclusive culture.” A final respectful anecdote with which Cremolini, before quoting Borges, takes his leave, amidst the applause of the whole church: “Speaking of faith and reason, one Sunday in Lent I was in the church of Sant’Agostino and I received a phone call from him . I couldn’t answer and when I went out I called him telling him that I had felt him at my side during mass. He asked me on that occasion which Gospel it was. It was the Gospel of John, he spoke of love. Francesco spoke again and gave me an aphorism from Schopenhauer: he loves your neighbor who is yourself. An unforgettable conversation.”
Diana Brusacà, magistrate and president of the Court of La Spezia, was a great friend of Francesco: “We are not ready yet, which is why I will talk about it in the present tense – he begins -. We have been preparing in recent months but nothing and no one has managed to make us ready to say goodbye. On December 28th we received that phone call that changed our lives: Francesco, with his proverbial imprudence, had accustomed us to his immortality. It was hope that gave us a glimpse of a future because Francis has always been and is a man of the future. Never withdrawn into himself, he instead was and is a man with a brilliant gaze who looks towards others and tomorrow, immersed in an imaginative continent free from his sorrows and regrets. Benevolence and compassion are imbued in him… always on the side of the interlocutor, never judged but gently caressed. In his wife, in his children, in his grandchildren, he had the points of reference of him, the true nucleus of him, which he speaks to us frequently and which today we also feel a bit like our family. You were imprudent to leave us so disappointed and astonished.” Then he mentions Vecchioni. “But don’t come and tell me to leave it alone now or that the fight must continue, because if this story were a song with an ending for me, you wouldn’t go away”. For your Spezia, beloved city of which you were a benefactor. Like an invisible bridge to take us to safety.” Finally, a quote that everyone who knew him understands without the need for explanation: “Because your days will be one good and the other better. You continue to love us.”
And if Egidio Di Spigna wisely remembered the symbols dear to the Maestro (“This morning I didn’t see seagulls in the sky”, thus begins his memory), Silvia Arfaioli wanted to read one of his poems while Paolo Asti, who with Francesco Vaccarone shared work and friendship, passion for art, reasoning about the city of the past and today, Vaccarone the artist spoke through everyday man: “We often tend to identify the work in the result of the artist, I mean in his paintings, in his music, in his lyrics, but the true work of an artist is a way of being in the world. This is what makes an artist become a master. Dear Francesco, you were able to show us all this by winning us over and allowing us to be your friends. We were lucky, I was lucky, to know the river that flowed in your soul, to know its impetus and grace, the wisdom and irony, with which you were able to tell us, through your pictorial cycles, what was happening around you. to us. Not far from here, in Noceto, there is a large marble bas-relief, a work that expresses the true meaning of public art, dedicated to Giovanni Paolo Secondo entitled “The human in the divine, the divine in the human” which, in the transfiguration of the figure of the Holy Father until it becomes forms, expresses the concept of what is eternal thanks to its becoming…”.
And again: “Dear Francesco, there is no doubt that you achieved all this thanks to your talents, but it wasn’t enough for you. Thanks to your way of being an artist you have brought contemporary art to a large number of people who, thanks to you, have begun to love it and want to know it better in order to appreciate it. Your works, in our homes, constitute an intense art gallery. Each of your paintings is like a frame which, combined with the others, tells the film of your life and ours. With the workshops in which hundreds of children, perhaps thousands, have participated over the years, you have sown in the new generations the sense of harmony of shapes and colors resulting from their creativity, so that they have become their heritage as adults. Today here you remind us that everything happens at random and that nothing lasts without transforming but, as Rodolfo Wilcock wrote, this does not prevent us from making a drawing on a foggy glass, nor from singing a few simple notes when we are happy; it may be that the drawing is a beautiful drawing and that the song is also beautiful, but this certainly doesn’t matter, as long as we like them. One day, we will die, but it doesn’t matter because, as with you, those who loved us will realize it.”
