Note – This press release was published in full as an external contribution. This content is therefore not an article produced by the FirenzeToday editorial team
It is in the seventeenth-century Palazzo Roncalli, a historic building located in Piazzetta Mascheroni 3, in Bergamo Alta, the place where, during the Second World War, Maria Pezzi, the greatest fashion journalist of the 20th century, worked. In fact, starting from 1943, Domus Editrice had moved the editorial staff of Fili Moda there. Here Pezzi arrived from Milan, by bicycle. Marco Buscarino revealed it to us in his story “Memories of the Twentieth Century”, presented at the 2024 Turin Book Fair, which contains the discovery. The choice to move the Domus headquarters from Milan to Bergamo was due to the devastating bombings that raged on the Milanese capital, forcing the inhabitants to evacuate and with them the nerve centers of numerous activities. It was known that Maria Pezzi moved from the Lombardy capital with great risks and sacrifices to work in the Orobic city, but until today the location of the editorial office in Bergamo Alta where she worked was not known. From the inventory of the Municipal Cultural, Environmental and Archaeological Heritage, we also learn that Pope John XXIII descended from a branch of the large Roncalli family, owners of the palace of the same name. The merit of Buscarino is to have identified and returned to the city of Bergamo an important place of Italian fashion as well as to have narrated, in his short story, among others, Maria Pezzi, an important figure of the Italian twentieth century who together with Beppe Modenese was among the major protagonists of Italian fashion and the birth of Made in Italy. In fact, it was Modenese himself who in 1951 organized in Florence together with the Marquis Giovanni Battista Giorgini, already responsible for purchases in Italy on behalf of American department stores, the first fashion show which was held in the Villa Torrigiani owned by Giorgini. The most important fashion houses of the period participated in the fashion show: Simonetta, Fabiani, the Fontana sisters, Schubert, Carosa, Marucelli, Veneziani, Noberasco, Vanna, Pucci, Avorio, Bertoli and the Island Weaver Clarette Galloni. Witness to the event was Maria Pezzi, who wrote. “There was no catwalk in the living room of the Giorgini house. Italian fashion was born on parquet flooring (it was the same in the Paris ateliers) in a short path between chairs and armchairs. (And Pezzi knew this because for years she was the only one accredited at the Parisian fashion shows.) There was a piano, there was a tapeur. The library served as a changing room for the models.”
