What a relief to turn from Senator Feinstein to Benedetta Barzini.
The opening paragraphs of my chapter on Barzini:
“Benedetta Barzini walked through the front door of her Milan apartment. ‘I feel like I know you!’ I said, and hugged and kissed her. But in fact we’d never met. Yet for the past decade I had been an intimate acquaintance with the image she’d presented in fashion magazines of the 1960s. When I began collecting them in the late-1970s, they already seemed like a dispatch from a lost culture. Against a blank-slate of seamless paper backdrops, the models leapt across the pages, often seeming impervious to the camera. Or they might just as easily be standing stock still in improbable poses, their hair and make-up elaborated to the extremes of Arabian Nights. They inhabited a world of fantasy that was radically removed from the doggedy accessible ambiance that was being cultivated—perhaps ‘imposed’ would be a better word—in the ‘70s by these same publications. The entirely different aesthetic approach Barzini represented to me as a teenager was on a continuum with my interest in ballet, in theater, another microcosm of enticing illusion.
Standing next to her in November 1988, I saw that she was even taller than she’d seemed in Vogue and, at age forty-five, just as thin. She wore little if any makeup and her skin was now sun-weathered. Certainly the body and face were still there, but the modeling façade had been supplanted. And this was certainly to be expected: her life since then had taken a number of quite different turns. In the 1970s she had become a left-wing activist, member of the Italian Communist Party. She now worked as a journalist and was a single mother of four.”