Roberto D'Agostino Umberto Pizzi
UltraCAFONAL

THE REVIEW

"It is the supreme mockery, the metaphysics of exploded Italy, the portrait of the last two - crucial - years of a pleasure-seeking and eating power, a masterful kaleidoscope by anthropologist Dago and portraitist Pizzi" (L'Espresso).

No title was ever so fitting. An ultra-trash book that captures this Italy now lost between bunga bunga, palace intrigues, starlets, showgirls, and immoral obscenities of all sorts. A kind of "Divine Comedy" (may Dante forgive me) of various shameful and decadent humanity. But one asks: is Italy really so vulgar? Are we really so "worn out", so "rotten" inside and out? What has made us so dehumanized, distorted, bewildered, sold out, and made us so vulgar? Society? The desire to have our small part of visibility "anyway"? The prevailing berlusconism?

They tell us (the sarcastic comments of D'Agostino) and they show us (the images by Pizzi) obscene and otherworldly things: the President of the Lazio Region Polverini foaming at the mouth while yelling at a rally, Bossi with his middle finger up, Quentin Tarantino miming masturbation at the Golden Lions, whoredom, "hedge funds", ignorance, the ostentation of money, Minzolini, Masi as a playboy, the stiletto heels of little cubist girls, Berlusconi and his rosy alopecia, laughing undersecretaries, naked escorts, pleasure-seeking princes, bejeweled old ladies, party leaders, mafia bosses, striptease artists, excellent wives, journalists in obscene poses, cardinals, dogs, tailors, models! All together passionately, millionaires and desperately uninvited, famous and unknown who feel known, from the Right, the Left, the Center, everyone, all apolitical, all brothers... all captured in paradoxical and embarrassing situations by the cynical and ruthless eye of the duo D'Agostino/Pizzi that spares none.

It is difficult to reach the end without being seized by nausea & indignation. Rarely have I held such a annoying and "pornographic" book, in the most conceptual sense of the term. It is unclear the final objective of this "UltraCAFONAL" (published by Mondadori... eh eh) since everything, in one way or another, was already known, but it is a fact that NEVER, as after the "reading" of this book, have I felt so "disgusted" to feel Italian, even if... fortunately or unfortunately, I am (quote).