SPAIN IS DIFFERENT Painting

Half century has passed from my first trip to Spain. On 1969 I was twenty-three, attending the third course of Architecture and eager to see the magical sculpture of Antoni Gaudí. Barcelona was poor and dirty: a desolate town. Franco cruelly persecuted the Capital of the Reds, throughtout thirty years. Even so, it won me over, with its charm of an old actress in ruins. From Barcelona we drove to Valencia, Granada, Sevilla, Córdoba, then we remounted to Toledo, ending in Madrid. Back home in Milan, I painted a watercolour: there was a dark room, chocolate-colored, with a statue of a Black Madonna in a recess and, through a great rounded window, similar to those of the Pedrera, the Sagrada Familia spires appear. Below the drawing I wrote down: “Spaniards are very sad people”. I didn’t come back to Barcelona until 1987. A Spanish galerist enthusiast of my paintings was ready to make an exhibition. I was about to not recognise the town. There were the urban constructions for the Olympic Games of the next 1992, the new funny Catalan Design, the national festive “movida” and the young Pascual Maragall as the progressive Mayor: a beehive of creativity, happyness and optimism for the future. Since then, I started to travel frequently to Barcelona: a couple of weeks every winter. Compared to my cold, humid, grey and rainy Milan, Barcelona was an exotic dream. The sea, the sun, the blue sky, the palm trees, the Gothic alleys plentiful of old outlandish shops, the crowded terraces of the coffee shops, the fragrant markets in the squares, the lively people, stress-free and always ready to chat and waste the time. A paradise. So long as, on July 18th of 1998, in the house of a friend in Sitges, I fell in love hopelessly with Anna, a pretty girl from Barcelona. I came back to Milan in September, just to pack quickly a bag and turn me into a new inhabitant of Barcelona. But very soon they told me I must to register as a Spanish resident. They gave me a sad Foreigners Identity Number: “X2695911N”. They imposed me to change the license plate of my SAAB 900 Turbo. To present the individual income tax return, taxing the money I had in an Italian bank. To open a current account at Caixabank, that they seized when I forgot to pay a fine, and from whom the electric, water, gas and telephon companies collected the invoice even before posting. Nothing serious, but a kind of things that never happened in Italy. A later time I came to know that in Spain the government parties got the highest corruption level in Europe. That there was a lot of workers subsisting by the unemployment benefit. That the majority of the people used to buy a flat, a car or any other thing mortgaging their own life as well the one of their sons. That daily the newscast talk about a sexsist killing his partner by knife wound. Since then, more then twenty years has passed. Anna and I, we are quite happy, we still love each other, maybe more than before, but, in the meanwhile, I understood that Spaniards, although they don’t are so sad as they seemed to me on my summer trip of 1969, nevertheless they don’t have the same civil rights of everybody. As Manuel Fraga internationally declared, during his proxy in the Francoism Tourism Ministry: “Spain is different”.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:39.4 W x 53.1 H x 0.1 D in

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