Photo 1: Some “Friends of the joyful Youth”, Neri Pozza, Dino Lanaro, Maurizio Girotto, Italo Valenti, Nerina Noro, Gastone Panciera, Otello De Maria, Bruno Canfori
First, I realize that I asked myself a very risky subject during the translation. The original title of the exhibition is “Friends of joyful youth”, and in fact at the beginning the Google translator and his algorithms understood everything as a gay subject, but none of this. We have to think about the way of expressing oneself about 100 years ago where the term gay was used to define light-heartedness, cheerfulness, joy. (apologies to non-Italian friends if the translation is ridiculous and inadequate, I will double check why this does not happen).
This article wants to be a recovery of the effective task of a Local Guide, that is to say about one’s place, one’s city, to offer a service to those who intend to visit it. The exhibition was recently inaugurated in the basement of Palazzo Chiericati, which is also part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Vicenza as it is the work of Andrea Palladio. The exhibition is dedicated to a company of young people born in the early 1900s who lived in Vicenza and its surroundings and who made the art of painting, sculpture and poetry into the form to raise a song to the most beautiful gift they had: youth.
The first thing that catches the eye is that in Vicenza almost all names are known as many main roads, schools or other public buildings are named after them. But apart from Neri Pozza, a sculptor, but above all a famous publisher, the others are famous only for the names used to identify an address or the school they belong to. But who were they? They were young people who understood that they were living in a splendid city which they could enjoy in the best moment of their lives: youth. That’s why they were called “The Friends of Joyful Youth”. They composed poems, painted, sculpted, with joy, with goliardia. They met every day and spent their free time together in that historical period which was in many ways extremely difficult. There was no freedom of expression, because it was the time of fascism and then of the war, and every word had to be measured, because one could be censored, or even end up in jail, even just for a joke that could not be tolerated by the central government . And indeed, even without making their political beliefs explicit, they began to come under scrutiny. Some had to leave the country, others simply moved to Milan, the big city where they would blend in with the crowd. Then the Second World War broke out, and the tragedy occurred in 1943 when there was an armistice with the allies. Northern Italy became a country occupied by Nazi forces. Many of the friends started their resistance, some with weapons. There were those who died fighting in the mountains, those who died in the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the war, the survivors tried to continue the journey, but something was no longer the same, there were no longer two things: joy and youth! The joy had been taken away by the tragedy of the war events and the tragic loss of so many friends. Youth had gone out of their hearts making them heavy and perhaps no longer capable of thinking in community as the young people of the past knew how to do, perhaps they too were beginning to be individualists like adults. I would like to invite, especially my fellow citizens and non-citizens, to visit this exhibition, even if it is not entirely correct to call it that, it is the story of our city in the twentieth century, it is life, mine too, because I met some of these characters in the my adolescence. I knew who they were, I met them on the street, even if I can’t say I met them. While enjoying this exhibition, a consideration came to me, that these guys lived their youth, realizing the beauty of the age they were living and they wanted to shout it to the whole world. Perhaps in their day youth was still a value, which seems to me to have diminished in this society in which one never becomes an adult, one always remains a child, one does not pass through the joy of youth which leads one to become an adult, but rather one wakes up sad children with wrinkles on their faces.
Photo 2: Nerina Nora: Portrait
Photo 3: Neri Pozza, the Cleric
Photo 4: Italo Valenti, The wedding in Piazza dei Signori. Painting a picture like this could go to prison, could be interpreted as a slap on authority
Photo 5: Italo Valenti, self portrait Photo 6: The joyful youth di Antonio Barolini (
La gaia gioventù
Antonio Barolini
Youth is joyful, it has smiled at us for a season,
nor is there any need to look for ways to lengthen the days.
I brought my boss a crown of memories,
clear companions, girls with happy faces.
We weaved a dance around the linden trees by the river;
they will say we were heroes like Homer’s sons.
The soldiers wore bunches of violets on their chests,
as one wears the sign of honor and battle.
Birds sang in the serenity of the rain;
their feathers are wet, the leaves are dripping on the grass.
I had a friend once, in my young age;
perhaps even a woman who thought of me in her secret.
I think of the pale pink-white skirt on the green,
and of the poppies, light as butterflies, on the veins.
The fresh birds gather their heads under their wings,
who can know these joys that sleep on the heart?
Or if you ever come, you white-haired age,
may I see you as a reward for the years that have passed.
A train must have passed behind the white houses;
children will still play in the streets.
Tell whoever passes by that I was a voice without pain
and that I believed in the dream of cheerful youth.
Photo 7: Maurizio Girotto, worksite Photo 8: Dino Lanaro, Crucifixion
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