✍️ Rome, from the Right Angle

A year of looking at my adopted home city through new eyes

Anna Magnani at home (Wikimedia image)

There’s a photo of Anna Magnani that fascinated me from the first time I saw it.

Taken in 1961 by Swiss photographer Hans Krebs, Magnani leans against a grand piano in her apartment just off Piazza Venezia. The photograph is intimate; it makes me feel like I’ve walked in on something. The living room is wonderfully cluttered: heavy drapery, candelabras, a portrait, a still life, and -- jarringly -- what looks like a painting of a brutalist tower block. Krebs himself is visible in a gilded mirror, but every time I notice him there, I think for a moment it’s my reflection.

Magnani was Rome before Rome became a tourist backdrop. She was dark-eyed, unpolished, furious, tender. She worked with Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica, and Fellini and won an Oscar. But to me, she seemed to belong to Rome more than to her films.

The image, the one that made me feel like an intruder, was the way I pictured her in my mind -- until about a year ago. That’s when Magnani stepped out of the Krebs photo and started appearing on the walls of Rome.

Magnani as Superwoman by street artist Lediesis (EJL photo)

More likely: that’s when I started noticing her appearing on the walls of Rome. Before then, I hadn’t been paying close enough attention.

That changed with The Italian Dispatch, which made me see the city I’d lived in for more than two decades differently, including my regular encounters with Magnani. I first saw her posing as Superwoman in an alleyway; then in a diver’s mask; soon after, she was peering from behind graffiti on a doorway; and then stretched across an outdoor staircase. She even sneaked into the newsletter’s Notes feed now and then.

But Magnani was just the start.