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spent long and happy hours designing and supervising frames with the two

elderly master carvers at Laboratorio Federici where we devised a baroque

tint nicknamed ‘Rosso Matthiesen’. I often lunched with a local restorer,

Signora Santunione, out of town in the hills. She was an artist and portraitist

in her own right who had executed an amusing portrait of Vittorio Sgarbi,

and was, in consequence, an expert at ‘in painting’ – sometimes too much

so. Mrs S. ran her household as if the Third World War were to break

out the next day. There were endless deep freezes stuffed with prosciutti,

Parmesans, joints of meat, fresh pasta and I know not what, so that every

visit to oversee a restoration ended in a blowout which took the rest of the

afternoon to recover from. There were also visits to Andrea Emiliani in

his flat at the Pinacoteca, visits to my old mentor, Prof. Carlo Volpe and a

gaggle of students who are now eminent in the world of art history. These

often devolved into heated debates over attribution and were invariably

followed by a visit to the Osteria del Nonno for the best agnolotti in brodo

in town. Food figures prominently in Emilia and so it ranked only second

Fig. 2. to art for me in those days. Not to be missed was the autumn insalata di

ovoli con scheggie di parmeggiano, pure ambrosia fit for the Gods, at Nello’s

trattoria in the centre of town, or dinner with grasù or cicciole followed by egg tagliatelle at the house of the brothers

Cera. And then there was the occasional lunch at the trattoria di Vizzano on the river Reno, reputed to serve the

best tagliatelle al sugo as well as crescentine, abundantly washed down with Albana frizzante or in the heat of summer

with Rosatello or Lambrusco, a pale fizzy rosé tasting of raspberries and a perfect marriage with salume. Last, but

not least, was a friendship with a persona who was larger than life as well as in stature: Minai Faldella. Minai was

a close friend of Prof. Federico Zeri. He had grown up destined to be a politician in the Demochristian Party

since he was considered an acute negotiator. Undoubtedly, one day he would have been in the front-line news

because he had a deep well of charm coupled with a natural ability to beguile. Sadly he took the rap for an Italian

political scandal involving Rumor, one of the many that plague Italian politics, and voluntarily took on the role

of fall guy to save his padrone from disgrace. In recognition, in the ensuing years his political peers offered him

support and access to any of the Italian banks linked to the Party. Thus for several decades Minai was able to fill

the collections of banks in central and northern Italy with art and have virtually unencumbered access. He was a

larger-than-life figure whose sense of humour was only exceeded by his appetite and his ability to ‘hoover’ food

down in the space of time it took me to eat three forkfuls. He adored my mother but, just like Federico Zeri, he

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