GRAZIA NIDASIO
THESE GREAT LOVES
4 • 31 MARCH
AT FESTIVAL
Any Italian comics-reader links Grazia Nidasio’s name to the unforgivable characters of weekly magazine “Corriere dei Piccoli”, such as Morandini sisters,Valentina Melaverde and la Stefi. But Grazia Nidasio’s fluid and lively sign goes through sixty years of Italian comic and illustration history, always fresh, dynamic and ironic.
Her exhibition These great loves presents the author’s drawings from her homonymous book, retracing some of the most exciting and curious love stories that marked last two centuries’ gossip columns. Published in instalments for the first time in the 80s by “Amica” magazine, these reports use love as an excuse to talk about pieces of history, extravagant characters and impossible passions: Jaqueline Kennedy’s burning love for money, Cristina Belgioioso’s patriotic passion for Italy, Gabriele D’Annunzio egocentric adventures.
In the middle between a realistic documentary and a gossip column, Nidasio turns her smooth and elegant sign in a sharp scalpel. By gathering details, underlining tics, paranoids and fixations, and using humour and deformation as the tools of an historian, the author creates fascinating portraits able to reread and examine minutely the personalities taken into consideration with acute irony, but keeping at the same time an indulgent eye on human beings’ capacity to do always the wrong thing. Grazia Nidasio’s corpus of work, absent from many years from Italian libraries, is enriched with unseen drawings, presented for the first time on the occasion of BilBOlbul 2011.
Her exhibition These great loves presents the author’s drawings from her homonymous book, retracing some of the most exciting and curious love stories that marked last two centuries’ gossip columns. Published in instalments for the first time in the 80s by “Amica” magazine, these reports use love as an excuse to talk about pieces of history, extravagant characters and impossible passions: Jaqueline Kennedy’s burning love for money, Cristina Belgioioso’s patriotic passion for Italy, Gabriele D’Annunzio egocentric adventures.
In the middle between a realistic documentary and a gossip column, Nidasio turns her smooth and elegant sign in a sharp scalpel. By gathering details, underlining tics, paranoids and fixations, and using humour and deformation as the tools of an historian, the author creates fascinating portraits able to reread and examine minutely the personalities taken into consideration with acute irony, but keeping at the same time an indulgent eye on human beings’ capacity to do always the wrong thing. Grazia Nidasio’s corpus of work, absent from many years from Italian libraries, is enriched with unseen drawings, presented for the first time on the occasion of BilBOlbul 2011.
BIOGRAPHY
Grazia Nidasio is one of the central authors in the Italian comic and illustration scene. Her stories and thousands of drawings published by “Corriere dei Piccoli” have accompanied Italian children’s imaginative world since the 50s, with characters like Gelsomino and Alibella, but most of all with Dottor Oss, Valentina Melaverde and la Stefi, who to this day still entertains “Corriere della Sera”’s readers. Beside collaborating with Il Corriere, Nidasio works as illustrator for Salani, EL, Mondadori. Among her recent illustrations, we would like to recall Rossini a Bologna, Bononia University Press 2008, and Orlando Furioso, Mondadori 2010.