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01 June1939
Wedding in San Fruttuoso
Author
Famiglia Bacigalupo
Format
16mm
Credits
Music by Guglielmo Pagnozzi

At San Fruttuoso di Camogli, newlyweds and guests arrive by boat. Before them come others, for the preparations, including the filmmaker who films the splendid abbey and the picturesque bay from the sea. A beautiful place for a wedding. Rapallo's Giuseppe Bacigalupo, a former young tennis player and now a brilliant young doctor on the verge of a fine career, and Frieda Natali, an American national who also works as a doctor, got married. A proper wedding, in a 'world of yesterday', where gentlemen celebrate and toast on high, and where fishermen on the beach also drink from kindly offered flasks and salute. Witnessing the bride and groom is the blond Lorenzo Lanza, of noble and decadent lineage, author of the poem Sanctity of Wine, awarded a prize in a poetry competition by Marinetti: "Rough vine stump / naked knot of winter anguish / that autumn melts in the barrels". Today, however, is the first of June 1939, and only his friend Ezra Pound is missing, who is also in Rapallo, but just this year he has returned to the United States on a peace mission to convince the Americans of the goodness of Fascism. Shortly afterwards came the war and Giuseppe Bacigalupo's 'world of yesterday' soon dissolved ('Yesterday in Rapallo', recalling Stefan Zweig, was to be the title of his memoir). With much nostalgia for the cosmopolitanism experienced on the Riviera of which this marriage is also a sign. Giuseppe wrote of his love for Frieda, which remained the same until her death: "It was born as a love affair, and a love affair it always remained."

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