Photo Credit: Archivio Luce Cinecittà Luchino Visconti’s 1957 film, “White Nights” (“Le notti bianche”), offers a thoughtful and poignant exploration of themes such as loneliness, desire and emotional vulnerability. Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name, it transports the tale from 19th-century St. Petersburg to a dreamy mid-20th-century Italian setting. While Visconti remains largely faithful to Dostoevsky’s narrative, his characteristic style infuses the film with emotional depth, striking visuals, and a focus on class and societal constraints. The story follows a young man named Matteo, played by Marcello Mastroianni, who lives a solitary life in a small Italian town. One evening, he encounters a beautiful young woman named Natalia, portrayed by Austrian-Swiss actress Maria Schell, who is also feeling isolated. Although she is initially reluctant, Natalia eventually confides in Matteo about her love for a man who has promised to return and marry her, but he ha...
Known for contemporary landscapes that fuse art and technology, Eric LoPresti is a Brooklyn-based artist with a strong sense of Italian identity. “My father’s family emigrated from Sicily via Ellis Island in 1905, which might explain a deep connection I still feel with that incredible Italian landscape,” LoPresti explains. Before attending graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art, he studied sculpture at several schools in Europe, including one in Greppocorgno near Perugia in the region of Umbria, under the guidance of the Boston-based sculptor Vincent Ricci. “For me, this was a transcendent experience — my first time in Italy — and a chance to connect with the Italian modernist tradition,” he says. Since then, he has focused on painting landscapes and other natural subjects, many of them inspired by the vast deserts of the Columbia Plateau in Washington State. The COVID lockdown was a particular productive period for LoPre...