LA GRANDE PARIGI

An emotional and cultural biography of Paris. The story of the art of the Golden Age of the Great Capital told with a confidential tone and fictional flair.

October 1900. After a gruelling thirty-hour journey, two young artists arrive at the Gare d'Orléans, laden with luggage, but above all with dreams. Their names are Pablo Picasso and Carlos Casagemas. Awaiting them is an immense and electrifying Paris, the place where - after the revolution of the Impressionists - every artist wants to be. It is the city of endless construction sites and the Exposition Universelle, of astonishing inventions and feverish crowds. The ominous and exciting swarming of the great metropolis resounds everywhere. Jacopo Veneziani takes the reader on a journey from 1900 to 1920, through a Paris turned into the art capital of the world, inhabited by penniless painters and poets who gather in the ramshackle Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, where the Fauves spend whole days painting on the banks of the Seine, eccentric futurists dream of undermining Cubism, and evenings go by discussing African art or declaiming verses while sitting en terrasse in a café in Montparnasse. An astonishing choral tale about unrivalled artists like Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall and Brâncusi, about remarkable poets like Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau, and silent heroines like Berthe Weill, Fernande Olivier and Jeanne Hébuterne. Through a series of seminal addresses, Jacopo Veneziani recounts the twenty years that made Paris the epicentre of world art, in a dense web of encounters and passages, deep rivalries and fortuitous collaborations. Jacopo Veneziani has lived in Rome and Paris and studied History of Art at the Sorbonne. With a number of social profiles - Twitter, Youtube, Instagram - he talks "about art, its history and a bit more". With Mondadori Electa he published in 2020 the volume #Divulgo, which collects some content and thoughts on art, and Simmetrie in 2021.