“With Mum I met personalities such as Gae Aulenti, Vittorio Gregotti, Pierluigi Cerri, Eugenio Scalfari, Guido Rossi, Alberto Lattuada, Ettore Sottsass.
You can imagine my ecstasy as a 14-year-old when, during a holiday in Lindos, on the island of Rhodes, I was introduced to David Gilmour, guitarist and singer of Pink Floyd. (…). (p. 90).
“(p. 90) ‘I went to San Siro to watch the Milan matches not with Dad but with my mother’s then partner, the painter Guido Somarè, who adored me, so much so that he named Giuseppe after a son he would have years later. I also reciprocate his great affection. (…)” (p. 95).
Guido Somarè (1923 – 2003), a talented painter like his brother Sandro, descendants of a dynasty of painters and artists (on their mother’s side, they were nephews of Cesare and Guido Tallone, protagonists of the Scapigliatura and Lombard portraiture between the 19th and 20th centuries), was my mother Giorgina’s companion for a long time after they separated from my father. We spent wonderful summers with him in Lindos, a town on the island of Rhodes, where his brother[Sandro Somarè, with Patrizia Ascari] had a house, and he was like a father to me.
Besides taking me to the stadium, he taught me fishing, water-skiing and how to drive the small boats that we rented locally. Or to drive the dinghy that we bring by boat from Italy, passing, the first few times, through the Isthmus of Corinth.
There is one photograph that I particularly love, because I took it in Lindos: my mother Giorgina and my sister Violetta clutching their cat Amanda against the backdrop of a white balcony. It reminds of really peaceful times.
The photo on the cover, however, was not taken in Greece but most probably in Guido’s studio in Milan. It is unpublished, you will not find it in my book.
The director Alberto Lattuada and the beautiful actress Carlo Del Poggio had a house in Lindos and I was very friendly with one of their two sons, Francesco. I used to spend evenings with him in Lindos, before the curfew imposed by the regime of the colonels, led by Georgios Papadopulos.
In addition to David Gilmour, in Lindos I used to meet the keyboard player and co-founder of Pink Floyd, Rick Wright.
There, at the age of ten, a friendship was also born with Lorenzo and Stefano Mauri. Then there are the Pellegrini, Lepetit, Monti and Corvo families. Mario Biondi and Guido Monzino.
Life in Lindos resembled, in some ways, Giuseppe Tornatore’s film Mediterraneo: Greece-Italy matches, with Greek friends, big dances at mid-August, during the village festival, the defence of Lindos during the Greek-Turkish war of 1974, with civilians enlisted at need who went to the acropolis with a rifle and a mattress ‘to rest’… .
After separating from Giorgina, Guido Somarè married Marilea, the sister of Andrea Solbiati, a family friend who tried, in vain, to convince my father to buy Milan.
Ironically, the Milan headquarters was located from 1940 to 1949 in Via del Lauro 4, where we lived from the 1960s onwards, thanks to the efforts of grandfather Peppino and his friend Nando Angeloni.
When Gianni Rivera comes to dinner, unfortunately, no one will tell him. I’m too young and Dad doesn’t like football (p. 90).
I still keep Marco Polo’s ‘Il Milione’ given to me by Alberto Lattuada and some books on football that Andrea Solbiati gave me. They were two dear people.
Thanks to Eleonora Sàita
