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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Lacerba, Monica Trapasso thought when she saw the sign above the pizzeria she had just bought, was a peculiar name for a restaurant. It is not even a word in Italian, although acerbo is an adjective, meaning unripe or sour, applied to fruit. But the space was suitable for the neighborhood trattoria that she wanted to open with her brother Angelo and her boyfriend, Marco Pagano: a few low-ceilinged rooms in a former stable on a short, narrow street in Milan, near a bakery and a glassblower's shop. Trapasso, who is in her mid-thirties, with brown eyes and dark glossy hair that falls in waves to her shoulders, is an architect, but she comes from a restaurant-owning family in Calabria; Pagano, a tall, earnest man in his thirties who wears wire-rimmed glasses, is the managing director of an employment agency. One day in the early summer of 2000, soon after the sale closed, Trapasso went with some friends to Venice to visit the white palazzo on the Grand Canal that houses the American philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim's collection of modern art. In the museum she saw a Picasso collage from 1914 titled "Pipe, Glass, Bottle of Vieux Marc," which included the large, blocky letters of a newspaper banner from that period. The newspaper's name was Lacerba. Maybe, she said to Pagano when she called him that evening, it's a better name than we thought.
The newspaper was a mainstay of one of the minor glories of Italian culture, the artistic movement known as Futurism. In painting, sculpture, and poetry, Futurism celebrated the early decades of the twentieth century in all its mechanical clangor and soul-stirring violence. Its guiding spirit for more than thirty years, the poet Filippo Marinetti, wrote, in his Futurist manifesto of 1909, that "we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke." By the time of his death, in 1944, when the real shape of the future being forged in those arsenals had become horrifyingly evident, he and his colleagues had produced dozens of manifestos on a wide range of topics, some experimental writing, and a considerable body of abstract painting and sculpture. As Trapasso began researching Futurism, she discovered that Marinetti had also written a cookbook, "La Cucina Futurista," published in 1932. The food of the future, as Marinetti envisaged it, would ban spaghetti but include smoked camel meat, raw-onion ice cream, and fried trout stuffed with nuts and wrapped in liver. It marked a whole new way of thinking about food: the cuisine of the absurd.
That premise, on the face of it, might not seem promising for a restaurant. At first, Trapasso thought she'd just add some Futurist touches to the decor. It was her Milanese chef, Pino Carvelli, who came up with the idea of trying to make something palatable from Marinetti's recipes. It took months...
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