ORLANDO - GIOVANNI DE SIMONE

A month ago I was off to see my mother in hospital and on the way home hopped off a bus to visit a Vinnies here in Sydney. On this occasion I saw an Italian friend who has a stall at the Rozelle markets and thought I would leave empty handed. But ……. behind a couple of vases on a high shelf I saw the colours of Palermo: a De Simone figure!

Well that’s what I thought at that stage!

I bought two things that day. A little Harrach cherry vase I have already posted on CW and this piece both cost less than $20.

The De Simone piece was intact. Not even a flea bite! Unusual for faience. I got it home and then began the research. It lead me astray for quite some time. It took me back to my days at University studying the poetry of Ariosto and Boiardo.

At first I began going over my notes on De Simone and his life in Palermo. Giovanni Simone was born there in 1930. At the age of 8 he left Sicily with his family for North Africa as part of the Italian movement into Abissinia. It was a period where he fell in love with Africa and its magic. But it was also a time when his parents were captured by the English and put in POW camps. At the end of the war he returned to Italy and studied in Rome at the Liceo Tasso. Later he went to the area near Faenza and attended a ceramics school.

It was there that Giovanni won an award: he had discovered the recipe for a red colour that would withstand a temperature of 900 degrees like other oxides. This made him famous. He studied there under Anselmo Bucci and Angelo Biancini.

It’s that red which I like to see on a piece of De Simone!

But one thing struck me about this piece. It was the eyes!
He was cross-eyed.
This must have been deliberate.
The other pieces I had all had figures with joyful eyes.
De Simone knew how to do eyes.
Why?

The answer came after a good night’s sleep.

I found reference to a series of figures that De Simone did based on the stories of Charlemagne or Carlo Magno that we know as the Chanson de Roland. He did a King and Queen and 12 figures called the Paladini. They are still done by Susanna De Simone.

In fact they are candlesticks.
So which one of the characters was my figure?
Which of the 14?

The answer came with the eyes.
One of the Paladini was cross-eyed. In Sicilian dialect this is ‘verciu’ or ‘guerciu’. In Latin it was ‘guelcus’. In Italian it is ‘strabico’ or ‘loco’.

In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso one character is ‘losco’: Orlando.

I had found a figure that took me back forty years: back to the poetry that Frederick May had taught me to love.