Status: 17.03.2021 7:32 a.m.
The Hamburg journalist Marco Maurer has written a wonderful book about a trip to Italy and has opened a small Italy museum in Hamburg for two months.
With a Fiat 500 through Italy! The Hamburg journalist Marco Maurer has fulfilled a dream and climbed into a 50-year-old Cinquecento with a photographer friend in Sicily and just drove off. He brought a wonderful book with nice encounters and 25 recipes. In Lehmweg in Eppendorf he has now rented a shop for two months and set up a little Italy there, in which he sets up scenes from the book – like in a museum.
A mixture of gallery and Disneyland
There’s a Vespa in the window.
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Suddenly you are in the middle of Italy. The sea rushes out of a loudspeaker. There’s a Vespa in the window. Olives roll over the shelves. Marco Maurer brings the stories from his great journey to life again here in this small shop. “We even rebuilt a fairly original Italian Cinquecento workshop, so you can follow and empathize with the whole journey from Naples via Abruzzo to Turin,” explains Maurer. “It’s a mix of gallery, museum and Disneyland.” The shop space becomes a walk-in book – a wonderfully crazy idea!
Italy feeling including a small church
In a niche, Maurer has built a small chapel behind a velvet curtain with Mary, crucifix and organ music. Around the corner is a kitchen like Mama Miracoli’s. Maurer started his journey at the southernmost tip, chugged through Mafia regions with the ancient Cinquecento, asked about the best pizza recipes and heard the stories of the olive farmers. “I wanted simple Italy: easy travel, simple food, simple car and down-to-earth people – the mechanic, the pizza maker, the fisherwoman, the saffron farmer.”
Wonderful cooking recipes from Italy
Marco Maurer describes the journey through the place of longing in the south in a very sensual way. Nature, people and cuisine merge into one great, wonderful whole. He writes about a dessert: “The tiramisud – a moist, fresh dessert, dripping with rum and lemon – tastes like my day in Naples – wild but harmonious.” You learn a lot about the history of Italian food, but unfortunately also that the Italy on our supermarket shelves has more to do with laboratory than with “Dolce Vita”.
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With the godfather’s mother-in-law on you and you
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Shortly before the opening, the Italy Museum is still covered with the covers of old Italian sports newspapers.
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The film scene showing the later “godfather” getting married in Italy is shown on a television. Marco Maurer was in the village where this sequence was filmed and met a woman who was there. “She immediately showed me, without being asked, a photo from that time, in which she can be seen as Al Pacino’s mother-in-law.” Right next to it hangs a radio on a tree in Eppendorf’s mini-Italy, from which a Roxette pop song croaks – that’s how Maurer experienced it in the middle of a huge olive-growing area. “The olive farmer said his brother put it there to drive away the wild boars.”
Overall and rolling pin as exhibits
In addition to the road trip with atmospheric, lively photos of Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Etter, Marco Maurer also tells the story of his Bavarian grandmother and believes he will discover Italian roots in her. The people he met on his trip sent him exhibits for his special Italy museum: the car mechanic’s overalls, the baker’s rolling pin. Marco Maurer rented the pop-up store in Eppendorfer Lehmweg for two months and wants to use it in Italian.
“My Italian Journey” is the title of Marco Maurer’s book. It has 240 pages, lots of photos and 25 recipes. The “Little Italy” of Eppendorf is located in Lehmweg 42.
This topic in the program:
NDR 90.3 | Culture journal | 16.03.2021 | 19:30 o’clock
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