The historic “Giubbe Rosse” reopens in Florence, a meeting place for artists from Montale to Gadda

The Caffè delle Giubbe Rosse in Florence, a place famous as a center of culture in the early decades of the twentieth century, where important magazines and publishing houses were born, frequented by an infinite number of people, from the oldest, Soffici, Prezzolini, Papini to the youngest, from Vittorini to Pratolini, reopened a few days ago after years of closure and thanks to the constraint of historic premises imposed in 2019 by the Superintendence. Restored according to a project by the architect Domenico Gallucci without distorting it and giving new life to the frescoes on the walls, the place, born in 1897 in what is now Piazza della Repubblica, was actually a Brewery, as the sign of the Reininghaus Brothers, two German brewers, said.
Nicknamed Giubbe rosse for the color of the waiters’ jackets, daily newspapers and magazines were always on the tables and they also attracted intellectuals and artists. Among the first to meet in the so-called third room, those linked to the avant-garde and naturally a significant date remains the publication of Marinetti’s futurist manifesto on February 20, 1909 in Le Figaro, after which the futurist fever exploded with Soffici, Boccioni, Palazzeschi, Papini, Marinetti arrived from London, and others, including those who gave life in 1913 to the magazine Lacerba, a group that came from the collaborators of La voce frequenting the café.
In 1926 it was then the time of the creation by Alberto Carocci of Solaria, which had among the various founders Eugenio Montale, Leone Ginzburg, Giacomo Debenedetti, Sergio Solmi joined by others from La Ronda (which had closed three years earlier) such as Riccardo Bacchelli and Antonio Baldini, in the circle also Carlo Emilio Gadda with the younger Arturo Loria and Alessandro Bonsanti who introduced his friend Silvio Guarnieri. Solaria was followed in 1937 by Letteratura, open to the debates of the new generations of literati. The Futurist exaltation had been dying out and fascism, with its rhetoric and cultural closure was looming and soon almost all of them would have to deal with it. In 1938, thanks to the work of Alfonso Gatto and Vasco Pratolini, still there, Campo di Marte saw the light, with the intent of creating a relationship between art and political-social reality, and with them were many other contemporaries, from Mario Luzi, to Oreste Macrì, from Elio Vittorini to Guglielmo Petroni.
A beautiful testimony of what the Red Jackets represented was written by Petroni himself in 1984 in some pages of
the autobiography ‘Il nome delle parolè (Sellerio – Premio Selezione campiello). He arrived at the Giubbe Rosse at the age of twenty from his native Lucca in the early 1930s, after the publication of his first poems: — ‘Come and make yourself known’ Silvio Guarnieri wrote to me. ‘I can’t yet, but as soon as I have the money for the train. The train from Lucca cost almost 4 lire. 2 weeks passed and I received 100 lire: ‘Now come and stay here for a while. I left for Florence, or rather for the Giubbe Rosse. It was in that place, in that café that I had never seen, that I thought my hopes and ambitions would be calmed… «Oh Petroni» was the weak greeting of the new friends who, after a handshake, returned motionless and silent. I remained there with them and the silences were long, inevitably softened by Montale’s baritone warblings. Bonsanti gave me a few kind smiles. Vittorini asked me if I had already looked for the hotel.
I wasn’t disconcerted even at the first meeting; it was as if I already knew that behavior, those silences; but when it was time to say goodbye, Montale and some others were worried about whether I knew where I could have dinner. ‘At my house’, Vittorini answered for me. After dinner, the children in bed and Delfina in the kitchen, the two of us remained alone to whisper; more than literature, we had known each other’s work for a long time, we talked about our daily miseries; Elio had a difficult life, even if Delfina, who was Quasimodo’s sister, helped on the boat by working in a tobacconist’s. Although his difficulties were perhaps greater than mine, he was interested only in his literary work.
I also got used to long silences… The first approach with Gadda did not take long; he stood next to me: ‘Beautiful Luccà. He was immediately attentive to my words, he began to jot some down in a notebook; he made me repeat them and they were those Lucchese words that I did not spare at the time. Everyone, however, soon conversed willingly with me; Montale, in our first approaches, spoke to me at length about psychoanalysis, about Zeno’s last cigarette, and he seemed almost surprised when I was able to show him that those subjects were not entirely foreign to me. Loria was a bit of an entertainer, he knew how to concentrate the interest of others on himself, with his composed speech in a particular Florentine… Before I said goodbye at the end of my first visit to the Florentines, Montale and Gadda invited me to dinner at the Antico Fattore; they made me talk a lot, they wanted to know everything about my days in Lucca, about my painting, about the shoe shop where I worked. They did not know that by speaking to me naturally about what had long been a situation of great discomfort for me, they were happily destroying the last vestiges of my prejudices. Before we parted, in that first long conversation, Gadda asked me a question: ‘How did you come up with the idea of ​​writing?’… Florence had finally brought me into the thick of things, into the reality of a contemporary world that until then I had only frequented in my imagination, through texts and news, binding me by affection and interest to the people who were now friends».