As told by Michelangelo Pistoletto.
I had a fever. First, they thought it was a trivial flu, then I was hospitalized on March 21 with Covid-19 pneumonia. My stay at the hospital in Biella, my city, lasted a month. At the beginning, I was on oxygen and wore a mask — reflection was my only option for passing the very long days, and I came to understand that this personal and world experience coincides with the prophetic vision of my Third Paradise work. The theme of this work contrasts between the “first paradise,” the world in which human beings were totally integrated with nature, and the “second paradise,” the artificial world developed by human intelligence that wreaks havoc on science and nature. The Third Paradise is the new harmonious relationship between the two. It’s a world that’s still empty, and today we’re called to fill it.
I felt strong emotions when I left the walls in which I was locked up and entered those of my home. My stay in the hospital had also become a sort of gastric quarantine. I didn’t eat any food for five days, then I started with a cup of tea in the morning, and a cup of tea with a biscuit the day after, increasing slowly until I regained my strength. When I finally got home, I sat down at the table to eat the food my wife Maria cooked for me, and I felt another extraordinary emotion. Not in an absolute sense but in a relative sense of the burdensome situation from which I had emerged.
A radicchietti salad, a vegetable purée, a slice of raw meat, an apple and banana smoothie. Each memorable because I perceived again the magic of flavors and smells that I had lost when I had Covid-19, I had lost my sense of taste and smell. And it would have been a huge loss because the art of cooking corresponds to the visual art and the art of music and its taste is equally important. Now my palate has acquired a new sensitivity and wants simple, essential, healthy foods. Functional to healthy lifestyle management.
Michelangelo Pistoletto (ph Pierluigi Di Pietro)
Like the products of the farms associated with Let Eat Bi, a project of the Cittadellarte, the foundation that I created in the abandoned Trombetta wood mill aimed at recovering abandoned land and creating jobs. Green beans, salads, and tomatoes in spring and summer; broccoli, onions, and radicchio in autumn and winter. These are sold in the market inside Cittadellarte, also equipped with a small restaurant, whose kitchen is entrusted to the Ramella family who manages the historic Croce Bianca in Oropa, next to the Sanctuary, where the dishes ignore the extravagant consumerist lure.
If I had been asked before this unexpected interval of my life what my memorable lunch was, I would have replied "I have two" — both different, one is private and the other is public. The first is the lunch of affections at Christmas carried out by an enthusiastic family team under the banner of "one for all, all for one." My task is the Russian salad made my way — that is, international rather than Russian because I put a little bit of everything into it. The agnolotti Piedmontese style, an iconic first course is always my mother's recipe - the pasta dough, filling, sealing, and cooking are a choral work.
The other occurred on October 16, 2013, in Tokyo, when I was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for painting. A memorable moment for at least three reasons. First, because my wife Maria and I were seated at the imperial table. Second, for the endless succession of courses according to the kaiseki formula, the great imperial cuisine of Kyoto. Finally, for the beauty of the presentation, where each container, bowl, and plate were designed to create a landscape of exquisite beauty that excited my aesthetic sense even before the gustatory one.