Trafika Europe 14 - Italian Piazza

Edgardo Franzosini

October 7 the monstrous German howitzers took aim at the city. The Belgian cannons went si lent before the enemy ’s superiority. On October 10 the mayor signed the capitulation of the city to the Germans. Bugatti abandoned Antwerp. He traveled with a convoy that moved slowly over deeply-rutted dirt roads, coming across clusters of soldiers camped out by the sides of the ditches, crossing smal l towns that were almost unrecognizable in the darkness and the dust. After one day he arrived, in the morning, at the Ostend port, from where he embarked that same night for Dunkirk. And from Dunkirk he f inal ly reached Paris. There he spent a few weeks, just enough time to convince himsel f that even the elderly, women, chi ldren, and those exempt from the draft—the only ones, in other words, who had remained in the city—had the aura of people preparing to leave; enough time to real ize that the houses, streets, and parks of Paris seemed fami l iar but were al ien; enough time to notice that the Jardin des Plantes had been transformed into a desert. In the end Rembrandt took a decision: after ten years of being away, ten years in which, in truth, he had never l ived with nostalgia or regret, he left Paris and returned to Italy. Two days before his departure for Mi lan, Rembrandt paid a visit to Adrien Hébrard at his foundry on Avenue de Versai l les. The contract they had drawn up in earl ier times was sti l l val id: “Monsieur Bugatti agrees for a period of ___ years . . . not to cede any of his works to another foundry or art publ isher . . . and to consign to Monsieur Hébrard,

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