The thing you can't stop reading is the little Fiat 500 parked dead centre, the cream one, because somebody has taped VOTA COMUNISTA right across its rump, just below the rear window, as if the car itself were canvassing. It is the smallest, most apologetic car ever built, and here it is electioneering. That's the joke, and like most good jokes it turns out to be serious. Behind it the whole wall is shouting — CIULLINI, MONARCHICI, DESTRA NAZIONALE, the hammer and sickle, PSDI, DC, a sediment of pasted paper for the 1972 vote — and the parked cars line up underneath like a row of voters who've heard it all before and just want to get the shopping done.
What Clark Winter does, and does coolly, is decline to take sides about the taking of sides. He stands far enough back that the great blank upper half of the Florentine wall does most of the talking: an enormous expanse of grey nothing, a single wrought-iron lamp hanging off it like a question mark, and then, low down, the frantic strip of democracy where humans can actually reach with a brush and a bucket of paste. Politics, it turns out, only goes up as high as a man on a ladder.
Winter — the American eye loose in Europe in 1971–72, the same restless trip that gave us the Ohio filling stations and Swiss snow — has the documentarian's patience and the wanderer's luck. He doesn't editorialise; he parks. The Fiat 500 stays the punchline: a nation's ideological civil war reduced to a bumper sticker on a bubble car, and somehow the most eloquent thing on the wall.
The thing you can't stop reading is the little Fiat 500 parked dead centre, the cream one, because somebody has taped VOTA COMUNISTA right across its rump, just below the rear window, as if the car itself were canvassing. It is the smallest, most apologetic car ever built, and here it is electioneering. That's the joke, and like most good jokes it turns out to be serious. Behind it the whole wall is shouting — CIULLINI, MONARCHICI, DESTRA NAZIONALE, the hammer and sickle, PSDI, DC, a sediment of pasted paper for the 1972 vote — and the parked cars line up underneath like a row of voters who've heard it all before and just want to get the shopping done.
What Clark Winter does, and does coolly, is decline to take sides about the taking of sides. He stands far enough back that the great blank upper half of the Florentine wall does most of the talking: an enormous expanse of grey nothing, a single wrought-iron lamp hanging off it like a question mark, and then, low down, the frantic strip of democracy where humans can actually reach with a brush and a bucket of paste. Politics, it turns out, only goes up as high as a man on a ladder.
Winter — the American eye loose in Europe in 1971–72, the same restless trip that gave us the Ohio filling stations and Swiss snow — has the documentarian's patience and the wanderer's luck. He doesn't editorialise; he parks. The Fiat 500 stays the punchline: a nation's ideological civil war reduced to a bumper sticker on a bubble car, and somehow the most eloquent thing on the wall.