Nino Titone e Mario Diacono. Lettere inedite intorno alle "Settimane Internazionali Nuova Musica" (1960-1968) e alla rivista "Collage" (1963-1970)

Abstract

The contribution sheds light on the convergence between music and other arts – notably the visual ones – as part of the avant-garde experiences that took place in Palermo in the 1960s. Unedited epistolary documents and journalistic chronicles recontruct the relationships of Nino Titone, creator of the Settimane Internazionali Nuova Musica (1960-1968), with various exponents of the Roman musical and pictorial avant-garde; and above all with Mario Diacono, an eccentric and multifaceted intellectual who played a leading role both in the events of «Collage» (1963-1970) – the interdisciplinary magazine created by Titone together with Paolo Emilio Carapezza – and in the preparation of the first of the two contemporary painting exhibitions (Revort 1 and Revort 2) that flanked the last two editions of the Settimane (the fifth and the sixth ones dating back respectively to 1965 and 1968). The exhibition whose curator was Diacono opened up to the Italian and European reception of American Pop Art, while the new optical, minimal, kinetic and conceptual currents found space in the second. The letters that Diacon sent to Titone even during his long stay in the United States (where he kept on co-operating with «Collage» and to put his contacts with the most advanced manifestations of the international avant-garde to good use), display a vivid testimony of the experimental ferment of the period (to which the cultural contexts in Rome and Palermo adhered with enthusiasm), highlighting their aspirations, utopias as well as difficulties, contradictions and less edifying backgrounds.