L' amatore

A trip through the visual archive of architect Piero Portaluppi, who made a significant impression on the city of Milan with the Hoepli Planetarium, the RAS building and countless villas for well-heeled Milanese in the 1920s and 1930s. The 'amateurism' referred to in the title of this experimental documentary was revealed some years ago thanks to the discovery of a collection of 16mm films, which he shot, edited and supplied with title sequences.

In these short films this man – who at one time kept track of exactly how much soup, meat, wine and salad he consumed in a year – gives an equally tightly controlled impression of his personal and social life during a turbulent period of Italian history. A period during which Portaluppi’s architectural style evolved from Neo-Gothic to Modernism and he rose into elite circles where he found his clients, as well as effortlessly conforming to the dominant ideology of Mussolini's fascism.