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Express Tribune
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
The Leopard review: hankering for oblivion in Sicily
First it was British period drama dangled in front of us, and like hungry, caged beasts, we devoured it. To be honest, we couldn't get over Downton Abbey and then The Crown. In 2020, the US producer Shonda Rhimes ignited Regency England with love, lust, intrigue, soapy storylines, politically-correct casting and orchestral covers of pop hits to create Bridgerton. And how we lapped it up, with modern-days celebs throwing Bridgerton-theme parties even. But lately, having completely juiced the British 18th century era, streamers and screenwriters are delving into European history and heritage. Since the aristocracy lived in the same kind of opulence and decadence all over Europe, it wasn't too difficult to find stories around power-hungry kings and princes, defiant princesses, and nasty villains who beheaded people faster than they sneezed. Out came stories of passion in palaces, love, intrigue, deceit, drama, revenge, political shenanigans, prisoners rotting in dungeons, femme fatales to pamper the princes in vivid contrast to banquets, ballroom dances and battles. The Empress (about the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria) and The Leopard (based on the novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa) are two such shows that created waves. Why do we love watching historical drama offerings so much? Beyond the bit of escapism around the decadence and opulence of speeding stallions across lush meadows, flowy gowns and frilly bonnets, meticulous maids, flashing swords and chopped off heads, these shows are often based on books and have solid storylines, hence they sell internationally and do not date like modern themes or stories do. After watching Adolescence, I was looking for some stuff to recover from the disturbing masterpiece, something light that would take away its compelling sadness, entertain and have some substance too. I luckily landed on The Leopard and found out that it had both the required qualities. The Leopard, originally Il Gattopardo, is an adaptation of Lampedusa's novel that sparked heated discussions after its posthumous publication in 1958. The competing viewpoints of its characters led some to criticise it as conservative, while others insisted it was a ruthless attack on the upper classes. The novel's author was a Prince of Lampedusa whose bloodline had declined under the Risorgimento, and his own title, established in the 1660s, survived only a few years after his death. Set against the social revolution in Sicily, during the period of Risorgimento in the 1860s, however at the end of the unification of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II had been proclaimed as king. 'Sicily is no longer just an island,' Tancredi (Saul Nanni) tells the Prince of Salina's love-struck daughter Concetta (Benedetta Porcaroli), 'but part of a nation.' The series generously offers sumptuous visuals, sensuous innuendo, and a story woven with political and historical detail. There are scenes with spectacular landscapes of Sicily, tables laden with delectable food, stunning women in fabulous dresses and even the men, led by the titular character himself, more than qualify for eye candy. Central to the entire saga is a love triangle that creates enough intrigue, twists and turns to keep you hooked for the six episodes of the series. For those of us who don't have a clue about Italian history, The Leopard offers a history lesson from Sicily and an insight into the violent endeavours behind the unification of Italy. The story from 19th century Europe is about the House of Bourbon that ruled Sicily for 100 years, until the rebels who want to unify Italy head towards the island of Sicily from the northern part of the region, led by a general named Garibaldi. Of course, for us it isn't to understand a storyline where we see that the old regime of hereditary landowners is just not prepared to give up feudalism and their luxurious lifestyle to industrialisation, and allow a transfer of power from the conservative order to the unscrupulous liberal bourgeoisie. The storyline may be set in history, but the question it puts across will always be relevant to humanity. When change is inevitable, does one accept and adapt or does one fight for what we always claimed as our comfort zone? Earlier in 1963, Luchino Visconti won the Palme d'Or for his film The Leopard, which starred Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale. But in the series, 55-year-old Italian actor and director Kim Rossi Stuart, apparently, the Italian equivalent of Paul Newman, and also one of the finest actors of his generation, plays Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina or 'The Leopard.' Fabrizio is reluctant to give up power to the new kingdom and the story revolves around his political manouevres to save his family, power and name. 'I'm not sure if this world of politics fascinates or repels me,' Fabrizio muses as he begins to realise how daunting it was becoming to protect his legacy — Stuart's icy blue eyes are haunting in this scene. The love triangle is between Fabrizio's daughter Concetta, Fabrizio's nephew Tancredi, and Angelica Sedara, played by the 20-year-old drop-dead gorgeous Italian-French model and actor Deva Cassel. Angelica is a middle-class woman who becomes a catalyst of social disruption. The role was originally played by Cardinale, but Cassel has also done an amazing job, being intimidatingly beautiful and talented as well. The scenes between Concetta and Tancredi, where Concetta's love remains unrequited until it is too late, were well acted, as were those between Tancredi and his uncle Fabrizio. Stuart in the title role is fabulous throughout the series because one couldn't imagine a better casting, but in the last episode, when he knows he is losing power as well as his life, he truly flaunts his craft. One finds it interesting that cousin marriages weren't frowned upon in Italy then as they are now throughout the West. Also, there is some rather sizzling chemistry between the wicked Angelica and Fabrizio himself, that inevitably reminded me of the forbidden love-triangle between a nephew, an uncle, and his second wife in the Turkish blockbuster serial Ishq-e-Mamnoo! It is being said that not since The Godfather has there been such a great combination of drama and passion in an authentic Italian setting. While Netflix is reported to have spent around £40 million on making 19th-century Sicily, The Leopard had one flaw, at least for me. I feel that costume dramas are often sprawling and sometimes pay so much attention to art, sets, and camera work that they often overlook that to put all that in requires many episodes and this might make the story lag. This is what went wrong with Leopard. The intrigue, drama, conflict and ensuing twists and turns would have been just fine in four episodes instead of six.
New European
19-03-2025
- Business
- New European
The bank that thinks it's a gallery
Most of these works stay hidden from public gaze but they are crucial marketing tools when it comes to promoting an image of wealth and shrewd judgment. And, of course, they scream money, money, money – in a subtle sort of way, of course.. As JP Morgan Chase (35,000 acquisitions) explains on its private banking site: 'Art transcends economic environments, providing cultural enrichment and a broadening of your asset classes.' Caravaggio's Martirio di sant'Orsola , 1610. Photo: Collezione Intesa Sanpaolo Gallerie d'Italia So meet the bank that thinks it's an art gallery – or rather four galleries. The Intesa Sanpaolo, one of Italy's biggest banks, has cultural outposts in Milan, Naples, Vicenza and Turin and itself owns 35,000 artworks. The contrast between them and their global rivals is marked. The premises with their permanent collections are open to the public; schoolchildren are encouraged to come, look and learn; students enjoy free entry up to the age of 18, and courses are available for graduates to learn how to curate an exhibition or manage a gallery. The other fundamental difference is that though there is a programme of contemporary work, the collections have been decades in the making and are inspired by the art and heritage of the region. They are not just a splashy gesture on an office wall. Perhaps the one man most responsible for this was the Milan banker Raffaele Mattioli, managing director of Banca Commerciale Italiana between 1936 and 1972. Known as 'the humanist banker', he was driven as much by his commercial instincts as his passion for art which he displayed in the bank's elegant offices on the Piazza della Scala. He died long before his bank was subsumed in 1999 into Intesa Sanpaolo but, happily, the takeover has stayed true to his ethos by transforming the old bank from a building of business into a building of culture, the Gallerie d'Italia. Its fascinating collection ranges from plaster works by Canova to paintings celebrating the Risorgimento, Italy's long struggle for national unity, by way of genre representations of the working class and landscapes of the Lombardy region. The artists lack the reputation – or the commercial dazzle of Hirst and co – but the work has an authentic charm which speaks to the culture of the region and emphasises Milan's significant role in Italian culture during the 1800s. More recent art from the 50s and 60s is not neglected, with a selection – again from the region – including Umberto Boccioni, Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri, and this June it hits the Swinging Sixties with Beatles in Milan , (June 25-September 7) displaying photographs of the lads posing with the Duomo in the background and twisting and shouting on stage. The photos are taken from seven million photographs from the 1930s to the 1990s which were acquired from an Italian photo agency and stored in the Turin gallery, a palazzo rebuilt after the second world war. It's a marvel of ingenuity using wood panelling, stucco work, gilt mirrors, furniture and tapestries, taken from nearby palaces which had been reduced to rubble, but it's fair to say the centre of attention is the new underground space which is given over to photography. Next up is Italian Olivo Barbieri. Other Spaces (until September 7) with dramatic 'helicopter' shots of Chinese city life followed in April by a retrospective of Carrie Mae Weems, The Heart of Matter , which includes Preach – a project exploring the role of religion and spirituality among Americans of African descent. The gallery in Naples has a permanent collection of vases – 500 of them, crafted between the fifth and third centuries BC – and an array of paintings from the 17th century to the early 20th. How surprised the experts were to discover after the bank had been taken over by Intesa Sanpaolo that a painting which had hung unremarked in the boardroom was none other than Caravaggio's The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula , which was shown at London's National Gallery last year. By way of contrast, the current show stars Andy Warhol: Triple Elvis (until May 4) with the silk screen paintings of Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong, and the disquieting Electric Chair together with a gun-toting Elvis Presley in silver and black based on a scene from the 1960 film Flaming Star . Underpinning all these enterprises is the bank's Progetto Cultura, a scheme to promote the bank's commitment to the arts and to the philanthropic schemes which accompany it. 'Our history is the living part of our being, of our brand,' says Michele Coppola, executive director of art, culture and historical heritage. 'Now we are contemporary philanthropists, supporting art and culture.' As he intimated, it would be naive to think this is not part of a brand-building enterprise. After all, this is a bank. Its aim is to make money. In December 2023 Intesa Sanpaolo announced assets of €963,570m (£810m) and in an unusual move put a price on its collection of €850m (£714m). Nor are they averse to the kind of publicity earned by sponsoring exhibitions – none more than the ravishing Siena: The Rise of Painting now at the National Gallery. Good publicity, sound profits and philanthropy, it's not a new business plan. The Medicis, the powerful Florentine banking dynasty of the 15th century, spent some of their vast fortune endowing churches and cathedrals and sponsored artists such as Donatello, Michelangelo and Botticelli to atone for their particular brand of usury and corruption. Nonetheless, there's a real sense of authenticity about La Restituzione, a scheme which was launched in Vicenza in 1982 and has enabled the restoration of hundreds of paintings and sculptures which had lain discarded in churches, council chambers and cultural institutions. The results will be on show in Rome in the autumn. Coppola says: 'Restituzione is part of our roots, of our history, of our DNA. It shows how we have a responsibility to our heritage and proves we are on the side of public culture by investing in the community we are a part of.'
BBC News
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'It tells us something about how elites seek to retain their power': How Lampedusa's The Leopard skewered the super-rich
Lampedusa's mid-20th-Century novel The Leopard became a bestseller, then a revered film – and is now a lavish Netflix series. Its withering takedown of society's flaws and hypocrisies still hits home today. "Dying for somebody or for something, that was perfectly normal, of course: but the person dying should know, or at least feel sure, that someone knows for whom or for what he is dying." These are some of the opening lines of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, published in 1958, only a year after the author died of cancer. These words are from the novel's protagonist, Prince Fabrizio, head of an aristocratic Sicilian family. He is recalling discovering the body of an unknown soldier under one of his paradisiacal villa's lemon trees. It's an image that sums up the novel's existential spirit: beneath beauty, there is rot. Lampedusa was never published during his lifetime. His sole novel charts the fortunes of the Salina family, set against the backdrop of the Risorgimento: a social and political movement for Italian unification that led to the creation of a new kingdom of Italy in 1861, during a period of wider European revolutions. As ideas about democracy, liberalism and socialism carried throughout the continent, workers raged against the land-owning gentry, which they held responsible for worsening working conditions and widespread poverty. The period concluded in 1870 with the annexation of parts of the Italian peninsula, the unification of Italy and the capture of Rome. In The Leopard, one such landowner, Fabrizio, strategises based on what he believes he stands to gain at this tumultuous time for the aristocracy. He orchestrates the marriage between his dashing nephew Tancredi Falconeri and the nouveau-riche Angelica Sedara – against the wishes of Fabrizio's own daughter Concetta, who is in love with Tancredi. Considered one of the most important works of Italian literature, The Leopard was described by the cultural historian Lucy Hughes-Hallett as "the most loved and admired novel ever written in Italian". The British author EM Forster, meanwhile, in his preface to the Italian author's unfinished memoir Places of My Infancy (1971), wrote: "Lampedusa has meant so much to me that I find it impossible to present him formally… Reading and rereading it has made me realise how many ways there are of being alive." Marking only the second adaptation of the novel – and the first serialised version – a new Netflix series makes a fresh case for The Leopard's relevance in the 21st Century, more than 60 years after Luchino Visconti's classic film. A runaway hit Despite its historical shrewdness and epic love story, Lampedusa's novel did not initially fare well with Italian publishers. Two major publishing houses, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore and Einaudi, swiftly rejected Lampedusa's 1956 manuscript. The influential modernist and editor Elio Vittorini claimed it was too "traditional" compared with the experimental avant-garde movement sweeping Italian literature at the time. "Conservatives didn't like it because it's very rude about the Church and it's fairly cynical about aristocrats," David Laven, a historical consultant on Netflix's adaptation, tells the BBC. "Left-wingers didn't like it because he doesn't portray a positive view of the ordinary working class." After Lampedusa's death, his book fell into the hands of literary agent Elena Croce and eventually landed on the desk of the publisher Feltrinelli. The novel had vocal detractors, including the aforementioned Vittorini and the anti-fascist author Alberto Moravia, who were both suspicious of what they believed was the novel's conservatism, a decade after the 1943 overthrowing of the fascist leader Benito Mussolini. As Rachel Donadio wrote in The New York Times in 2008, The Leopard "was at first seen as quaint and reactionary, a baroque throwback at the height of neorealism in cinema and class-consciousness in all the arts". When it was published, however, it became a runaway bestseller, cycling through a staggering 52 editions in fewer than six months. Perhaps it resonated with a disillusioned generation living well after the Risorgimento, but appreciating what the French Marxist author Louis Aragon described as a "merciless" and "left-wing" critique of the upper classes. Lampedusa was posthumously awarded the prestigious Strega Prize, and his reputation as a literary great would soon outstrip his contemporaries. Part of what made The Leopard difficult to stomach for so many was its scathing tone, evenly applied to all corners of Italian society. Lampedusa himself was born into the aristocracy in 1896, and lived in a grand palazzo much like the one in his novel – but that did not prevent him from lampooning his own. His biographer David Gilmour wrote in The Last Leopard (1988) that part of what prevented Lampedusa from writing until so late in life was what he believed to be the redundancy of his own class. More like this:• 10 of the best TV shows to watch this March• The mystery of why Jane Austen's letters were destroyed• The women-only gang that menaced Victorian London Within the novel's first few pages, Lampedusa disdains Fabrizio's wife and seven children and describes his arduous audiences with King Francis I (King of the Two Sicilies) as coming face to face with: "this monarchy which bore the marks of death upon its face". Far from believing this makes him a cut above the rest, however, the jaded Fabrizio is just as flawed: unscrupulous, forsaking his own family. A tale of disenchantment and fear of obsolescence amid a crumbling dynasty, The Leopard skewers the flaws and hypocrisies present throughout all Italian society. "The great myth of Italian unification is that it was a bottom-up movement, that Italians suddenly woke up in the morning and really wanted to overthrow the regimes they were living in," says Laven. "If you think about Sicily, civilians were used to regime change." Sicily had been ruled by the kings of Spain, before conquests by the Italian House of Savoy and Austrian Habsburgs. The French Bourbons had taken over by the time Naples and Sicily were merged in 1816. They were, in turn, overthrown in 1848, before returning to power 16 months later. In Lampedusa's novel, though the revolutionaries have high hopes of radical change, the protagonist insists the middle classes will simply replace the upper classes, while on the face of things everything remains the same. Despite these societal shifts, the status quo was upheld, as captured by one of the novel's most enduring lines: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." "It's not only something that's going on in Italy but across Europe in the 19th Century," says Laven. "Bismarck doesn't really want German unification. He's trying to defend the interests of the Prussian Junkers [nobility], and he's prepared to make compromises. Lots of British aristocrats don't like the way the world is going, but they realise they must accommodate themselves with a changing world in order to retain their status. [The Leopard] tells us something about the way in which elites seek to retain their power." According to Laven, although The Leopard contains small historical inaccuracies, Lampedusa really captured the essence of the time. Unlike the work of historical fiction giants such as Leo Tolstoy or Victor Hugo, the author navigates Fabrizio's lofty world with thrift and virtuosic wit. "[When you think of historical fiction], you tend to think of these great slabs of books," says Laven. "What you have [here] is this incredible ability to capture a moment almost 100 years before he's writing with such economy of style." Legacy of The Leopard Five years after publication, The Leopard's status as a landmark of Italian literature was cemented by an acclaimed film adaptation, directed by Visconti, a Marxist who, like Lampedusa, hailed from a noble family. It starred Burt Lancaster as the titular leopard, Fabrizio, and Alain Delon as his nephew Tancredi. Visconti's opulent film held the same searingly cynical and yet elegiac view on the upper echelons of Italian society, according to Arabella Cifani, books editor of the Giornale dell'Arte. "Visconti understood it profoundly," she tells the BBC. "One would say that the book was connatural to the worldview held by Visconti, who was also a prince and whose ancestors had ruled Milan for over 100 years." Famously, the film contains a lavish 25-minute ballroom scene. According to the Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus, the waltz "competes for [the] most beautiful sequence committed to film". But amid this splendour, Lancaster's Fabrizio has a cloying sense of his own mortality, musing on what his own death will be like. The American star was not Visconti's first choice for the role, but he embarked on in-depth research, spending time with Lampedusa's widow, adopted son and members of the Sicilian nobility. Though it won the Palme d'Or in its year of release (1963), the critic David Weir claimed Visconti's film was less appreciated by audiences than Federico Fellini's 8 ½ from the same year: "The Leopard was part of the story of the early 1960s that saw movie audiences gravitating away from big-budget fiascos". Its ensuing influence on major directors has been undeniable, however, with resonances of it in the grandiose work of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who has cited it as one of his favourite films, saying: "I live with this movie every day of my life". For the creators of Netflix's new series, the way The Leopard speaks to a collapsing epoch was at the core of its appeal. "We were going through the throes of Brexit when I first read it, and it seemed to me that there was a sort of Risorgimento in reverse happening," its writer and creator Richard Warlow tells the BBC, referring to new divisions being created in Europe as opposed to unifications. "It did get me thinking about ideas of nationhood, what it is to be an island, the ingrained nature of our lives and what it's like to suddenly change that." Undoubtedly, the lavishness of the novel was another draw for the showrunners, with some already comparing it to hugely successful Netflix series like The Crown or Bridgerton. Although the Risorgimento – and the novel's events – took place more than 150 years ago, the ramifications are still deeply felt in Italian society, according to Laven, especially against an increasingly political and economic split between north and south. "It's quite clear that for them it's still very meaningful," he says. And how much this revolutionary period of history changed anything – besides the creation of a centrally governed region of Italy – is open to debate. Cifani adds that the novel's famous line: "if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change" continues to be used as a political slogan. It's a sentiment that seems, like Lampedusa's novel, timeless. The Leopard is released on Netflix on 5 March. -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Independent
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Style and substance combine in mesmerising historical drama The Leopard
It's impossible to overstate the impact that fiction can have on the mythology of a nation. What would our understanding of British history look like, were it not for the record Shakespeare left of our late medieval kings? How would we think of the French Revolution without Victor Hugo's Les Misérables or the American Civil War without Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage? These works record history, but they also shape it – and that role is played, in the great unified nation of Italy, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 's 1958 novel The Leopard, which arrives on our screens this week as a lavish Netflix miniseries. Italy, in the second half of the 19th century, is on the brink of binding together its disparate nations, under the stewardship of General Garibaldi. Sicily, the island being kicked by the boot of the peninsula, has long been its own master, and is governed, internally, by its aristocracy, not least Don Fabrizio (Kim Rossi Stuart), Prince of Salina, known to all as The Leopard. But his standing in Palermo is unsettled by the arrival of Garibaldi's 'red shirts', not least when his feckless but beloved nephew Tancredi (Saul Nanni) enlists with the rebels. As Sicily falls under the spell of the nationalists, undertaking a project known as the Risorgimento, from the Italian for 'resurgence', the way of life long enjoyed by the Salina dynasty is threatened. This is the grand question of The Leopard and one that is well suited to our times. At moments of great change, should we adapt and accept our new station, or fight for the world we have always known? The novel's author was himself a Prince of Lampedusa whose own bloodline had declined under the Risorgimento, and his own peerage, established in the 1660s, would survive only a few years after his death. 'Sicily is no longer just an island', Tancredi tells the Leopard's lovestruck daughter Concetta (Benedetta Porcaroli), 'but part of a nation.' Of course, as with all great, sweeping historical novels – from War and Peace to Gone with the Wind – The Leopard also finds time for romance amidst the violence. Tancredi eschews the wide-eyed Concetta in favour of Angelica, the glamorous daughter of a village mayor, played by Monica Bellucci's daughter, Deva Cassel. For all the variety of its international library, it's rare for Netflix to put so much faith (and money) into a non-English language series, but having triumphed recently with shows like Squid Game and Lupin, it is the turn of Italian to receive the streamer's euros. And the show is beautifully made: the locations and costumes are sumptuous, the attention to period detail immaculate. This is a period drama on a scale rarely seen on TV, more akin to the expenditure on The Crown than terrestrial dramas like Wolf Hall or The Gilded Age. That's perhaps why they handed the directorial reins to Tom Shankland (who had previously adapted Les Mis for the Beeb) and writing duties to Richard Warlow (creator of the corporation's Ripper Street). If Sicily itself is a fusion of cultures – having been occupied, at times, by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Normans, Spanish and more – then so is The Leopard. It seems Netflix understands that the show shares many of its themes with Downton Abbey, which has often been compared to Lampedusa's novel. Broiling class anxiety ('He wants to crush us and sweep us into the sea!' a Salina child exclaims) is mixed with sexual repression (here, aided by a healthy dollop of Catholic guilt. 'How can I settle for a woman who, after every single embrace, has to recite an Ave Maria?'), The Leopard laments. It is pleasant, if familiar, not least because the book has already been adapted for an acclaimed 1963 film, starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale. The poignancy of that film was slightly undermined by a confusing melange of dubbing – here, Netflix's technology allows viewers to seamlessly amble between native Italian, English and other options, from Hindi to Ukrainian. Buried beneath the love triangle and the mountains of granita (for breakfast?!), The Leopard is a simple story about a man, stood on a rock in the sea, watching the tides change around him. 'We were the family of great leopards,' the Prince eulogises. 'Those who replace us are jackals, hyenas. Everything will be different, but worse.' As testaments to the flux of history go, The Leopard manages to be beautiful, engaging and suitably elegiac.
Fox News
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Defaced Holocaust mural finds new home in Rome's Shoah Museum
The Shoah Museum in Rome has acquired a piece by reserved contemporary pop artist aleXsandro Palombo after it was defaced in an apparent act of antisemitism. The mural, which depicts Liliana Segre and Sami Modiano, the last two Italian survivors of Auschwitz, was defaced multiple times and even erased by vandals. Segre and Modiano are shown in striped clothing under green bullet-proof vests with yellow Stars of David on them, and there are even representations of the serial numbers tattooed on them by the Nazis. The perpetrators vandalized Segre and Modiano's faces, as well as the stars on their chests, but left the numbers on their arms untouched. "They took away my face, my identity, they erased the yellow star, but they left the number tattooed on my arm," Segre said. Palombo eventually reproduced the piece, and it is now part of the museum's permanent collection. "Art is the highest expression of freedom, and repeatedly attacking a work that portrays two survivors of Auschwitz highlights how the very value of democracy and all our freedoms is in danger," Palombo said in a statement. "The gesture of courage and resistance of the Shoah Museum of Rome and the Italian Jewish community is a great and precious lesson in civilization for all of us, who responded to the antisemitic violence and hatred of these new forms of social and cultural terrorism with a powerful action of the Risorgimento." Palombo has made several pieces honoring the Holocaust, and his other works have not been spared from vandalism. A piece entitled "Arbeit macht frei," which shows Hungarian writer and Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck wrapped in an Israeli flag was also defaced, with much of the flag being erased. The title of this mural is the same phrase the Nazis put on the gates of Auschwitz, and it translates to "work makes you free." Bruck told Italian newspaper La Stampa that she was saddened but not surprised by the vandalism, saying that "antisemitism is a tsunami." The mural of Bruck has also been acquired by the Shoah Museum in Rome. Another one of Palombo's pieces that was vandalized was entitled "Halt! Stoj!," which depicted Segre, Modiano and Burk alongside Pope Francis, who is outfitted with a cross and a sign reading "antisemitism is everywhere." The four are depicted as Simpsons characters, a common motif for Palombo. While the image of the pope was not damaged, vandals defaced the Stars of David on the three Holocaust survivors. Palombo, a contemporary pop artist and activist, used pop culture references in his artwork, including celebrities and cartoon characters from the Simpsons and Disney. One of his most iconic works is the "Simpsons deported to Auschwitz," which shows Marge, Homer, Maggie, Bart and Lisa before and after the concentration camp, referencing the emaciated state of Holocaust survivors liberated from Nazi camps.
