Uno due tre cultura

I created a little collection of recommendations for the instagram-culture collective @unoduetrecultura, Buon Divertimento!

Ciao polpettis, my name is Leonie, @leoniejohannew. I work as a stylist and journalist, writing about fashion, culture and my life in bellissimo Firenze, as this is where I’m at home. My master studies brought me here and I never want to leave again. I love the golden light, my old, elegant neighbors and especially the huge secondhand markets and small florentine vintage stores, all around. Here I find treasures for myself and my stylings, which I do with pre-owned garments. I often use pieces of my own wardrobe for my work, it’s a pool of collected items (my favorite is a sweater with beagle-print, found on a market in Catania).

Ah, I also work as art director for my friend Alessandro’s brand @disario.official

I would love to own a dog and to live in summer 1983, somewhere in northern Italy, but who wouldn’t.

My favorite time to read is when I travel through il bel paese. I start the book in the treno regionale and it accompanies me during the trip, gets read in a café, on a bench in the streets, in gardens of museums and my guest-bed. Like this I have a trip in a book. Best case scenario: the books’ story takes place in the city I visit.

A BOOK - THE NEAPOLITAN SAGA BY ELENA FERRANTE

In four books Elena Ferrante tells the story of the loving but rival relationship between two very diverse friends, from their early childhood until almost the end of their lives. It starts in the 1940s in Naples, Italy - Elena and Lila are both above average smart, but their characters and surroundings entirely different. While Elena has the opportunity to follow an academic career, Lila, stuck with her poor family, gets drawn into mafia business - and still her brilliant, genius ideas haunt Elena wherever she goes.

These four books accompanied me to Bologna, Puglia, Napoli and Sicily.

A BOOK - COMING OF AGE BY PETRA COLLINS

I would like to live in a Petra Collins photograph. Deep, hot light gleams from the pictures, the colors, details, the perceptible feelings and entire atmosphere make me stare at them and I can’t let go. The pictures Petra Collins takes indicate femininity in a vulnerable but powerful way, showing the female gaze with a retro touch and in an analogue rawness. For the book the photographer pictured girls within their conflicts, their youth, their loneliness, in such a delicate way, that a movie of my own teenage-times starts to come up in my head - confused and heartbroken, probably.

I didn’t take this book on my travels, it’s too heavy, but it moved with me to wherever I lived.

A PLACE - I CASALI DEL TREBBIOLO IN PONTASSIEVE

In the summer I longed for some days outside of the burning hot city center and found this little Agriturismo, a hike away from Florence. “I Casali del Trebbiolo” lays in the tuscan hills, surrounded by cypresses and olive trees. You can choose a room in one of the four pastel colored farm houses, have a swim in the piscina and eat organic dishes with vegetables that grew in the bed next to your sun chair. The atmosphere is homely and familial, oh, and I’ve never seen better sunsets!

On my stay here I read Normal People

by Sally Rooney, a combination I can highly recommend (for post-covid, maybe).

A MAGAZINE - MORE OR LESS MAGAZINE BY JAIME PERLMAN

“Championing creativity over cost and consumption”, it says in the magazin’s instagram-bio, and I think this is a statement to live by. More or Less Magazin, @moreorlessmag, founded by former British Vogue Editor Jaime Perlman, doesn’t use seasonal collections for its fashion editorials, but almost everything else. Big names of the fashion industry create beautiful stylings with craft, vintage clothes, rubbish or design-left overs, in a way that an editorial doesn’t lose it’s beauty, at all. I hadn’t have a more interesting magazine in my hands since a long time.

A SERIES - MYTHO

The french mini-series was first shown on Arte but is now available on Netflix, jippi. And this is the story: Elvira Giannini lives together with her boyfriend Patrick and their three children Carole, Sam and Virginie. She works as an insurance agent for a really unpleasant boss and in her free time does everyone’s laundry, buys groceries, cooks and cleans, while no one in her family seems to care. Until she finds a way to change the situation: with a big lie. Mytho is witty and tragic, emotional and really french, which means: super good costumes (if you ask me).

The cherry on top: The soundtrack is peppered with amazing french electro from French 79 to Kid Francescoli, mi piace!

MUSIC - CULT SURVIVOR BY SOFIE

Sometimes, when I don’t know how to continue an article or am too tired to keep writing but also don’t want to stop, I just start to sing along to the music I’m listening to. My newest favorite for this activity is the wonderful album Cult Survivor by Sofie @sofieroyer. Her soft but dark voice tells me about Georgia Waves and how it feels to be asleep, with such light melodies and a quite danceable rhythm, that eventually i’ll close my laptop, get up and move a bit. Secret tip - from me, to you.