Lampoon Magazine International Issue 13

LA CORONA FERREA è custodita a Monza. La leggenda dice che uno dei chiodi della croce sia l’anima della sua struttura. Voluta da Teodolinda, incoronò Carlo Magno e i sovrani del Sacro Romano Impero – Napoleone scese in Italia e se la pose da solo sul capo. Una fascia di metallo bizantino, rielaborata nel Medioevo, forse può essere intesa come la corona più nobile al mondo – perché anche tra corone c’è differenza, e quasi mai contano le pietre e la mole. Elisabetta II dice che le si sarebbe spezzato il collo sotto il peso di quella britannica – non in senso letterario, ma letterale: durante le cerimonie, la regina è sempre stata ben attenta a placare movimenti anomali della testa. AFFISSE alle pareti della London Library, Evelyn Waugh ricopiava…

LA CORONA FERREA - the Iron Crown of Lombardy - is preserved in Monza. Legend has it that one of the nails from the True Cross is incorporated in its structure. Commissioned by Theodelinda, it was the crown of Charlemagne and the kings of the Holy Roman Empire – Napoleon came down to Italy to place it on his head himself. A strip of Byzantine metal, re-crafted in the Middle Ages, it is possibly considered the most noble crown in the world – because even among crowns there is a difference, and their size and the number of precious stones used are rarely what counts. Elizabeth II said that her neck would have broken under the weight of the British crown – not figuratively, but literally: during ceremonies, the Queen…

THE FIVE MONARCHS Back in the Dolce Vita of the 1950s, Farouk, pleasure-loving king of Egypt, who was forced to abdicate after the Nasser revolution and was exiled to Rome, predicted precisely what was to come, repeating his mantra: “In a few decades, in the world only five monarchs will remain: those we see on our playing cards, and the King of England” THE IRON CROWN Eighty percent silver and gold alloy, the Iron Crown comprises six plates linked together by vertical hinges. It is 15 cm in diameter and 5.5 cm tall, weighing in at 535 grams. Twenty-two embossed golden roses adorn it, twenty-two coloured gems and twenty-four cloisonné enamel plaques. The red cabochons are garnets, the purple amethysts, and the corundum is dark blue. When it was created,…

RAPHAEL URBINAS Engraved on the gold armband of his beloved Fornarina as though to sign his possession of the woman, as well as to mark the painting indelibly, proclaiming it a signed work. A composed, balanced art to the extent of imitating nature, so much so that it has become a standard of objective beauty over the years, and has been confused, from the time of 19th century art criticism, with an academic norm, or more vulgarly, a stereotype. IT WAS A PRIVILEGED relationship with the beauty and the splendour, the pleasures and the intrigues of the Renaissance courts. It began in the metaphysical ducal fortress in Urbino, suspended between the hills and the rounded landscapes of Montefeltro. Raphael was fed at the breast of his natural mother as a…

IRON WOMEN Diane Williams and Katharine Graham, iron ladies who dream of rebellion like the characters in The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopic novel by Margaret Atwood from 1985, recently rediscovered by readers thanks to the TV series of the same name it inspired. A still from the TV series. CHIARA BARZINI Chiara Barzini, author and screenwriter, debuted in fiction with the novel Things that Happened before the Earthquake, published in the United States by Doubleday. She tells of the troubled adolescence in Los Angeles of an Italian who moved there in the Nineties following her filmmaker father. DIANE WILLIAMS American writer and editor born in 1946, Diane Williams specializes in writing and critique of short stories. She lives in New York where, in 2000, she founded the annual literary journal…

THE LEGEND Painter Fleury Joseph Crépin (1875-1948). He had been told that the war would end on the day he finished his three-hundredth painting. He began in 1939, and the last painting bears the date 8 May 1945. Also according to the prophesy, when the war was over, Crepin would then have had to paint forty-five tableaux merveilleux ON THE CORNER of Via Condotti and Bocca di Leone, one enters a playroom. Magic tricks, fortune-telling paraphernalia, séances like out of a 1930s Agatha Christie mystery. A riddle, somewhere between mind and culture. One could say that Hermès is the only fashion maison to venture into a more complicated dimension, in an era in which marketing management (marketing, what an ugly word to include within these lines) seeks only speed and…