close
shape
Almanac
shape
Small format stories
shape
Team and contacts
close
27 September1961
Harvest in Portofino
Author
Famiglia Bacigalupo
Format
8mm
Duration
5'32''
Credits
Symphony No. 3 by Leonard Bernstein; The New York Philharmonic Orchestra; Robert Schumann

In the vineyard of Castello Brown in Portofino, the grape harvest is taking place. The teenager Massimo Bacigalupo took the opportunity to build an 8mm film around this event, in which we see a child arriving at the castle, as in a fairy tale. In this extract from the film we see the grape harvest sequence. Bacigalupo recalls: 'The little boy in the film is my brother Andrea, the owners of the castle were called John and Jocelyn Baber, the people in charge of the kitchens and management were Guido and Idelma Garbarino. I remember that when I screened it with my family, I used Schumann's Sinfonia Renana as the soundtrack." 27 September 1961 is a symbolic date for the Almanac. On this same day, 'One Day a Year', the work by the writer Christa Wolf that inspired us so much, began to take shape. After describing 'my 27 September' in 1960, responding to the call of a literary magazine, she took up her pen again the following year, on the same day: 'So far, so good. But why did I then also describe 27 September 1961? And all the following 27 Septembers, until today - for forty-three years, now more than half my adult life? And why can't I stop?" He will ask himself in 2003, when publishing a book written year after year for forty years. Wolf's first answer is horror at the oblivion of the everyday, as we read in the introduction, entitled 'My September 27th'. The fragments of the Almanac are also a response to the writer's fear and a way of telling a written story as it unfolds.

Share