Sigmund Freud, practising psychoanalyst in Vienna before the First World War and during the interwar years, inventor of the therapy generally known as the interpretation of dreams. You see Dalí in a film studio that looks like Piet Mondrian’s studio in Paris he tugs at his moustache, points to a Mondrianesque composition on a painter’s easel, looks wide-eyed at the camera and says: ‘Pyet, Pyet? Pyet Nyet!’ Then he turns to the viewer and says charmingly, questioningly: ‘Dalí? Dalí? Dalí Si!’ What prompted Dalí, hardly deprived of fame or attention himself, to ridicule Mondrian, one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, in such a grotesque way more than fifteen years after his death?Īnother question. In the early 1960s Salvador Dalí made a video with the photographer Philippe Halsman. He describes in detail the daily life and folklore in the regions that he visits, voicing more often than not in a very frank way his surprise at the things he meets on his way.This is a rather tricky foreword, something of a cadavre exquis, full of questions that are not that easy to answer. He writes with understanding about art and architecture and is well acquainted with Italian and Spanish history and literature. He has an educated taste and an inquiring mind. Laffi has a very lifely style of writing – unlike most medieval pilgrims who described their journeys –and it is garnished with personal experiences and impressions. In this new edition of the diary we experience the world of this extraordinary pilgrim. At the time it must have been quite popular, for during the next sixty years it was reprinted another four times. The pilgrim, Domenico Laffi, born in 1636 in the foothills of the Apennines not far from Bologna, first published his account in 1673 and called it 'Viaggio in Ponente' three years later it was reprinted and a revised edition, from which this translation was made, appeared in 1681. He translated the text, followed in the footsteps of the pilgrim and made an extensive study of local archives and libraries in order to reconstruct the world of this seventeenth-century wayfarer. In 1988 James Hall, author of among others 'Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art', discovered in the British Library a seventeenth-century account of a pilgrimage.
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