Antica Barbieria Colla’s characters: Giuliano Gramigna

Giuliano Gramigna was a writer, poet and literary critic, known in particular for his long collaboration with a prominent Italian newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera. Franco Bompieri tells how he became a customer of Antica Barbieria Colla:

Text taken from Presi per i capelli by Franco Bompieri (Mondadori 2000)

« “He was so beautiful that it looked like he had just come out of Colla’s hot towels’”.

This quote in the novel Marcel Ritrovato by Giuliano Gramigna, in addition to flattering me, filled me with curiosity towards the author; so one day I called him at the office and using all the courtesy possible I invited him to come in person to see if the hot towels were up to his novel.

After a few weeks Gramigna appeared on the doorstep of the shop. I recognized him immediately, also because there was always a picture of him on the title page of his books.

After a professional shave, I let him try the hot towels. Gramigna lightly caressed his face and said: “Never has a quote been more focused” ».

Antica Barbieria Colla’s characters: Carlo Bertè

The painter and engraver Carlo Bertè is not only a client of Barbieria Colla, but also a friend of Franco Bompieri who says:

« Carlo Bertè paints driven by a light that always accompanies him. It is the light of the soul that leads him to paint skies that go beyond the canvas. His paintings speak of dreams that seem to come out of that Po Valley fog where he was born. It is a painting that seems to melt and just as it melts it takes shape. His art is serious, sincere, made up of wonderful emotions and love.

While I cut his hair (few in truth) we spend some time talking about art. For him the artists are all good, never in the many years that we have known each other have I heard him criticize the work of a colleague. He is a shy man, but a profound connoisseur of art.

He told me one day: “Don’t stop just to look at the paintings, listen to them!” ».

Antica Barbieria Colla’s characters: Enrico Cuccia

Franco Bompieri met Enrico Cuccia in 1951 at the Continental Hotel where he was hired as a worker; when in 1960 he moved to Antica Barbieria Colla, many of his customers followed him, including the well-known banker. Here’s how he remembers him:

« “He has spoken! Enrico Cuccia has spoken”. In the shop we couldn’t hold back the amazement. For years we had witnessed his ritual arrival: a barely hinted “Good morning” with a lowered gaze, a detached availability to the barber’s tools, an expert look at the newspaper, not at those available from us but at His one, inevitably foreigner, mostly the Financial Times.

Despite the routine, we always worked with him with a certain apprehension, as it was the first time. The shop, regardless of the number of other possible customers, was silent: if anyone spoke it was a whisper. After the service, Enrico Cuccia approached the register, paid, hinted a “Thank you” and a “Good morning”, he went out and alone, his arms crossed behind his back, walked towards Via Filodrammatici, now better known as the street of Mediobanca.

But on that hot summer morning, the order was upset: at a certain moment, Enrico Cuccia pointed to the air conditioner placed near the ceiling and said: “It’s a little cold today”».

http://Credits: Archivio storico Mediobanca “Vincenzo Maranghi” – ICAR, Direzione Generale degli Archivi – MIBACT via <a href=”https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enrico_Cuccia_nella_sala_del_Consiglio_di_amministrazione_san_dl_SAN_IMG-00774647.jpg” title=”Enrico Cuccia su Wikimedia” rel=”nofollow”>Wikimedia Commons</a>

Antica Barbieria Colla’s characters: Enzo Bettiza

Antica Barbieria Colla has always been a place where politics, culture, current affairs were debated; this is also thanks to the fact that among its customers there were various intellectuals such as Enzo Bettiza, a journalist and writer who died in 2017 whom Franco Bompieri considered a reincarnation of a Russian prince, not only because of his Eastern European origins; he describes him like this:

« I remember Enzo Bettiza from the time when I worked in the barbershop at the Continental Hotel, in via Manzoni.

Tall, handsome, raven-haired, indifferent to the cost of things, he was already considered an eminent journalist, specializing in the politics of Eastern countries, which in my opinion he didn’t love, as one often doesn’t love his beloved homeland.

“Look” they told me “he was born in Split. It is true that he speaks Russian, but he also speaks German as if he were from Vienna, and French and English “.

“Exactly” I replied “like all Russian princes: he is a polyglot who reserves Russian for courting beautiful women and to give orders to the servants.”

When Enzo Bettiza is not around the world, he comes to his barber with a spare shirt.

After the service, which he wants accurate but unperceivable, he retires to the private dressing room and changes his shirt. Sometimes the change takes more than half an hour, so meticulous he is in tying the tie.

This is enough for me to say that in Enzo Bettiza there is the soul in exile of a prince, who survived the hated great October Revolution. »

Antica Barbieria Colla’s characters: Enzo Jannacci

Enzo Jannacci, singer, songwriter, comedian and actor, can rightfully be considered a symbol of the city of Milan; on his death in 2013, he was buried in the Monumental Cemetery in the Famedio, the place where those who, in different ways, have contributed to improving the Lombard capital rest and are remembered.

And his music, from the 1960s onwards, has certainly helped to make Milan known, even to those who were not born there but came and stayed there, like Franco Bompieri, of whom as well as being a client he soon became a friend.

The memories related to him are many, among them the fact that he was a shy person and able with his music to tell about Milan rising after World War II .

Charismatic, serious and true, he was able to talk about the past while always being current.

Enzo Jannacci was born in early June and whenever possible we always went to his parties, full of joy, smiles and music.

When he came to the barbershop it was not just to cut his hair, but mainly for the treatment with the candle and also because he loved to have his head scratched: he had his own comb with very hard teeth, which he had managed to recover in one of his trips; he used to ask Franco or whoever for him (in recent years Giordano was serving him) to fearlessly rub on his head during washing, because then the lotion penetrated better and he would have felt “lightened by all thoughts”.

He was a nice, sunny, but also melancholy man.

As evidence of the great friendship and esteem that existed between Franco and Enzo, there is a song included in the 2001 album “Come gli aeroplani”, which is called “Ti luna“: this is nothing more than a poem by Bompieri, present in his 1984 book “Augusto di Setteprati“.

Antica Barbieria Colla’s characters: Luchino Visconti

Throughout the history of Antica Barbieria Colla it has often happened that the fathers have passed on the custom of serving themselves in our shop to their children, who have in turn become our customers in respect of a sort of family tradition.

Something similar happened with one of the most illustrious Milanese families, that of the Visconti di Modrone: Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone began to frequent the barbershop at the beginning of the twentieth century and continued until his death, then followed by several of his descendants, including his son Luchino Visconti di Modrone, one of the most important Italian directors and screenwriters of the twentieth century.

Franco Bompieri, who was his barber, says:

« Visconti used to like high taper and short hair, short at an unspecified level, so he often accused me of having done everything wrong, giving me quick and playful fists on my shoulders.

I delude myself thinking of it as a way to establish a human relationship.

Visconti was the director who, with The Earth Will Tremble, but above all with Rocco and his brothers, had given dignity to poverty and immigration, the conditions of my first life.

Visconti was also the director of Senso, shot for the most part in my region, on the river Mincio, on the thread of a beloved Verdi: it was natural that I saw him with special eyes and soul.

No confusion: the interest and perhaps also the love Visconti carried for man and the things around him and that come to life from the passions and sufferings of which he gave unique representations, could never have filled our profound difference in social rank, but I am sure that more than a subtle thread was pulled between us. Perhaps because, as a son of a horsemanship, I was still wearing a well-known smell to Visconti who was, in his youth, a passionate breeder.

One day I asked him: “Why did you leave horses for theater, Mr. Count?” “Horses gave me great satisfaction, almost the best of what you can get from a living being, but they do not speak”. Despite The earth trembles, he was still a Visconti. »

Antica Barbieria Colla’s Characters: Roberto Benigni

No more than a few weeks ago the Venice Biennale, the institution that organizes the famous Venice International Film Festival, has decided to award the 2021 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to the Italian director, actor and screenwriter Roberto Benigni, who already won the Academy Award in 1999 for his movie Life is beautiful.

When we hear the news in the shop, we immediately look at that autograph on the wall and the memory brings back an anecdote from some time ago:

« With the candle flame, I singed the ends of Roberto Benigni’s battered hair, in a patient attempt to strengthen it. He looked at himself in the mirror with wild eyes and an amused grin.

“Oh no, you have to do this thing to me in a movie, it’s too funny”.

…

I keep manipulating Benigni’s scalp with thaumaturgical intensity: burning, massaging, washing, rubbing, drying, in a game to save his remaining few and fragile hair.

He had more when I went watching him for the first time in a theater in Milan. Fifteen spectators, a handkerchiefs on his face, convulsed grimaces to make it fall. Finally, here comes a sharp, sly, sneering face, a voice full of dialectal inflections and the vitriolic satire typical of his main character at the time.

It seems to me I have done a good job, deserving the autograph hung on a wall in the shop: “To Franco, the greatest in the world”. »

Antica Barbieria Colla’s characters : Franco Moschino

Around the mid-1980s, while Milan was establishing itself internationally as one of the capitals of creativity and fashion, Antica Barbieria Colla counted among its customers Franco Moschino, who had recently founded his line and was pointed out by many as a subversive because of his irreverent, ironic and nonconformist style.

“What a shame! The opened the Villa Reale* to present Moschino’s rags” headlined the Corriere della Sera, one of the most prominent Italian newspaper.

Today, Moschino is considered one of the “sacred monsters” of Italian fashion and a precursor of social responsibility thanks to his commitment to the fight against AIDS, the reuse of garments and the enhancement of sustainable collections.

Franco Bompieri, who at that time was his barber, described him like this:

So sweet, so sensitive, so profound in investigating life, Moschino did not claim to be the bearer of great messages and if these emerged, they were the inevitable consequence of his personal commitment to the problems of the world and of the people he realized in his acting.

The conceptual understanding of his work as a stylist, but also as a painter, an excellent painter, certainly had roots in surrealism and tradition of the costume, of the dress, not only Italian. Moschino used to dig into tradition.

One day, while cutting his hair, I asked him: “How is fashion born, your fashion?”

“In the old cemeteries”, he answered, “especially in those of the little mountain villages, where, in the small images of the dead, there is fashion for everyone, even for you: mustache, beards, haircut, images of life, in short, with the evocative power of death“.

*The Villa Reale is a neoclassical palace in the center of Milan, nowadays home to the modern art gallery of the city.

Antica Barbieria Colla’s characters: Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

It was back in 1966 when Guido Mantovanini, second owner of the barber shop, received an unexpected call. There were many famous people who were daily sitting on Antica Barbieria Colla chairs, but being chosen by the English Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was really a thrill.

Here we tell you through the memories of Franco Bompieri that time.

« We were about to close the shop that night in September 1966. The Clubino janitor stopped in the doorway and with displayed indifference said:

“Tomorrow, around ten-thirty, Prince Philip of Edinburgh would come to get shaved”.

Guido Mantovanini, the owner, who always respected the rule that all customers are the same, at that announcement whitened a little, and said:

“Get ready”.

“Is it for tomorrow, isn’t it?” I resisted.

“It’s for tomorrow, but we get ready nevertheless”.

Prince Philip was in Italy for a hunting party, organized by the Marquis Medici del Vassello in his reserve “La Mandria” in Piedmont.

After the hunt, a big party at Palazzo Belgioioso, residence of the Marquis; to sleep the Prince had however preferred the “Clubino” guesthouse , very close to Palazzo Belgioioso and Antica Barbieria Colla. »

The second time since 1904

On March 9 2020 Antica Barbieria Colla, having acknowledged what was happening in Italy due to the increase in Covid 19 cases, decided to close to protect the health of its customers and collaborators.