For years I’ve considered myself a massimalist.
I’m Italian, I’m Neapolitan. We are baroque people. We are about adding, getting into the abundance of love, life, colours, art, words, food, everything. We don’t throw away stuff. We are sentimental people and everything has a value to us. An old handkerchief can remind us of a particular day, a necklace of a particular person. Objects for us are about suggestions, evocations.
Also, we don’t throw away stuff because “It can always be useful”. We stuff our shops with exotic objects, our wallets with family photos, the windows of our car with praying cards, our bookshelves with books. We are curious people, we are open to change our mind even in the span of a short conversation – in fact more often than not we are also contradictory in our speaking and thinking. I’m guilty of that myself, never getting straight to the point but continuously overlapping levels and levels of thoughts. A common Neapolitan saying is: “A cap’ è na sfoglia ‘e cipolla”, meaning “The head is as layered as an onion”. We might have an opinion about everything, but deep down we question everything.
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