Friendship with Fontana, theatre and sculpture: Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milanese with cuttlefish bones

He exuded a thoughtful sweetness, probably since he was young when he preferred patient work in the studio to festive social gatherings. And probably since he was a child he exhibited that wise and contemplative gaze with which he investigated the sand of the Marche and Romagna coasts that filled his summers. He said that right there, on the shoreline, his art was born, sprung from cuttlefish bones. He began, he claimed, one day to collect those remains, those alien and perfect limestone monoliths brought by the sea, and he began to carve them, composing mysterious alphabets of signs on them as if on sheets of paper. He had become a medium who tried to decipher the mysterious beyond matter.

The drawers of the studio in Via Vigevano that the sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, who died yesterday evening, the eve of his 99th birthday today, had brought to Milan, his beloved adoptive city for 70 years now and which, just a stone's throw from the Navigli, secretly smelled of the Adriatic, remain full of cuttlefish bones.

Pomodoro was born in Morciano di Romagna but soon moved to Orciano di Pesaro, and then was sent as a teenager to Rimini to study. Here he graduated as a surveyor, and then spent a few years again in Orciano where American literature - Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald - and two Italians who were great admirers of America - Vittorini and Pavese - struck him. He enrolled in economics. Bologna and above all, enrolled in the civil engineering corps, he participated in the Reconstruction until '57.

But Pomodoro had already arrived in Milan in '54, with cuttlefish bones in his pocket and the dream of sculpture. With him was his younger brother, 4 years younger, Giorgio Pomodoro, known as Giò, with whom he had shared the beginning of his career. In fact, they had both started out as goldsmiths, becoming set designers and then artists. Two parallel paths that split in the '60s, and every time Arnaldo spoke of Giò, who passed away in 2002, he was moved to tears.

The theatre paid tribute before the artistic environment (the first exhibition took place in '55 at the Galleria del Naviglio) to pay tribute to Arnaldo. The consecration as a sculptor came instead after the meeting, above all with Lucio Fontana , a close friend, almost a father, who guided his growth in the golden years of Brera, and who shared with him the brief season of the Gruppo Continuità , or Gruppo C, an avant-garde blessed by the critics of Argan and Ballo and which lasted from '60 to '63.

However, unlike Fontana, Pomodoro did not frequent Jamaica very often, a worker too geometric to be confused by the glasses, a frequent visitor of a Milan where he was on first name terms with Sottsass and Pivano, meeting with admiration, reciprocated, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.

Close to the Triennale, a good friend also of Gillo Dorfles whose longevity it was hoped he would challenge, or again of Pier Luigi Cerri as well as in one way or another of all the personalities who have made the cultural history of the city up to today, he had bought with his sister a farmhouse in the Vigevano area which for a long time became his good retreat.

After laying the spheres, cubes, cones, cylinders in some capital of the world, he always willingly returned to Milan, also finding the comfort of his family. Not only Giò but also his famous cousins. Teresa Pomodoro, actress, and Livia Pomodoro, magistrate who reached the top of the court. His favorite place, in addition to the Darsena and the drawers of his study, remained the Battaglia foundries. There where each time the bronze, pouring into the molds, gave life to the forms with which throughout his life he tried to solve the enigma of an elsewhere.