From Lída Baarová to Eva Herzigová, a small atlas of the Italian-Czech relations from an erotic viewpoint.
When you met them they were shy, reserved, with an indefinite look of tender lunacy in their eyes, while sipping their tea at the Louvre or at the Slavia (early version), or while biting a palačinka or a Sacher Torte at Letná Park or, more frequently, at a concert at the National Theatre or in a bookstore in the Golden Triangle to look for Hrabal’s latest work.
Or else, you would see them getting off at Národní Třída, but also at Anděl or at Kampa, and the recorded voice in the trolleybus always sounded like theirs: winding and impenetrable, charming and mysterious to a Mediterranean ear. You would be willing to get off the tram together with them and ask: “Hi, who are you? What do you do? How do you live…?” following the classical lady-killer Italian handbook which would conquer them or scare them, you never knew at these latitudes…To make the situation worse there was not even a song by Karel Gott to hear, a singer who unfortunately was by then (but also now) totally unknown by most of Prague-lover Italians…
Yet, without troubling Vitaliano Brancati, it’s easy to rediscover an evident truth, which even the most tasteless globalisation can hardly bury and that we’ll reveal it to you in a whisper: behind each Italian visiting Czech Republic there’s nearly always a woman who he’s pursuing.
To explore this magic thread, these underground geometry (not only pheromones and pale blue eyes, not only blond hair, not only genotypes attracting each others…) perhaps you ought to be a psychologist or an ethnologist, but we are not.
We can only recognise the fact that, from Lída Baarová onwards, we Italians have paid (and have actually been paying now) this tribute to the Bohemian beauty. With bashfulness, without falling into the myth of an easy sexual conceit half tenderness half simple adventures, half big love story half casual affairs: they’re magical balances. Italian tightrope walking, in fact.
To find again the culprits of this fertile medley would be a titanic task. Eva Herzigová, Alena Šeredová and Ivanka Trump are only few of the full-bodied responsible persons. Going back in time, even an unpredictable Barbara Bouchet, the actresses of Czech cinema of the “New Wave” from the Sixties, some models landed to star in cinema or TV. Among the new entries are now many of the protagonists of the film “Kolja”, like Blanka, the young violoncellist player who is taught by professor František.
Even today, in the consumer Prague invaded by backpackers, the repentance of indomitable singles is studded with “fatal encounters”. These are encounters that have caused the fall of the most fortified posts of confirmed bachelors and apparently indissoluble marriages.
Of course there was the extenuating circumstances of the poetry of the places: the romanticism of Mariánské Lázně, the Jelení Skok and the festival of the cinema in a bewitching July in Karlovy Vary; a climb up the hill of Spielberg in Brno (a melancholic and Risorgimento experience), which was the dearest place to Piero Chiara as well.
Then, the most obstinate ones, would meet Czech beauty (the one with a capital B) even in the most improbable places: a meeting in Pilsen, a sight seeing tourist walk in Kutná Hora or else in Český Krumlov, a visit to a factory of glasses in Jablonec, an excursion to Český ráj.
In most cases, it ended up with a love story which was longer than the Vltava, more winding than the Elba, but which ran safe over the years surviving waterfalls and stagnation.
Perhaps, in our love affairs, a dose of provincialism was also involved. As a matter of fact, before 1989 a trip to former Czechoslovakia was for an Italian an adventure into an unexplored country. Even an anodyne hostess of Csa or Čedok (even if she hadn’t so many curves) could make an inexperienced peninsular or even an islander lose his head.
Then, we have already told about it, there’s a distinguish Prague bearing, a certain savoir-faire involving apparent distraction and cruel seduction to which Italian hearts were not at all accustomed. Last but not least, and we really say this without any hint of malice, a concept of eroticism (and of sex) diametrically opposed to ours. Could it be different? Of course not: joining a parish in Catania (or in Voghera, for example) was really different from living laically in Ostrava or in Liberec. Catholic culture and Hussite reminiscences. That subtle individualism and Czech rebellion could easily jeer at those Italian bigots. For example wearing T-shirts without bras and mini-skirts with the utmost nonchalance. In brief, those were far away worlds that when they met would create the most vaporous emulsions of feeling.
Turbulent hormonal explosions, as told before, occurred by chance even along the Adriatic Riviera up to the Dalmatian coast. Traces have been found, as some witnesses reported, even during ingenuous holidays in Šumava and God only knows where else.
Reversing the question (since everything seems to be circular) we might as well wonder at the charm of the Italians which enchanted Bohemian and Moravian beauties.
But at this point the matter would become rather complicated. Skipping the clichés about good cuisine and music, the banality of the “Italian romanticism” and their tender heart, History, Dante, Boccaccio and the Renaissance, we risk falling into a dramatic void.
Do you really think in your heart of hearts they tell us the truth?… It may be pride or discretion, but Czech women in love would never tell you the truth on the italský púvab!
by Ernesto Massimetti