Pisa, new culture councilor: he is Pierpaolo Magnani, vigilante and video maker who dreams of "a living city"

Change at the Department of Culture of the City of Pisa. Andrea Buscemi, who is officially leaving the post of alderman for personal reasons, has stepped down. “After a year at the helm of the Municipality of Pisa,” Michele Conti, mayor of the right-wing junta that administers the Tuscan city, stressed in a note, “I considered it useful and necessary to give new impetus to the governmental action, bringing into the council new energies that will have to work with the rest of the team to achieve the objectives set in the mandate program. I expect a change of pace, maximum commitment and above all a full availability of energy and time in tackling this prestigious assignment in the interest of the citizens of Pisa.” The City Council’s is a mini-replacement, since also leaving office is Rosanna Cardia, alderman for education, who will be replaced by Sandra Munno, a civil lawyer by profession who specializes in family law, inheritance and real rights.

Buscemi, a Pisan actor and theater director born in 1963, had been much criticized since the beginning of his tenure: last year, for example, he had called Keith Haring ’s Tuttomondo mural (the only work by the American artist designed to be permanent) “very modest and banal,” receiving a chorus of unanimous criticism, and at the beginning of the year he was involved in the heated controversy that arose around the street artist Ozmo’s exhibition. Not only that: in commenting on the end of Buscemi’s term, the newspaper La Nazione pointed out that the former alderman was also “particularly challenged” for the “judicial affair in which he was accused of stalking his ex-girlfriend.” An affair from which Buscemi was acquitted due to the intervening statute of limitations. La Repubblica also recalls that the Women’s House of Pisa had promoted a collection of signatures calling for Buscemi’s resignation.

The new councillor for culture in Pisa is Pierpaolo Magnani, born in 1965, in League quota: for him two degrees from the University of Pisa, one in Economics and Business and the other in Cinema, Music and Theater. “Videomaker by passion,” as he is always identified by Repubblica and other newspapers, in 1990 he joined the dance company “Effetto Parallelo” of which he would later become head of the video sector. Magnani has been in the video production business since 1993 and has since produced several short films. Also active as a digital set designer for several entities in Pisa and elsewhere (such as the Teatro Sant’Andrea, the Teatro dei colori in Avezzano, and the Accademia d’Arte Drammatica “Silvio D’Amico” in Rome), he currently works as a clerk in the supervisory unit of the Livorno Branch of the Bank of Italy.

The newly appointed councillor’s goal is to make Pisa a living city: “One of the dreams I have for Pisa,” he said, “is of a lively city, full of high-level cultural initiatives but also of opportunities for pure leisure, but still healthy for all Pisans, for students who represent an asset and for tourists who should have the chance to enjoy it to the fullest. The operators who animate the leisure time will also be a fundamental resource for a shared effort so that it all takes place in a virtuous way, far from the extremes of a sad and inappropriate obscurantism and permissive laxity that generates tragic drifts for all those young people who in the high mortgage their lives and the future of a society that needs them to grow and become better. Let us all fight together ... tomorrow will thank us.”

Pictured: piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa. Ph. Credit Finestre Sull’Arte

Pisa, new culture councilor: he is Pierpaolo Magnani, vigilante and video maker who dreams of "a living city"

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