Federico Patellani's Radiant Images Show An Italy Of Another Time

Federico Patellani called himself “a new kind of journalist” in an article published in 1943; a journalist who learned to find “living, contemporary, thrilling” images from the movies. Because of his unique gift of “blending the values of documentary and beauty into a single photograph,” Patellani’s images have made history.

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Among Patellani’s most iconic image is the radiant face of a girl bursting through the newspaper Corriere della Sera on June 2, 1946, her features lit up with the joyous news that Italy was about to become a republic. He took the shot for Alberto Mondadori’s Il Tempo, a weekly inspired by Life and known for skillfully pairing reporting and evocative photography. It was a philosophy Patellani could embrace wholeheartedly; though journalistic photography was a profession, not an art, it had to be beautiful in addition to bearing witness. This was a fairly novel concern for the time, but a natural one for a man who had been an artist in the past. This desire to meld beauty and truth is what made Patellani the first true Italian photojournalist.

In his photos, Patellani immortalized an Italy that was trying to forget the trials of its recent past. The country was licking its wounds after World War II, while contending with a rapidly evolving cultural landscape that combined economic success, the rise of the beauty pageant and cinema’s return to glory. Slices of that tumultuous time are captured in 90 images that are now on display at the Palazzo Madama in Turin, in an exhibition entitled “Federico Patellani — Profession: photojournalist.”

Patellani didn’t limit himself to Italy. He was a foreign correspondent in Russia, reporting from the Eastern front and signing his work with the pseudonym Pat Monterosso. In 1954 he went to Greece and Turkey; the following year he traveled through southern Italy shooting television documentaries. In 1956, while traveling through America, Patellani shot a full-color movie, “America Pagana (Pagan America),” as well as a series of photographs for the weekly magazine Epoca. Epoca would later publish Patellani’s “Paradiso Nero (Black Paradise),” 160 pages covering the 1,500 miles the photojournalist traveled with his son Aldo aboard a Land Rover, driving from the Belgian Congo to Kenya.

From ancient European universities to recently-liberated African countries, from South America to the Pacific Islands, from Africa to the Amazon, Patellani traveled around the world many times over, reporting faithfully as he went. His last report was sent from Sri Lanka in 1976, one year before he died.

Here are some of the photographs Patellani took over his long and luminous career as a photojournalist.

This post was originally published on HuffPost Italy and was translated into English.

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Capture the Indie Scene in Charleston

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A glimpse at Charleston cool. All photos by Cabell Belk.

By Cabell Belk for Fathom | Gone are the days when Charleston debutantes didn’t venture above Calhoun Street after dark. Your society granny may not be brunching on the other side of the Crosstown yet, but there’s no denying it — the Holy City’s creative center of gravity is shifting north, as evidenced by a collection of increasingly guidebook-worthy micro-neighborhoods blooming near the King and Spring Street crossroads. Instead of covered markets and crab cakes, you’ll find maverick letterpress studios, small-batch distilleries, selvedge denim purveyors, bakery happy hours, and more than a handful of restaurants inhabiting repurposed industrial buildings.

Indigo & Cotton
79 Cannon St.; +1-843-718-2980
The plaid pocket squares and reversible bow ties at this 21st-century haberdashery are worthy of a Charleston society soirée, but you don’t need an address on the Battery to fall for the smart selection of Shinola watches, vintage Levi’s, and statement socks in dapper prints.

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Street artist Shepard Fairey’s mural separates Butcher & Bee from The Daily.

Butcher & Bee
654 King St.; +1-843-619-0202
One of the original Upper King Street pioneers, this BYOB craft sandwich institution is open until 3 a.m. on weekends. Queue up with just-off-the-line local chefs for late-night favorites like sweet potato banh mi and grilled gruyère with creamed kale. Daytime hours are famously limited, but next door at younger sibling takeaway spot, The Daily, early birds can pick up fried egg sandwiches with harissa ketchup and fontina, fresh-pressed juice, and Counter Culture espresso starting at 7 a.m.

Brown’s Court Bakery
199 St. Philip St.; +1-843-724-0833
Operating out of a restored 19th-century Charleston single house, Brown’s Court supplies industry neighbors like The Ordinary and Two Boroughs Larder with top-notch brioche. Walk-in regulars come for the pour-over coffee, sriracha croissants, and nightly happy hour discounts. Half-priced pecan sorghum pie and a spot on the second story side porch are the makings a fine afternoon.

Chez Nous
6 Payne Ct.; +1-843-579-3060
Lovers of rosé and Le Creuset have been swooning ever since this darling restaurant opened in a tiny alley off Coming Street. And really, you have to have a hard heart not to fall for the buttercream-painted 1835 row house with handsome wooden tables clad in mismatched vintage cutlery and a proud old chimney full of marvelous scabbed bricks. The northern Mediterranean menu — handwritten daily — may be concise (two appetizers, two mains, and two desserts), but it is lovingly composed and brilliantly executed. Always order both desserts. No one should have to choose between persimmon ice cream and ricotta crostata.

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Sit back and give in to the allure of Chez Nous.

Holy City Barber
684 King St.; no phone.
Indulge in a bygone ritual at the single-chair barber shop, where you can spin blues on an antique record player and sip bourbon while waiting your turn for a hot shave. Just don’t try to make an appointment. And don’t even think about bringing your girlfriend.

Leon’s Oyster Shop
698 King St.; +1-843-531-6500
Not that fried chicken and oysters are ever a tough sell, but Leon’s is the ultimate crowd-pleaser. A meal here can just as easily skew decadent — if you spring for the “big chicken dinner” and pair it with bubbles — or down-home (hush puppies, six-packs, and soft serve with jimmies). With a daily catch and no fewer than ten seasonal side salads, the menu is accommodating, even of calorie-counters. The cannily redesigned space, formerly Leon’s Paint & Body Shop and now a study in ramshackle chic, will speak to coolhunters and Brooklynites, but the vibe here is refreshingly come-one-come-all.

Mac & Murphy
74 1/2 Cannon St.; +1-843-576-4394
Back in 2009, a pair of visionary paperphiles took a chance on a still-peripheral stretch of Cannon Street. Six years later, their postcard-sized print shop is a destination for millennial scribes of all stripes. Use the intimate backyard writing garden to knock out your thank-you notes on Rifle Paper Co’s limited edition Rainbow Row greeting cards — or splurge on a gold foil and letterpress map of the Charleston peninsula from local creative studio 42 Pressed.

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A nod to the old world at Saint Alban.

Saint Alban
710 King St.; +1-843-531-6868
Some mornings require an expeditious caffeine hit; others call for latte rosettas and antique china. Think of Saint Alban as an homage to the European café of old, but with parking and takeaway cups and a maple-ricotta slathered buckwheat waffle on the breakfast roster. The newly-opened Upper King Street charmer (read: hand-illustrated menus, Art Deco light fixtures, and floral wallpaper) accedes to every ritual and occasion, whether you need a fireplace or a patio breeze, a honey cortado or a negroni, Wi-Fi access or a freshly printed New York Times. But if you want the owner’s opinion, there’s nothing more civilized than scones and sherry at 11 a.m.

The Alley
131 Columbus St; +1-843-818-4080
The lineup of vintage arcade games at this distribution warehouse turned retro bowling bar will take you straight back to 1992. Reserve a lane in advance or geek out on skee ball, air hockey, and Mortal Kombat. Then break for cornmeal-fried chipotle shrimp po’ boys.

Xiao Bao Biscuit
224 Rutledge Ave; no phone.
At first glance, this hulk of an old filling station looks like anything but the scene of your next lemongrass ginger beer cocktail. But experimental Asian soul food and a serious playlist have turned the scruffy parking lot into a hotspot hangout. The only thing it’s fueling these days is a citywide obsession with okonomiyaki (Japanese cabbage and scallion pancakes).

Read more on Fathom: From Alligators to Ghost Stories, the Four Sides of Charleston, Feeling the Festive Energy in Charleston, Fathom’s Guide to Charleston

Cabell is a writer in New York. She travels for the thrill of getting lost and then finding herself again, never quite the same as when she set out — and for the promise of pastries unknown.

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Survey Reveals The Simple Habits That Could Help You Live To 100

It’s quite an accomplishment to live to 100, but a survey of centenarians revealed it’s your attitude that can get you there. UnitedHealthCare released its 10th annual 100 @ 100 survey today, with clues to what helped centenarians live so long.

The survey asked 100 centenarians about their views on health, aging and keeping a positive attitude, as well as other topics.

A sunny outlook is said to be one of the key factors in living a long healthy life, according to the survey. One in four seniors surveyed said staying positive is critical for longevity, with just over six in 10 saying they overall are positive people.

Diet and exercise, unsurprisingly, also were thought to be factors. Twenty-one percent of centenarians said a healthy diet was key while 10 percent said exercise, above all, is important. Various research has backed up the virtues of a positive attitude. A 2012 Yale University found that seniors with a positive attitude were over 40 percent more likely to bounce back from disability than those who were negative. Yet another Yale University study found that older people with positive views on aging can live up to 7.5 years longer than those who view aging negatively.

Besides staying positive, nearly half of the centenarians said they stay active by taking a walk or going for a hike at least once a week, while many others reported a variety of wellness habits including stress-busting activities like meditation, as well as lifting weights. Spending time with family was also important, with 90 percent saying that spending time with loved ones makes them happy.

“The survey reaffirmed that being and feeling healthy isn’t just physical -– and that’s a lesson that seems to come with age,” Rhonda Randall, UnitedHealthcare’s chief medical officer told The Huffington Post in an email. “The centenarians tell us that mental, emotional and social health are linked when it comes to healthy aging and feeling young.”

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the survey, UnitedHealthcare also invited 100 10-year-olds to take the survey as well. When asked to describe being 100, the kids came up with adjectives like “calm” and “peaceful.” Some of them even said they looked forward to how different the world would be, with better technology, in another 90 years.

But the most striking part of the study was this: Despite being aged in the triple digits, 52 percent of the centenarians said they felt younger than their age and 60 percent said they didn’t feel old at all. Amazing.

Just goes to show, age is nothing more than a mindset.

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How To Focus On The Work That Matters

How can you spend time wisely?

We all wonder where the hours go. There’s a good reason for that — we’re absolutely terrible at remembering how we really spend our time.

Via What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career:

Hunting through data from the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other time diary projects, I came to the inescapable conclusion that how we think we spend our time has little to do with reality. We wildly overestimate time devoted to housework. We underestimate time devoted to sleep. We write whole treatises glorifying a golden age that never was; American women, for instance, spend more time with their children now than their grandmothers did in the 1950s and 60s.

Nowhere is this truer than with work. Are you a workaholic spending 75+ hours at work a week? Then you’re probably off by as much as 25 hours.

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New York's Future Is on the Water

For many New Yorkers, the May 1 opening of the new Whitney Museum in lower Manhattan signifies really only one thing: the center of gravity of America’s greatest city has dramatically and irrevocably shifted downtown. With the Whitney move, proclaim certain commentators, Chelsea and the far West Village in 2015 have become the social and economic and cultural equivalent of the Upper East Side in 1966, when Marcel Breuer’s building opened its doors on Madison and 75th Street.

Yet the Whitney’s debut on Gansevoort Street is a sign of something much more significant: it is the consecration of New York’s return as a true waterfront city. This is much more meaningful in the long run than the fact that ‘downtown’ is somehow the ‘it’ place to be — urban centers of gravity constantly shift over time, after all, depending on economic and real estate cycles. But returning to the water… now that’s a big move. Ever since the grid system of Manhattan was laid out by far-sighted city planners in 1811, New York has done its best to turn its back on the majestic Hudson and East Rivers and the vast New York Harbor. While commerce was first made on the water, by trading the beaver skins that came from upriver, wealth sought to be inland, away from the waterfront. Robber barons built their mansions on Fifth Avenue and midtown, not on the water’s edge. By the turn of the 20thcentury, the height of fashion was to look out over the green expanse of Central Park, which became a powerful magnet for orienting the city both northward and inland. Not for nothing was the Metropolitan Museum built on Fifth Avenue and the Park.

The rivers and the harbor, after all, were foul, industrial places. New York’s first hospitals — like Bellevue and the old Gouverneur Hospital were on the water’s edge — bodies and effluvia could easily be whisked away by the tides and the river currents. Though Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller would help romanticize the waterfront , the fact remains that for close to two centuries, it meant rotting piers, desolate places where mobsters could take care of their enemies, social and economic shadiness. Socially, it meant Hell’s Kitchen and hookers on 11th Avenue.

Over the last ten years or so, this has been changing dramatically. In New York as in other coastal cities and ports around the world, waterfronts that were long derelict because of the transformation of the shipping industry, came to be seen as potentially valuable inner-city real estate. From Battery Park City to South Street Seaport and Hudson Park, activity on New York’s extensive waterfront has now extended to the Brooklyn Bridge Park and Red Hook. The 15-acre Hudson Yards project along the Hudson River in midtown proclaims itself to be the largest private real eastate development in the United States; it is certainly the largest development in New York since Rockefeller Center was built in the Depression. Tomorrow, other projects will include the Greenpoint waterfront and the Brooklyn Navy Yards, to name only some of the most important.

What is surprising, in fact, is just how late New York has come to the global waterfront rediscovery party. London’s South Bank began to be developed in the 1950’s, while the massive Canary Wharf business district, which replaced the old commercial entrepots along the Thames, started rising in the late 1980’s. The competition for the waterside Sydney Opera House were unveiled dats back to 1956. Shanghai’s Bund began to be restored to favor following Deng Xioping’s economic reforms in the mid 1970’s. For cities like Miami, Tel Aviv and Rio de Janeiro in the post-war era, premium housing almost always overlooked the water. In New York, it rarely did.

But New York is in full transformation now. New York’s rediscovery and redevelopment of its waterfronts are also going hand in hand with a revolution in urban lifestyles. Apart from Staten Island residents, few New Yorkers ever dreamed of setting foot on a ferry. Now they are much more frequent, plying the waterways separating Brooklyn and Manhattan, crisscrossing the Hudson and the East River. Mayor Bill de Blasio is calling for an even more massive increase in the their use. New York, says the Mayor, “is the ultimate coastal city.”

Somewhat counter-intuitively, developing the water’s edge is the best defense AGAINST the water. Building resilient up-to-code structures along its coasts means New York will better be able to withstand the ravages of rising sea-levels and the next Hurricane Sandy. The redevelopment and rediscovery of its waterfronts thus augur well for the health of New York in the 21st century.

To glimpse the promise of New York in the new century, take a ferry from South Street to Governors Island. As the boat plies the water, look back at Manhattan, with its gleaming new towers around Ground Zero. To the west are the soaring towers of Jersey City, then the urban archeology of Ellis Island, and finally the Statue of Liberty. To the east Brooklyn, now almost as dense and shiny and new as Manhattan. This is truly one of the greatest urban seascapes in the world, as breathtaking in its way as Venice, Hong Kong Harbour or Rio. This is the New York of the future.
___________

John Rossant is the founder and chairman of the New Cities Foundation, a leading global non-profit institution dedicated to improving cities everywhere.

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North Korea's Kim Jong Un Cancels Trip To Moscow: Russia

MOSCOW, April 30 (Reuters) – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will not attend events in Moscow next week commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Europe, the Kremlin said on Thursday.

“He has decided to stay in Pyongyang,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call. “This decision is related to (North) Korea’s internal affairs.”

The trip would have been Kim’s first overseas since he took power in 2011 after the death of his father.

Shin Kyung-min, a member of South Korean parliament’s intelligence committee, had said on Wednesday that South Korea’s spy agency expected Kim to go to Moscow although there was no independent confirmation of the plan.

Yang Moo-jin, an expert at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said Kim could have boosted his image by going to Moscow and it was not clear why he had decided not to go.

“He was at the stage in his leadership where he should have been seen working on external affairs and trying to overcome international isolation, especially in light of the negative publicity he’s got in recent months,” he said.

“By visiting Russia, he would have been able to exert pressure on China and also on South Korea, and he would have been able to improve his own image by going over there with his attractive wife and speak in English, which he surely must be able to do.”

But some analysts had questioned whether Kim, believed to be in his early 30s, would choose for his first overseas visit an event where he would share the stage with several leaders and have less control over proceedings than in a two-way summit.

Peskov said about 30 foreign leaders would attend anniversary events but not all would attend a military parade on Red Square on May 9. These include German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is expected to be in Moscow only on May 10.

Many Western leaders are shunning the anniversary events in a show of displeasure over Russia’s actions during the crisis in Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists are fighting Ukrainian government forces. (Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Moscow and jack Kim in Seoul, l Writing by Timothy Heritage, Editing by Elizabeth Piper and Mike Collett-White)

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Watch Jeff Bezos' New Rocket Take to the Skies For the First Time

Yesterday, Blue Origin’s New Shepard space vehicle ventured out on its first developmental test flight. The Jeff Bezos-founded organization reports that the launch was a success—though it didn’t manage to recover the propulsion module as it hoped.

Read more…



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