Aldo Buzzi, 99; filmmaker became writer late in life
WASHINGTON - Aldo Buzzi, an Italian intellectual who began his career as an architect, then turned to filmmaking alongside directors including Federico Fellini, and in his 70s emerged as the charming writer whose works appeared in American publications including the New Yorker, died Oct. 9 in Milan of a cerebral hemorrhage, said his nephew Giovanni Cavedon. Mr. Buzzi was 99.
Even as he approached his 100th birthday, Mr. Buzzi joked that he was a “young’’ writer, having arrived at literature when many of his contemporaries had been at it for decades.
He stocked his books - collections of essays, travelogues, memoirs, and even recipes - with tiny details that revealed his insatiable curiosity: the fact that Tolstoy’s chef made pastries rise by blowing into them “as if he were playing a flute’’; that an Italian physicist grew out his hair to avoid wasting time at the barber shop; that in the backwoods of South Carolina there were “mailboxes on the edge of the forest where there are no houses.’’
A defining relationship in Mr. Buzzi’s life was his friendship with Saul Steinberg, the Romanian-born artist who illustrated almost 90 covers of New Yorker magazine, including the iconic “View of the World from 9th Avenue,’’ a parody of Manhattanite myopia that shows two New York City blocks hulking over the United States, the Pacific Ocean, and the rest of the world.
Mr. Buzzi met Steinberg while both were architecture students in Milan shortly before Steinberg, who was Jewish, fled to the United States after being arrested under Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws. The two friends exchanged weekly letters until Steinberg’s death in 1999, correspondence now collected in the book “Letters to Aldo Buzzi.’’ Their conversations are recorded in another volume, “Reflections and Shadows.’’