This interview is part of a series of seven interviews on Fuori! (including this one, as well as those with Angelo Pezzana, founder of Fuori!, Maurizio Gelatti, Vice President of the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori!, Maurizio Cagliuso, Archivist and Librarian of the Fondazione Angelo Pezzana-Fuori!, and the activists of Fuori!, Enzo Cucco, Anna Cuculo and Riccardo Rosso). These interviews were collected during summer 2024 thanks to a Scholarship Catalyst Program grant from Texas Tech University (Office of the President, Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President for Research) and are to be considered as dedicated to Angelo Pezzana.
Vera Fraboni is an architect and was an activist of Fuori! since 1971.
Thank you for this interview, Vera. Would you like to talk about your years of activism in Fuori!? How did you participate and in what events?
First of all, it is important to say that I was born in 1954 in a small town in the province of Ancona in the Marche region of Italy, and even as a young man, I was aware that my sexuality was oriented and attracted to the male gender. In the early ‘70s, I do not remember exactly from whom, but I think from a young man in the village, I heard about Fuori! in Rome, at the Radical Party headquarters in Via Torre Argentina 18, and about Mariasilvia Spolato, an activist who was always working with cyclostyle, therefore stained with ink.
I remember that at the newsstand at the Senigallia railway station I saw issue number zero of the magazine Fuori!. Amid much reluctance, fear, and indecision, I bought it. Reading this magazine shocked me because, until that time, we – we homosexuals, as the word gay was not yet in use – lived in hiding. We met in latrines, in the dark of the last rows of cinemas, in parking lots. Fuori!, instead, was inviting us to come out, to declare ourselves, and this was extremely scary for me, but at the same time, I felt that something very important was beginning.
My participation in Fuori! materialized in 1976 when the Radical Party took part in the first national elections, and besides many homosexual candidates, I was also on the lists. This was an acknowledgment, still in a position between the said and the unsaid; however, I began to interact with the Radical Party and, of course, Fuori! and its members. In 1974, I attended the Radical Congress at the Teatro Pier Lombardo in Milan, and there my awareness began to solidify. I knew that Angelo Pezzana had been demonstrating in Red Square in Moscow and Enzo Francone in Tehran.
In 1977, I was studying Architecture at the University of Venice, and through the Venetian Fuori!, I was asked to participate in a demonstration in Saint Mark’s Square on the occasion of the Biennale del Dissenso, directed by Carlo Ripa di Meana. At the Sala del Cinema on the Lido, a film by Sergei Parajanov – a Russian director and homosexual who had been banned by the Soviet regime from attending in person – was shown. We made a symbolic demonstration with chains on our wrists. The weekly magazine L’Espresso was present and published a comprehensive article.
In those same years, the MIT (Movement for Transsexual Identity) was born, still within the Radical Party: I watched it with great interest without understanding why. I continued to interact with various members of Fuori!, from Angelo Pezzana, Enzo Cucco, Enzo Francone, and Marco Silombria from Turin to Italo Corai from Pordenone. The interactions never stopped; there was always a common thread.
In 1976, Angelo was elected substitute deputy to take over in the second part of the legislature, thus gaining institutional recognition.
Placing the Fuori! experience in my life, this movement became my social acknowledgment and helped me understand that my attraction towards the male gender was not something that belonged only to me but was something much more widespread. Therefore, it helped me not to fall into the ghetto of isolation. There was a referent, a party that had taken charge of our requests.
For me, it was the connection that kept me from feeling alone in a small-town reality that bullied me for my feminine ways. At that time, I knew of homosexuals who were seen as village caricatures. Clearly, I did not want to be a caricature. Fuori! made me realize that my homosexuality was something social, political, and that I had the right to live it fully, not in the dark. This is the importance that Fuori! had for me: it kept me from feeling marginalized and ghettoized.
Of course, I had to go to the Radical Party in Rome and Turin to the congresses. I also contacted the Radical Party in the Marche, where I met Monica Galdino Giansanti, the first transvestite – at least in this region – who claimed through articles in Fuori! her right to be a man but also to be Monica when she wanted.
In giving you a response to this first question, I had to delve into my mental archive. Today, I am very focused on my present, and I am working to lay the foundations for a happy and peaceful future.
The Radical Party congresses, always held in early November, were an opportunity to meet other members of Fuori! and participate in political and congressional decisions.
Finding a community is important.
Of course. The purpose of Fuori! was to affirm: “Come out of hiding, declare yourselves because you are no longer alone.” This was the meaning of the movement, that did not exist yet in the years of the protests in Sanremo by Angelo and others at the psychiatry congress. Until then, homosexuals were considered mentally ill.
I remember in Senigallia there was Ninni, a high school English teacher, a very cultured and eccentric person who I went to for private lessons. I looked at him with admiration: Ninni was mocked but respected because he was a high school teacher, a music and French literature scholar, among his various skills. When I told my mother that I only felt comfortable with people like him, she asked me why, and I replied, “Because I feel like him.” She commented, “But you are not like him.” Then, she suggested that I go to a doctor, a family friend, who asked me if I liked men. This was when I understood how my real battle was beginning. I told him no because I did not want to be medicalized, and I told myself that from then on, I would have to do it alone. I realized that from that moment onwards, my fight and my life began, and subsequently, Fuori! played a decisive part.
Up to this point, you have already given several interviews and conducted video interviews. I wanted to ask what aspects of your life you want to share.
I am keen to share and talk about my whole life.
With the Radical Party and Fuori!, I have always fought for people’s rights. While I was the one fighting for the rights of others, it took me 43 years to give myself the chance to correlate harmoniously psyche and body. I always felt dissatisfaction within me, and it was only after a casual encounter that I understood why I was not feeling well. It was very simple: I desired to relate to the male gender, not as a man, but as a woman, and this made me restless. I never had complete gratification; I was always frantically searching for sex until I gave myself the right to my true identity. Fabrizio lived as Fabrizio the architect; he had successes, whatever you want. But Fabrizio was a woman, and at 43, Vera was born. Right away, I had proof that I was on the right path for my life. In fact, within a few weeks, I was cured of all psychosomatic diseases: psoriasis, dermatitis, and herpes.
I was lucky enough to be introduced at the Cocoricò by Daria Bignardi, who invited me to the TV program Tempi Moderni on the TV channel Italia 1. I was on stage, dressed in a Prada acid green sheath dress, and while Daria was introducing me as Vera Fraboni, an architect from Senigallia, photos of me in a suit and tie were scrolling on the mega screen. This was my outing in a very short time and almost without realizing it. In fact, I flew home in the evening and left in the morning as a man. Leaving the house, I recalled that a few hours earlier I had done my TV outing, so I went back, and left again as a woman, receiving praise from photographer Mario Giacomelli at a coffee shop over a cup of coffee.
Why did it take me 43 years to give myself the right to harmonize my temperament with my body and live as a woman? The reason was very simple; I asked myself in psychotherapy several times. The problem was not to displease my mother. These outings are a problem for parents even today, let alone back then for a woman who came from the war and held people’s judgment in high regard, which I totally disregarded. The people who loved me stayed close to me; the others left. So, it was really a matter of cleaning up the acquaintances.
With Vera’s birth, I have become a less problematic person, who talks about herself confidently, because she is clear about things both in her head and in her physical being. I talk about this willingly, not because I must teach something. I always say, this is my life experience; it started 50 years ago, with Fuori! being very important. Even though for geographical reasons, I did not fully experience militancy with Fuori!, I still managed to buy that issue number zero of the magazine and be shocked by what was being asked of us, such as to “come out” into the open. There and then I said to myself, I cannot do it. However, belonging to Fuori! was a great school of life, and I still remember it with emotion.
Professional lives run parallel with identity issues. You work in the visual arts: would you like to talk about your background as an architect and what types of architecture you combine in your work?
I am very keen to say that I was also born with a great passion for Art, that manifested itself as a child with drawing. In addition, I had an uncle who introduced me to I Maestri del Colore from the Fabbri Editore series: he explained and told me about the movements in art history. My parents, also under the recommendation of my teachers, facilitated me toward an artistic course of study even though it was not clear yet that it was architecture. Therefore, after middle school, I went to study in Urbino at the art school, where my decision to continue my studies at the Faculty of Architecture in Venice matured. My parents have always supported me, sometimes even beyond their financial possibilities.
In Venice, my passion for architecture, sculpture, dance, including film, theater, and fashion grew stronger. However, my architectural training was not fully nurtured during the post-1968 years because planning was often dismissed as bourgeois and non-revolutionary. Art history exams were replaced with sociology courses, all from a political perspective that I did not agree with. Fortunately, I managed to enroll in Maestro Carlo Scarpa’s planning course, and I felt reborn. I had intended to ask him to supervise my thesis, but Carlo Scarpa tragically passed away, slipping fatally in a store in Japan. It was then that I realized I needed to complete my degree with the first available thesis topic, knowing that I would continue to study and research more deeply on my own afterward, and so it was.
In 1981, I completed my degree and passed the state exam. By November, I had my VAT number, my registration with the Order of Architects, and from there, I embarked on my professional and academic journey.
My architectural language is definitely contemporary, rooted in the classicism of Palladio and the architecture of the ‘30s, up to Giò Ponti, Ignazio Gardella, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Vico Magistretti, Gae Aulenti, and Achille Castiglioni, all Masters that I have studied and continue to study. Consequently, always having in mind Maestro Scarpa’s classes, I found certain things again, I recognized myself in them, and here is what I am designing today.
Today, my language, that synthesizes all these experiences, is reflected in my work in both interior design and architecture. I am passionate about design and the study of light, meaning both lamps and illuminated objects. No project of mine begins without a thorough analysis of the interaction between natural and artificial light. A home changes throughout the day as it interacts with these elements. For me, light is crucial because it creates emotions within the interior.
A house without a thorough study of light is not a complete project: in fact, it is not a project at all. A few years ago, during a period when I felt a strong need to create –
because the urge to create is something that I experience daily, whether it involves a house, a lamp, or inserting a bolt into something else – I asked myself, what else can I do? I realized that I wanted to design jewelry, thought about it and started configuring my jewelry design. Naturally, I found that the key to my expression was in architectural details, therefore the geometric shapes, the circle, the square, the equilateral triangle. I remembered when I was a kid, folding pieces of notebook paper and turning them into spatial shapes.
My jewelry designs stem from this approach: a square folded into four, a flap that opens on both sides, and flat figures that become three-dimensional and decoration for the wearer.
Your introspection in your work as an architect leads me to consider that the forms of your jewelry are inspired by Calder’s mobile installations.
While Calder used forms that we could describe as enlarged and informal drops floating in space, mine can be traced exclusively to geometry.
During my professional experience, I was called by architect Enrico Astori to collaborate with Driade, where I got to know his sister Antonia Astori and Adelaide Acerbi, his wife. I also met Enzo Mari, Dino Gavina, Bruno Munari, deepening my knowledge of the basics of design and architecture.
In twenty-plus years of weekly psychotherapy, I went digging not only where it was necessary to live better, but also into things that that resonated from my past. For example, I took part in the struggle to close the asylums in the days of Franco Basaglia and Franca Ongaro: I myself, having friends who were studying medicine, namely psychiatry, approached David Cooper’s Death of the Family (1972), so over these twenty years I took back all the things that were in the storage of my memory and I was able to give them a fulfilled answer.
This also led me to live in my own inner world through the Buddhist practice of the Lotus Sutra. My spiritual search began at a young age, not including Catholicism, in which I did not recognize myself. I searched within the East but did not find something that belonged to me until about eight years ago, taking up the invitation of my Buddhist and dying cousin, I began reciting the Buddhist mantra Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō, and today I am here recounting my life with great joy and simplicity.
I went through, without getting involved, the heroin period, the years of terrorism and the Red Brigades, Toni Negri’s April 7, Emilio Vesce, and even the AIDS period. Not getting involved was difficult and involved a balancing act. I managed to pull it off because I had this innate passion that always led me to search for the beautiful at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and at the Galleria d’Arte dell’Accademia di Venezia. For me, the discourse around architecture, painting, jewelry, and lamps is all part of this great passion that at moments reveals itself at different times in different ways.
Photo Credits: Filippo Sorcinelli
© Courtesy of Vera Fraboni
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