By Luo Haizhou

I, of course, dare not adumbrate the Italian lifestyle in a word as simple as 'romance'. But actually, what strike you the most when you enter the Italian Pavilion to have a look at their exhibits and the way they handle the exhibition are the impressions of the ample freedoms, naturalness and vibrancy of the Italian people in their imagination, comprehension ability and behaviors.
Coming into the exhibition room, visitors will first find a large mirror, a strip of water, lightning, and a small and transparent bridge suspended in the water, as well as a huge blue glass pearl to recreate the evocative setting of the Mediterranean. The Italians have devoted their largest space to the representation of the sea, and the exhibits, including the globally famed Ferrari racing cars, are downsized quite a bit or just hung on the wall, in sharp contrast to the vase sea area. The whole lay-out looks spacious, but nevertheless intelligent and well-balanced. I am afraid that this summary could only be a rough evaluation based on the exhibition forms, but the Italians may be telling us that the Italian way of life does not emphasize what you possess in life; instead it pays more attention to how they treat life.
In the same vein, the Italians also handle the relationship between life and arts in a special way, and the truism that arts originate from life becomes quite straightforward in the Italian Pavilion. Fashion fuses with sculptures easily here, despite the absence of models and prestige brands. Visitors could easily discern the quality and demeanor of the global fashion capital just from the posture and stripes of the sculptured models. Elsewhere, what absorbs you is the car models made out of chocolate, instead of a simple large-scale one, with the chocolates delineating the most representative lines and sides of the car, and it's by all accounts a tantalizing modern handicraft.
The exhibit items of human kind could always win the understanding smiles from visitors. There are sculptures of people in the ancient Rome being placed in front of a big mirror as if to shake hands with its mirror image, prompting visitors to think whether ancient people are curious about what is happening nowadays. All of a sudden, the sculpture brings back some remote and serious things into our contemporary life. In addition, I an wondering where they got the inspiration to cast the human faces on the screen out of an array of pastes; with the lights coming upwards, an angry face crops up in front of us. The principles of shadow play are manipulated out of our expectations, or even to our surprise.
The romance of the Italian people and their freedoms in interpretation and representation of arts dates back from a long history when you see the precious bronze statue which was made some two thousand years ago. After passing around the huge glass pearl, visitors will find the statue of a dancer, the "Dancing Satyr", which is the masterpiece among the exhibit items on display in the Italian Pavilion.
At a height of 2.5 meters, and weighing 108 kilograms, the dancing statue was fished out of the Sicilian channel in 1998. Like the armless goddess of Venus, the statue has lost its arms due to the erosion after lying at the seabed for over two thousand years, and one of its legs was also lost, with part of its hindbrain being hollowed. But just like Venus, the statue of Satyr is also exhibiting enlightening beauty and muscular build, resembling its prototype----a woodland creature in between humankind and Gods that is frequently mentioned in the Roman and Greek mythologies, and a follower of Bacchus, the God of wind. The pearl-shaped exhibition room, with a diameter of nine meters, is equipped with constant temperature controllers, and the lights are kept quite dark, with picture-taking prohibited to ensure that the bronze statue will not be negatively impacted.
It is said that this would be the only tour for the bronze sculpture, and it will never go abroad after being sent back to Italy when the Aichi World Expo winds up. Will its rare appearance on the World Expo generate an episode of millennium romance?

Pictures:
1. The outlook of (part of) the Italian Pavilion.
2. The posture and stripes of the statues among the sculptures
3. The well-arranged lay-out of water and blue lighting that recreate a scene of the Mediterranean Sea.
4. Models of Ferrari racing cars hung on the wall.
5. Chocolate car models.
6. The statue of an ancient Roman in front of a mirror
7. The Dancing Satyr.