Log book

Syusy gets to Imperia, where she visits Villa Grock, the house of the Swiss circus artist who became famous with the name Grock. Syusy is spellbound and the thing that most strikes her is the way in which this clown planned the symbolic decorations that characterize the house. You would almost think that the columns can represent little clubs, a fundamental object for jugglers, but there are also references to the stars and a lot of spirals, symbols of the infinite!

Together with the executive officer Alberto Bellotti, Syusy goes to discover this place, a cultural heritage entirely conceived and designed by the clown. The whole villa is a work of art, a bit like being an actor.

The style is difficult to identify. In effect ... there’s a bit of everything! Quotations from Indian and other types of architecture. It’s a true monument to the imagination. There are also allusions to alchemic aspects and esoteric, like the “orange tree fountain.”

Actually the historian Antonio Vassallo explains that this external eccentricity corresponds to an internal depression: Grock was romantically depressed, one also notices it from the contrast between the wonder of the outside of his villa and the inside, which is more rigorous and linear. Syusy makes hypotheses and imagines that perhaps it takes a certain rational sense to do a clown act, where in reality it is never instinct that prevails. Indeed, perhaps precisely order is at the basis of madness and the comic element.

Grock’s bust, inside the villa, reminds one a bit of Totò and also Batman’s Joker, an ironic face hiding a world. The human being is also these two different faces!

Today, in Imperia, many clowns are following in Grock’s footsteps, like the Sorrisi in Pillole association, which does performances above all in hospitals to make children and the elderly smile. A difficult enterprise at times, but one that gives great satisfactions!