La pazienza è la virtù dei.. Fanti 2

Within «15 Portrait 15 Poets», the portrait of Vito Riviello turns patience from a moral virtue into an expectation governed by collective formulas, where identity, language and the promise of fortune lose their stability together. Zampogna subjects the recognisability of his poet friend to two codes already worn by use: the proverb, a repository of common wisdom, and the scratchcard verdict, an anonymous formula that measures desire through an outcome. The portrait therefore does not celebrate a literary identity, but places it where personal expression and prefabricated language contaminate one another.

The incongruous conclusion «Fanti» prevents the proverb from closing upon its expected meaning. Without resolving its reference, the term can be read as a deviation that restores a margin of invention to the sentence and brings poetic language into a worn statement. Lower down, «Non hai vinto», meaning “You have not won”, converts the patience invoked by the text into an expectation immediately frustrated: it opposes the duration of virtue with the impersonal finality of a verdict. Across the face, diagonal marks and irregular fields do not operate as ornament. They fracture the continuity of the screen printed image, assimilating Riviello’s presence to a surface already used, traversed and exposed to erasure.

The work resumes the grammar of «Scratch & Win», but shifts its stakes from illusory wealth to identity. What is tested here is not only the hope of a prize, but the very possibility that a face or sentence might preserve an intact meaning within the codes of collective communication. Riviello’s recognisability persists, while writing and gesture prevent it from settling into celebratory fixity. Zampogna thus allows friendship, irony and loss to coexist: the poet emerges as an individual, but also as the site where common language is diverted and the media verdict reveals its power to reduce every expectation to a consumable outcome.