We leave the “vice-life” responsibly

This article is published in Vanity Fair issue 20-21 on newsstands until May 25, 2021

We were indebted to Alessandro Mahmoud. Flashback, February 2020, an uninhabited villa above the Sacro Monte di Varese. The morning is cold, snowing, the crew arranges the equipment inside the large, empty and silent rooms. Everything proceeds as if poised on a precipice: we take the photos of Mahmood, we prepare the cover image, but it is quite clear that something is wrong. And that soon everything will change due to the pandemic about which, at that moment, very little is known.

You will never see that service or even that cover because in their place we started the journey of Vanity Fair which has brought us here. A journey of changes, resilience and adaptations that imposed a sort of limbo on everyone, a break lasting more than a year from the life we ​​were used to.

I was telling this anecdote to Guido Furbesco, the executive editor who joined the team of Vanity Fair recently. “What you tell me”, Guido commented, “it reminds me of a particular term, “vice-life”, a word of the poet Valerio Magrelli“. In one of his writings, in fact, Magrelli states that «whoever is on the train always wants to go somewhere and always does so in view of something else. That is, its purpose lies elsewhere. Our life is full of these instrumental and vicarious activities, in the course of which, rather than live, we wait to live or, better said, we live waiting for something else. These are the moments in which we act as a vehicle for ourselves. It is what I would call: the vice life ».

In these long months we have lived a vice-life, we have been suspended, waiting for. It was a difficult, painful journey that is certainly not over and that will continue to leave marks and wounds for a long time. Yet, in our opinion, the time has come to come back to life. Responsibly, of course. But also with great hope and above all with a look forward, towards what will be, aimed straight at the best that will come.

And here we are at the cover of Mahmood, a sort of revenge on the past: his new album will be released in June, but this is just a detail. His bright face, his desire to return to performing live is the same as we all have. And it is the same that we want to celebrate from here on, number after number.

So, for this special edition of Vanity Fair which will remain on newsstands for two weeks, we also talk about the recovery of another sector very affected by the pandemic: that of restaurants. In the following pages you will find many stories of restaurateurs who are about to leave again: starred or trattorias, famous or unknown, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that their voices, their experiences are the first step to re-embrace the wonderful social ritual of food and the even more important one of returning to life.

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