P R E S S   R E L E A S E

SPRING - SUMMER COLLECTION 2007

“TRIBUTE TO LADY CHATTERLEY”

Libertine atmosphere of an ‘antan’ Taormina in the 1920s, when rich Northern European ladies leave generous memories to those who exalted womanliness.

Sicilian Romanticism and English dandyism .

Noble and popular, masculine and feminine, Lady Chatterley is an intriguing woman, loving life.

Fragile and romantic wrapped in hand embroidered materials, sensual and desirous in string, raffia and linen macramé; elegant and warlike in soft chiffon supported by a “framework” of silk threads or lace ribbons.

Apron dresses and precious collars to dream of a woman emerging from the pages of a very famous book and becoming harmony and style.

A YOUNG MULETEER FROM TAORMINA

THE TRUE “ LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER”

            Peppino D’Allura, 24 years old, the envied partner of the German baroness Frieda Richthofen, 41 years old, wife of the English writer David H. Lawrence, in the famous “erotic sex games under the rain” that inspired the most scandalous novel of the early 20^th century, “ Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. A long story of “ ardent and strong passions” between 1920 and 1922,that the writer will later transfer from the countryside in Taormina to an English wood…

            Frieda often had lunch at an English friend’s house, a residence on the hill. And her friend would send a mule and a muleteer. Peppino would go down to her house and then together with Frieda up the hill: Frieda on the mule’s saddle and Peppino on foot. At sunset, they would go down the same path towards home.

One day Frieda’s friend waited for her guest but in vain. Held up by a summer storm out of town, the soaked baroness and muleteer found shelter in a vineyard farmhouse. The baroness was enchanted, delighted and excited by the mishap. Caring but embarrassed the muleteer found some old peasant aprons that she could somehow use to dry herself  behind a screen of piled baskets. But

she quickly went outside, naked as her mother had made her… She ran up and down the vineyard, challenging the rain and calling out loud to her timid companion  to take part in her rapture…

This is how their “games” began. Later the baroness told her husband (35 years old, six years younger than her and impotent for consumption which he hoped to cure in the sunny Sicilian weather). Frieda described all including the scandalous details that were not embarrassing for her.

Lawrence wrote everything in his novel, changing only the characters: Lady Chatterley in his wife’s place and the gamekeeper Mellors instead of the muleteer.

From “Lady Chatterley and the Muleteer”

by Gaetano Sagumbroni

(Armando Siciliano Editore – Messina)