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Places
Ettore travels widely, for he finds it a requirement, not a
vacation. It is during these periods that he is most active
in acquiring his philosophies.* The years of 1970–1976
were especially wayfaring. In these years he had an affair with
Eulalia Grau, a young artist from Barcelona, and nearly abandoned
all conventional methods of design. Packing only his camera
and retreating into the mountains of Spain, he became a “pathetic
deserter”:
To begin with, I abandoned all recognizable styles and, as
far as I could, blanked out the past. I ignored mathematical
logic and the principles of design. Trying to deny its existence,
I ignored the whole philosophy of Madison Avenue, the degrading
philosophy of television advertising, the logic of costings,
investment, revenue, percentages, shares and money... I wanted
to know how it feels to flatten fresh grass by lying on it.12
*
A trip to the United States in 1956 with his first wife Fernando
Pivano, a translator of English literature, had a profound affect
on his sensitivity for design. Here, he worked under George Nelson
and was acquainted with many writers and poets of the Beat Generation.11
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