Meet Claudiano.jpeg's Tortellini People
In Bologna, Claudio Chiavacci's tortellini art brings joy to passersby—and himself.
Welcome to the Above the Fold! The below article is excerpted from the brand-new print edition of Above the Fold. For a hard copy that you can revisit from your coffee table/backpack/bookshelf whenever the mood strikes—plus much more!—order Issue 1 today:
To spend a long weekend in Bologna is to go on a multi-day tortellini bender. You can eat tortellini in its most traditional Bolognese form, where the mortadella- and prosciutto-filled dumplings swim in a rich, clear brodo. You can eat them out of paper cups, smothered in melted butter or bolognese, at fast-casual cafeterias, or snack on deep-fried tortellini like it’s popcorn.
You can find jumbo tortellini-shaped breads stuffed with mortadella, and when you’ve stuffed yourself, you can go to your nearest trinket shop and stock up on tortellini key chains, tote bags, and mugs.
I know this because I did all of the above in September of 2022, which is when I came across another tortellini delight: A photo of a pair of tango dancers, wheat-pasted onto a wall on the street, with tortellini in lieu of heads. Instagram sleuthing revealed the work of Claudiano.jpeg, a Bologna-based photographer and illustrator originally from Tuscany, who has been dotting Bologna’s streets with tortellini collages since June of 2021, when he decided to experiment with presenting his own photographs and collages in street-art form. (His first, a collage of a piano player, is below.)
“I started to make something funny with Bologna, for Bologna,” he says. “I make these funny things because I'm happy if people who walk on the street smile if they see my artworks.” They also function as a form of art therapy. “When I am super depressed, I make tortellini on the wall,” he says. “There are good thoughts tied to these moments, to the image of tortellini,” he says. “The nana prepares tortellini for all the family on Sunday. It is something that celebrates union between parents, nephews, all the people of the family.”
Claudio (pictured, above) attended university in Bologna, and when his family would visit, they’d gather together to eat tortellini, too. “Plus, the tortellini are very nice because they are expressive,” he says, “and if you put eyes and a mouth [on them], they’re super funny.”
Tortellini require a honed craftsmanship to make well, but they’re an ephemeral art, gobbled down in seconds. Claudio’s pieces aren’t that different—once they’ve been affixed to the street, they last for about two to three weeks until they disappear. Claudio is a photographer, so they live on in his own images (and on his popular Instagram). Ahead, he shares the stories behind some of his favorite pasta pieces.
1. “In Bologna a journalist published an article about me and he defined me as the ‘Banksy of Bologna,’” Claudio says. “The girl with the tortellini balloon I made as a citation—it reminds me of Banksy.”
2. Claudio had to re-make this image of tango dancers after using tortellini from a grocery store in his first iteration. “People weren’t very happy...it’s something very dangerous—don’t do that in Bologna, just use real tortellini, not tortellini from the supermarket,” he says. “This collage is called The Last Tango in Bologna. It is about my ex-girlfriend, because she really loved to dance tango, but we never danced together. So this was to reconcile with my past.”
3. The woman in this photograph lives in Claudio’s neighborhood. “The phrase means, your smile is a revolution. I made this collage because I’d split up with my ex-girlfriend; in that period we tried to come back together. When I saw her after two or three months, she was smiling, and I thought that her smile was a little revolution for me.”
4. For this piece, Claudio swapped the tortellini for its larger cousin, the cappelletto, another regional staple. “This is about how sometimes the culture of a city is heavy,” he says.
5. “The guitar player is a dear friend who lives very close to my house,” Claudio says.“I put this tortellini guitarist on the wall during the night, and in the morning someone had drawn a cigarette and smoke [coming out of its mouth].”
6. “The little guy is my flatmate, and the other guy is a friend that I photographed with his Vespa,” Claudio says. “I really love motorcycles because my father was a mechanic of cars, mopeds, and motorcycles.” Like many of his works, this came out of a need for a pick-me-up. “In that period, I suppose that I was very sad,” he says. “I needed to do something that makes me happy.”
Claudio's posters always make me laugh! I love spotting them around Rome—still need to visit Bologna to capture even more!