Alla Carta

Alla Carta is a biannual Italian magazine that was conceived to 'explore the social act of eating around the table through fashion, design, art and cinema.'

It's moved some distance from this in that the food motif feels more submerged, but the magazine is highly sumptuous in terms of the quality and quantity of the (conceptual or themed) imagery and its lush print production. If you collect only a handful from the current crop of truly interesting European fashion, culture and photography magazines, think about putting Alla Carta in the frame.

Here's the publisher's description for the latest issue, 'Le Interviste Impossibili':

This issue of Alla Carta is a collection of impossible interviews inspired by the renowned radio program "Le Interviste Impossibili". In 1974, the Italian Rai radio network invited several writers to imagine encounters with illustrious figures from the past, crafting not only the questions but also the answers.

As much as possible, the program’s interviews aim to avoid the far-fetched; the various authors sift through documents and collective memory to tell the stories of their interviewees through words that were actually spoken, could have been spoken, or perhaps should have been spoken. Yet in each interview, the strong sense remains that, in the futile effort of embodying the thoughts and attitudes of others, the authors are simply narrating themselves—their own interests, fascinations, and obsessions. Whether expressed in words or images, each interview, each portrait, ultimately becomes a self-portrait.

The authors in this issue reveal pieces of themselves through the faces, words, or objects of Achille Castiglioni, Ada Lovelace, Giulietta Masina, Giuseppina Morlacchi, Kiki De Montparnasse, Lea Vergine, Mary Magdalene, Monica Vitti, Natalia Ginzburg, Virginia Woolf and many others.