Federico Maria Sardelli

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Federico Maria Sardelli is mainly known as the leader of the award-winning baroque music ensemble Modo Antiquo, but is also a unique humorist, artist and comic writer, relatively well-known in Italy because of his monthly humour contributions to the Tuscan satirical magazine Il Vernacoliere. He's also an illustrator and the director of the Ancient Music department at the Florence Music Academy.

[edit] Comic works

Federico Maria Sardelli is a longtime collaborator of the satirical magazine Il Vernacoliere and is valued because of his satire of Italian mainstream culture, religion and religious kitsch. His nonsensical style resembles that of Monty Python and Daniele Luttazzi, but he has a recognizable style of his own rooted in Tuscan popular humor.

Notable characters and strips by Sardelli include:

• Clem Momigliano, an improbable detective who uses a 9V-battery-fueled rocket (!) and cynically exploits his servant Negro Balongo. However, Balongo is not really a slave: he agrees to be the servant (for free) of Clem since he admires Clem, which is an hero.
• Il Bibliotecario ("The Librarian") : a peculiar comic strip made always of only two frames that are variations on a common theme : in the first the librarian greets an unnamed elderly woman with an (always slightly different) improbable and archaic sentence (e.g. something like "May I help thee, my Peripatetic Friend : if I can be a Spring of Fulfillment for you, please consider me at Yor Disposal"). The woman will always ask for an (always different, and always real) improbable ancient book (e.g. the "Gabinetto Armonico" of Filippo Bonanni). In the second frame the librarian will answer the elder woman with a totally unpredictable, often nonsensical and more often heavily offensive behaviour (for example by showing her his buttocks and asking her for advice on his new tattoo, or telling her he's the "King of Fried Food" and insulting her).
• Merda ("Shit") : a mute strip where various characters are obsessed by their relationship with excrement of which they can never liberate themselves.
• Circo ("Circus"): about the adventures of a circus whose animals indulge in embarrassing activities like homosexual copulation just when the show is going on

But the talent of Federico Maria Sardelli as a comic author shows in more elaborate and unique gags like elaborate parodies of Padre Pio agiography or of Italian sagra (sort of popular festivals that Italian contadine communities once often organized ); the so-called Proesie ("Proetries") that are ineffable nonsense works sounding like:

Take care when
you move it from the sofa:
it's the very fragile
corpse of a dingo.

and the Più Belle Cartoline Del Mondo ("Most Beautiful Postcards Of The World"), that are elaborate stories built around kitsch 60's and 70's postcards (often representing children or couples), written in an absurdly baroque and archaic style and lexicon, full of wonderful linguistic inventions (like the fake Zodiacal signs : e.g. Cancellini Marika, born under the sign of the lifting...), and with exhilarating plots rich in politically uncorrectness and cynical unhappy ends ; a recurring character in these stories is that of the terrible dwarf Gargilli Gargiulo.