Federico Maria Sardelli

Federico Maria Sardelli is mainly known for being the leader of the award-winning baroque music ensemble Modo Antiquo, but it is also an unique humorist, drawer and comic writer that has gained a relatively big fame in Italy because of its monthly humouristic interventions on the Tuscanian satiric magazine Il Vernacoliere. He's also the Director of the Ancient Music department at the Florence Musical Academy and an illustrator.

Comic works

Federico Maria Sardelli has a long-lasting collaboration with the satiric magazine Il Vernacoliere. He soon became one of the most estimated collaborators of the magazine, due to him really unique and clever humorist style. His characters can be roughly described as mercyless satire of Italian mainstream culture, religion and religious kitsch, superstition and ignorance, but this is almost always drenched in surprising paradox, clever non-sense, parodistic use of aulic speech and politically uncorrectness. He's somehow reminiscent of the Monty Python, Daniele Luttazzi, but he has a strongly recognizable style of his own that's also somehow rooted in Tuscanian popular humour. He also has no fear to indulge in scatology or "bad taste" : his witness, indeed, is full of such referrings. Recently he also begun to write political satire.

Notable characters and strips by Sardelli include:

• Clem Momigliano, an improbable detective that uses a 9V-batteries-fueled rocket (!) and cynically exploits a black slave called Negro Balongo.
• Il Bibliotecario ("The Library Man") : a peculiar comic strip made always of only two frames that are variations on a common theme : in the first the library man greets an unnamed elder woman with an (always slightly different) improbable and archaic sentences (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 Yer Orders"). 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 library man will answer to the elder woman with a totally impredictable, often nonsensical and more often heavily offensive behaviour (for example by showing her the ass 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 relationships with excrements of which they can never liberate from
• 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.