Fabrizio Falcone – Italian by name and Mozambican at heart

Fabrizio Falcone – Italian by name and Mozambican at heart

 Fabrizio Falcone has lived and worked in Maputo for nearly twenty years. He is the managing partner of the Campo di Mare/Clube Marítimo restaurant, on the Maputo waterfront. He loves the sea, the heat, a good shrimp mboa, the colours of Mozambique, a country he would not trade for anywhere else on earth.

But how did an Italian, trained sociologist, decide to emigrate to Mozambique and venture into the restaurant business? “Out of admiration and friendship”, Fabrizio comments. Two words that represent his values in life, according to him, immediately adding two more words that are his most important worlds: “the sea and, above all, my daughters.”

It was in 1996 when the city council of Térmoli, the Italian city where Fabrizio lived at that time, invited master Malangatana to paint a 40-metre canvas. Malangatana worked uninterruptedly for 10 days, failing to complete the immense work. It was only in 2001 that the master completed the triptych, which he donated to the city, and it was there that Fabrizio Falcone met the great Mozambican painter. “Great admiration for the work and for the man, a universal artist and a generous human being who made me fall in love with Mozambique,” Fabrizio Falcone comments. Then came the collaborations with Malangatana, during the Italian cooperation project “Cinemarena”, of which Fabrizio was the main manager from 2004 to 2012, with some temporal and geographical interruptions.

“Cinemarena was the most beautiful and interesting project that I could have chosen,” Fabrizio says

“Cinemarena was the most beautiful and interesting project that I could have done,” says Fabrizio. “I got to know the whole country, the most distant villages, where we used to do health education through cinema, – he remembers – weeks and weeks of travel, and right after sunset, setting up the screen, projecting the films, theatre activities, in short everything that served to provide information about HIV-AIDS, uterine cancer, breast cancer… and many Q&A sessions.” That’s where the passion for the country remained for good, for its “happy and generous people, despite the many problems.” Today, he says without any doubt that he knows Mozambique more deeply than Italy…

Fabrizio recalls with particular affection the Cinemarena session in Matalana, following Malangatana’s wishes. “We projected the documentary that Isabel Noronha made about the master’s life, Ngwenha, O Crocodilo, right in the land where he was born, where he dreamed of an arts centre. It was a privilege!”

When the cooperation experience was over, the love for the country remained. I wanted to live on the coast of Inhambane. “Perhaps the most beautiful place in the world,” he says.  Friends of the Maputo indoor football team, with whom he won several competitions, invited him to become a partner in a restaurant business. Emergency project management would have helped a lot even if I didn’t have any restaurant experience, he thought. And he accepted the challenge. “Today, 250 people work with us, says Fabrizio, who is not afraid of anything. “The pandemic has been a problem, but we have endured it, appealing to our sense of responsibility, everyone tightening their belts for mutual help,” highlighting how Cinemarena has taught him a lot about this.

His love for the Mozambican plastic arts stayed with him forever. It was he who convinced his partners to make a permanent exhibition at the Campo di Mare restaurant. “We started with a collection of sculptures by Gonçalo Mabunda, to which a collection of photos by Mauro Pinto will soon be added,” explains Fabrizio, whose restaurant is frequented by a varied public, including many expats. “It’s my way of paying homage to the memory of Malangatana, contributing to the dissemination of plastic arts and music as well.” It is common to attend beautiful concerts by renowned Mozambican artists in the restaurant by the sea, Italian by name and Mozambican at heart.

Issues 71 Jan/Feb | Download.