Quite a peculiar book, this elegant Atlante is, according to Edoardo Sanguineti himself, more an index of a (not yet written) anthology than a real one. To describe it: there are 77 pictures of Italian writers, intellectuals, poets and artists mostly chosen by (and not by as stated in the book title -- apart from a few maybe!) Giovanni Giovannetti. They range, in alphabetical order, from Corrado Alvaro (San Luca, Reggio di Calabria, 1895 – Roma 1956) to Cesare Zavattini (Luzzara, Reggio Emilia, 1902- Roma 1989).

As an introduction, the book opens with a long interview to Edoardo Sanguineti by Erminio Risso (44 thick pages), who already edited a substantial collection of essays by Edoardo Sanguineti, full of Gramscian echoes (Il chierico organico. Scritture e intellettuali, Feltrinelli: Milano 2000). Here Sanguineti provides us with some guidelines to better understand his choice of the authors, or better the authors’ portraits, to be included in this atlas. It might be easy to dismiss a book like this as a graphically impressi

Furthemore, he applies to the Italian literary scene of the 20th century the cathegory of “miseria italiana” (transferred and re-adapted from Marx’s and Heine’s “deutsche Misere” as applied to the moral and economic status of Germany between the 18th and 19th century). The “Italian misery”, which is worthy of more than a reflection, is summarized by Risso and Sanguineti in a cocktail of provincialism, backwardness of the cultural and ideological structures, social constraints, and the difficulties inherent to a new democracy and a relatively recent unification. To sum it up: Eliot and Brecht are certainly much more “into” the century, its perspectives and limits, than Montale or even the cosmopolitan, but always snob, Alberto Arbasino.

This book is not an anthology, but a gallery of portraits. As an index to an anthology in the making, it might have included authors who played a fundamental role, in their isolation though, in the Italian Novecento. Why not to include Umberto Eco, for instance? Or some musician-intellectuals such as Luigi Nono, or Luciano Berio, the latter being, inter alia, a lifetime collaborator of Edoardo Sanguineti? If a philosopher like Carlo Michelstaedter, a forerunner of Heidegger according to some, is in, what about a giant in the International philosophy panorama such as Emanuele Severino?

Some topics in this essay:
Italian Novecento, Emanuele Severino, Reta Genoese, Feltrinelli Milano, Edoardo Sanguineti, Sebastiano Vassalli, Vassalli Genova, Tommaso Ottonieri, Paolo Pasolini, Balestrini Porta, edoardo sanguineti, gruppo 63, italian novecento, gianfranco contini, giovanni giovannetti, italian literary, 20th century, gallery portraits, sebastiano vassalli,