Giorgio Bassani: a poet hurt by history

Of pass by Buenos Aires, the historian of the art Paola Bassani, daughter of the author of Histories of Ferrara and the garden of the Finzi-Contini , evokes in an interview the personality and the work of the great Italian writer, the friendship with Pier Paolo Pasolini and the intellectual climate of the postwar period. In addition, an unpublished page, written by the novelist reproduces ferrarés when it was twenty-five years old, in which analyzes without mercy its own work

Few writers have managed to recreate and to model to an historical city in their novels with such probability and cleverness of style that the readers of those books, when taking a walk by the mentioned streets and real parks in those narrations, do it taken by the anxiety to know the corners and the footpaths where the fiction personages are eternally in a page to divulge a secret, to declare themselves enamored or to weave a treason. Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), the admirable author of Histories of Ferrara and the garden of the Finzi-Contini , is one of those little ones and remarkable creators who have dyed of irrealidad an urban space (Ferrara) or, perhaps, have sobreprinted one more a more essential reality, deeper, to the descriptions of the guides of tourism and the planes.

Bassani has done the same also with some people. DES-IT has made them, or rather it has elevated them at another level of reality. In front of me, seated to a table of the coffee the Connecting rod, she is Paola Bassani, the daughter of the Italian novelist. In the prologue of the garden…, the narrative one tells an excursion to Etruscan tombs made in company of friends, in April of 1957. In the retinue there is a girl of nine years, Giannina, "of character cheers and expansive", whose questions take to the narrator to decide that, finally, it will write the history of the aim of a youth love and the tragedy of a great Jewish family under the fascismo. That girl of the fiction, inspired by Paola, is today the woman which I have in front of me, arrival to Buenos Aires to speak of her father in a series of conferences. Historian of the art, specialist in the manierismo, disciple of the great student Roberto Longhi and president of the Foundation Giorgio Bassani, Paola is a woman who conserves the "character cheers and expansive of the childhood" and "sparkling eyes" over which, of as much in as much, "she passes a shade of evident pain".

Giorgio Bassani was one of the Italian intellectuals more assets of second half of century XX. Besides to write books of poetry ( Storie dei poveri amanti , Astrolabio , Un´ altra libertà , Epitaffio , In great segreto , I gave là of cuore ) and of stories ( Histories of Ferrara , Behind the door , the heron , the scent of the hay ), he was editor of Botteghe Oscure , the great literary magazine of the postwar period. Also one evolved as president of Italy Nostra (a created association to defend the landscape and the artistic patrimony of the peninsula) and was vice-president of RAI. Like person in charge of the Feltrinelli editions, it discovered and it published gatopardo , the famous novel of prince Giuseppe Tomasi I gave Lampedusa that had been ignored or rejected by other editorials. The works of Bassani received numerous prizes, but the name of the author reached international repercussion beyond the literary scope by the film versions of the long night of the 43 , the gold eyeglasses and, mainly, the garden of the Finzi-Contini , directed by Vittorio de Sica and winner of the Oscar of 1972 to the best foreign film.

The cinema, indeed, marked the work of Bassani from the beginning of years 50. The narrations of the Italian author were written after it began to work as cinematographic scriptwriter and were influenced by everything what learned in that office. "Michelangelo Antonioni introduced to my father in the world of the cinema - Paola Bassani remembers -. Both were native of Ferrara. They played together tennis in the Mafisa. When the racial laws entered use, papa, being Jewish, had private preserve the enter the club. Pero Antonioni and it followed in contact. Michelangelo went to Rome in 1943 and helped my father to settle in secrecy in the capital. Papa conspired against the regime from 1936 until Mussolini was dismissed by the king. He interests to me to emphasize that he did not hope to that the racial laws were promulgated to declare itself antifascist. Although it seems lie, most of the Jews of Ferrara were facist, like was it the rest of the ferrareses. In a rich and bourgeois city like Ferrara, the Duce was considered, mainly, like the creator of the Empire. In the beginning, not even the racial laws convinced absolutely my grandfathers of the sinister aspect of the fascismo. My father could study in the university; but, already graduated, he could not teach in her. He could do it, however, in the Israelite schools. In the classes that dictated, he formed the boys, little smaller than he, in the antifascism."

The conspirativas activities of Bassani consisted of meetings between intellectuals in whom it struggled the situation of the moment and in the writing and antifascist publication distribution. This last task forced to the writer to continuous displacements by the peninsula. The members of the group to which Bassani belonged, origin later of the Partito d´ Azione, were consecrated mainly to a propaganda action destined to denounce the atrocities Nazi-facists and to face the analysis of how posmussoliniana Italy would have to be reconstructed. Bassani never participated in the armed warfare. It believed in which then it was called, in agreement with the thought of Croce, "the religion of the freedom".

"In 1943, the facist spies already were informed into the movements of my father. In May they stopped it. With several tens of other conspiradores he was locked up in the jail of via Piangipane in Ferrara - Paola Bassani counts -. the 25 of July, the king dismissed to Mussolini and he made it arrest. On the following day, the antifascist prisoners, among them my father, were released. Papa did not become illusions, imagined that the things were going to get worse. After Skorzeny rescued to Mussolini of its prison in the Great Sasso and of that the Duce, in agreement with Hitler, founded the Republic of Salò, it was well clear that my father had guessed right in his forecasts. He said to them to all his friends and to its family who had to leave Ferrara because it was a very small city, where all were known and it knew myself who was facist and who was not it. My grandparents and the rest of my family left Ferrara and successfully tried to merge with the inhabitants of more important cities where nobody knew them. Papa already was enamored with my mother, Valeria Sinigallia, with whom he had wanted to marry when he still was in the jail. The authorities did not allow it. But as soon as it was in freedom, those that would be my parents contracted marriage in Bologna the 4 of August of 1943.

"In November of that year, one of jerarcas facist of Ferrara was assassinated, Igino Ghisellini. The murder of Ghisellini had to be paid with the death of ten enemies of the fascismo. The dawn of the 15 of November they went to look for my father to its house. They did not find it, because it had escaped long before. The adversaries of the regime were taken in front of the estense castle, right in the center of the city. To his backs it was the pit of the strength; it faces, a pharmacy and the Fis. coffee was eliminated There with machine-gun bursts. That episode inspired to my father nouvelle the long night of the 43 , taken to the cinema by Florentano Vancini. , papa, saved in the beginning of Ferrara, took refuge in Florence and, finally, Rome. He arrived at the capital the 6 from December from 1943 with the last train that entered the station. Later the city was incomunicada."

From 1944 to the end of the war, Bassani participated in the edition of Italy releases , the newspaper of the Partito d´Azione, of which he had been one of the founders. The Partito was lay, nonMarxist, antifascist and radical. From Rome, Bassani and its woman traveled continuously to Naples and released Italy, to look for new followers and to meet with other coreligionists who worked in the diffusion of the ideals of the group. In those trips, Bassani discovered the South. In Naples, it frequented the house of great Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, whose ideas inspired to the members of the Partito d´Azione. In the trips to the south, Bassani was opened to a more sensual and primitive world. Later it continued the exploration of the landscapes and the old monuments of those regions and arrived at Sicily, guided by his friendship with the writer Car it Levi, the author of Christ stopped in Eboli.

"That dangerous and intense period that lived between the 36 and the 45 was the material with which it constructed the most important part of his work - Paola Bassani says -. During the war, in 1940, had published Città in pianura with pseudónimo, Giacomo Marchi, because as Jewish could not be published no work hers. Marchi was the last name of my maternal grandmother, who was catholic. Città in pianura is the first book, in him they appear the deep lyricism and the melancholy that bathe all their later works. Later, the war, the experience of the segregation and the fascismo provided the subjects to him of their narrative work and they turned it an author whose work noticeable and is fed by the historical circumstances. To those elements a fundamental fact was added. My father learned to count of a different way from his work like scriptwriter in the cinema. He had to learn to be made understand by an ample public. The postwar period saw the birth of the neorealism and my father directly was involved in that movement. Friend became of Mario Soldati, the author and director piamontés. For him, the script of the provincial , a film based on a book of Moravia wrote, in which Gina Lollobrigida worked. It knew Pasolini and, from the first moment, it included/understood that one in front of was a great writer and intellectual. They established a very deep friendship. It made it collaborate immediately in the magazine Botteghe Oscure and wrote together scripts. My father incorporated the group that elaborated the libreto of donna of fiume , that was filmed in Codigoro. The protagonist was Sophia Loren. Papa also collaborated with Visconti in the script of Senso ( Livia, the history of a desperate love ), a film that did not have anything to do with the neorealism, but with the historical interests of my father. Like curiosity, I can say that a single time my papa appeared in the screen like actor. Is seen it in a scene of the girls of Piazza Spagna. He is the professor who raises to the stairs towards Trinità dei Monti. In addition, it doubled the voice of Orson Welles in ricotta , of Pier Paolo Pasolini. The voice that recites the poetry of Passolini is the one of papa, not the one of Welles."

The cinematographic experience started of Literature to Bassani, it made him take contact with the reality and he returned it effective like narrator. Later the cinema, paradoxicalally, gave back it narration much more mature to the literary. It sacrificed then in his prosa part of the poetic dawn that characterized it in altars of the interest of the story.

Like example of the literary transformation that had an operation in Giorgio Bassani, her daughter reveals that, between the unpublished ones of the father, she found an adaptation popular, for the screen, of the fiancès , the famous and classic novel of Manzoni.

"In addition, the cinema changed to the technique of story of my father" - Paola says -. That is seen in Histories of Ferrara. ` the stroll before cena´ is opened with the description, to the way of travelling of which it is seen in the Giovecca privateering, the main street of Ferrara. The narrator is counting what he appears to his glance as he advances by the privateering until he arrives almost at two personages who are at the end of that perspective, visible as two tiny spots. Those two spots are the protagonists of nouvelle. In that technical resource, the Bassani writer conciliated two traditions and two techniques: cinematographic and the pictorial one. Papa had studied art with Roberto Longhi, the great historian and critic of the art. With him, he had analyzed and investigated the Renaissance perspective. The beginning of ` a stroll before cena´ is the result of that combination of knowledge."

The friendship with Pasolini had something to see with the writing of the gold eyeglasses , nouvelle in which Bassani narrates the history of a respected and prestigious doctor ferrarés, doctor Fadigatti, the condemned to the solitude and to the marginalization as soon as its homosexualidad is discovered.

"My father was a man rather mujeriego. I never knew if sometimes it had a homosexual relation. I do not create it, but on some way a vicarious homosexual experience through Literature and of its friendship with Pasolini lived. In order to write the gold eyeglasses , Paolo used itself the frecuentación of Pier and Car it Emilio Gadda, the author of the mess that of via Merulana. Papa observed and studied to give them life to doctor Fadigatti. In 1957, he proposed to them that they spent his vacations with us in Antigniano, near Livorno. My parents rented rooms in a small pension and invited to Pier Paolo and Car it Emilio. From char those that maintained with them, from the pictures who did of them in their notebooks, many pages of the eyeglasses arose Anyway …, papa said whenever the homosexualidad was one of the few things that produced certain incomodidad to him in the deal with Pier Paolo. One mainly talked about certain attitudes of Pasolini. For example, once, papa, who was very timid, had left to walk with Pier Paolo by hills of Florence. In a return of the way, they saw pass to a worker very good young man raised a bicycle. Pier Paolo, snatched by the bearing of the boy, threw several kisses to him with the hand. The boy did not make case, but my father told us after, of the shame, he had wanted to evaporate. Nevertheless, there was between Pasolini and papa a great complicity. Papa was the first person to whom Pier Paolo read ashes to him of Gramsci. And kind Pasolini was listening of Histories of Ferrara . "

The garden of the Finzi-Contini (1962) was, partly, a transposition of the love of Bassani by its wife, Valeria Sinigallia, and of the experiences that lived during the fascismo. Paola Bassani Says: "In Ferrara, a branch of my maternal family, also Jewish, had a great house, with a tennis court, which they invited to play the friends. There papa knew mother in 1941. It was a very beautiful woman. His father had inherited a great fortune, that finished losing. Mother lived with his in Pola, near Trieste, where my grandparents had an imposing villa, that had belonged to the emperor Francisco Jose. My mother the seventeen years had left orphan of father and then the family also lost that villa. Mother was itself then to live to Venice, to palazzo of a grandmother. Between Venice and Ferrara, average a short trip of train. A day, mother solved to visit her cousins of Ferrara and to spend one season with them there and, late, fell Giorgio, the young writer, who had been going to play tennis. They fell in love lost. Soon papa traveled to Venice to declare to it him."

Histories of Ferrara and the garden… were a species of answer of Bassani to the neorealism that as much had influenced in the postwar period Literature. The fact that the writer had been one of the scriptwriters of that cinematographic movement still more held the new course remarkable who took not only he, but also the thought and the aesthetic one of the time.

Giorgio Bassani came by only time to Argentina in 1983, in occasion of the Fair of Libro of that year. He gave the impression of a rigid, serious man, not too expressive. In fact, already five years ago the first symptoms of badly had begun to pronounce themselves in him of Parkinson. Later, also he suffered of Alzheimer's disease.

"In spite of everything, papa knew to fix them to it in his last years of production to continue writing. He returned to the poetry and he wrote in poems the reasons that no longer had time nor forces to develop in novels. Those poems are epitafios. In them it counts dreams, crucial moments of an existence, but mainly, minimum and revealing details of the daily life. No longer it had forces to recreate a city, since it had recreated Ferrara. During a time, papa took refuge in Lucania, the south of Italy, where he had a house with a wonderful panorama. Friend became of the neighbors with whom he commented small daily facts. There it seemed to find something to him of the climate of the preindustrial Ferrara of his childhood. That was another bow that shared with Pasolini: nostalgia of that old world, governed by another time, another rate. When their forces and their conscience no longer allowed him to continue working with tiny letter their poems-epitafios in drawn into squares notebooks, silence happened."