2012 March »

A writer in search of an editor

Mar 262012

On account of its State and Church-sponsored publishing, Italy finds itself in sixty-ninth place out of all the countries in the world with regard to free thought.

The writers of this mentally castrated country, who should have been its torch and driving force, and who, with a few exceptions, have contacts in the right places and access to subsidized publishing houses, are unable to produce anything innovative and original.

Recently the editor Bompiani suggested that film director and actor Carlo Verdone should write his biography, adding that they would provide a ghost writer to help him. In other words the biography would not be written by the film director (in fact it has already been published by the above-mentioned editor) but would largely be written by the ghost writer. Verdone quite frankly admitted this on Fabio Fazio’s programme, Che tempo che fa on Rai3 on Sunday 26 February 2012.

The cost

Brief autobiography No Responses »

Mar 142012

Today I am in possession of three diplomas, two from universities and one from a college: one I obtained in Australia, at the Holmes College of Melbourne, one in Spain, from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and one in Italy from the Università per Stranieri di Perugia. I have no idea what they are worth. Perhaps nothing, perhaps they are just pieces of paper and nothing more. But I have never been interested in qualifications. Whenever I took an exam the challenge was always with myself. I wasn’t desperate to get a diploma, I was desperate for knowledge; it wasn’t for the professors that I racked my brains, but because I needed to satisfy my hunger for knowledge. I wanted to understand the world, I wanted to know languages, to understand peoples, life, everything. My motto was and still is: I don’t know, therefore I suffer.

At any rate, and without wishing to offend educational institutions, I regard myself as self-taught. I did not meet the writers and people who transformed me, formed me, opened my eyes and revolutionized my existence in schools or universities but in real life and in the course of my reading. The books that I have read and the experiences that I have had have been my teachers; they are what have given meaning to my life, illuminated it.

The leap

Brief autobiography No Responses »

Mar 132012

When I was sixteen, resolute in the face of my mother’s objections, I went away, leaving my family, my animals, the place where I was born, and I set off for northern Italy.

In Turin I slept in cold, dark, wretched garages, with snow on the roof and water dripping inside. Sometimes I lived in dilapidated, filthy houses where there was no toilet, no drinking water, nothing at all, only a dirty mattress on the floor where you slept in your clothes beside strangers. Most of the time I worked on building sites.

My first love story, with a girl from Reggio Emilia, ended painfully. She was semiliterate and so was I: we had no future. And I wanted to go back to school, I wanted to study.

In spite of the industrial atmosphere of the city and the tough life I led there I liked Turin: it opened my eyes, awoke in me a taste for life and for a world that I was impatient to discover.