Poetry International

(Florence, 1914) is considered by some experts to be one of the greatest Italian poets alive. He spent much of his youth in Siena, and the Toscane landscapes left lasting impressions which marked his poetry to this day. While studying French language and literature in Florence he commenced publishing poems. His first collected poems, La Barca (Canti), appeared in 1935.

Mario Luzi's poetic roots are in the hermetic school which came into being in Florence around 1930 with Carlo Bo as its theorist. Notwithstanding the depressing climate caused by the town's fascism, some important literary magazines saw the light of day; Florence remained Italy's intellectual capital after all. Luzi made a great many friends - Eugenio Montale, for example.

For some time Luzi taught French in Parma (where he met Atillio Bertolucci), then in San Miniato and finally in Rome while continuing to write poetry. His Avvento notturno (1940) was considered a true hermetic manifest. According to Olga Maria Brouwer, his poems express his search for liberation and a realization of both the contrasts in - and the brevity of human existence. The collection Il giusto della vita (What's good in life, 1960) contains his best poems; they are less hermetic.

Mario Luzi has been living back in Florence since 1945. He contributed to a great many literary magazines and together with Carlo Betocchi founded La Chimera which engaged in the now famous polemic about the crisis in neo-realism with the periodical Officina of Passolini, Fortini and Leonetti.

Mario Luzi also gained a reputation for his translations of S.T. Coleridge, Racine and Shakespeare, a.o. Together with T. Landolfi he compiled the Anthologie de la poésie lyrique française and he wrote a great many studies and essays on a variety of literary subjects. He traveled widely, to India and China for example, and continued lecturing at the Florence Institute for Political Science up till 1985.