It is in irreversible coma in hospital in Pisa Marco Santagata, writer, literary critic and university professor. He got sick of Covid-19 and the virus has grafted itself into an already delicate clinical situation. Born in Zocca in 1947, an illustrious petrarcologist, subtle interpreter of Leopardi, Pascoli and Dante, with a professorship in Pisa, Marco Santagata set two of his novels (one historical and the other contemporary) in the Emilian Apennines between Modena and Bologna, evoked in both cases with the familiarity of someone who has lived there for a long time and has lived with its history and literature.
In 2003 he won the Super Campiello Award with Il maestro dei santi pallidi. His As a woman in love, from 2015, was a finalist for the Strega Award. An internationally renowned Italianist, Santagata was the curator of the works of Dante and Petrarca in the Meridiani Mondadori edition. A few months ago he published Il copista with Guanda, A Friday by Francesco Petrarca, landing once again on a fictional work dedicated to an author like Laura’s cantor. Santagata had felt the need to tell about his Petrarch in a bad day at 68, old and tired, tormented by a series of ailments such as urinary incontinence and stomach acid, dominated by black humor. The copyist reconstructs that Friday of the poet, freeing himself in one fell swoop from the immense continent of his endless bibliography with a snapshot of the fantasy that he constructs, narrates, imagines.
The method
It was Santagata’s method and he had happily applied it to Dante and Boccaccio as well. “With the passage of time he told me in an interview that I am more and more interested in a reading of the authors rather than in the texts, in the attempt to grasp the germinal moment through the intertwining of life and writing, the quid that is not yet biography and it is not yet a work ”. This is what happened for Dante at the center of the story As a woman in love: a very distracted man who says beautiful phrases by Cicero even aloud while passers-by with hand gestures, in a blatant way, imply that that guy is out of his mind.
A tormented man, the poet of the Comedy who does not have a studio at home, but works on the shaky table in the kitchen, prey to the vicissitude of his love marked by destiny, with the aspiration to literary glory and the fear of not being able to compose the his masterpiece and next to a grumpy wife. And so it happened for the last of the three Florentine Crowns, also «a monument that descends from the pedestal». Boccaccio, Fragility of a myth is all about running after the existence of the writer of the Decameron with the sure step of the narrator and the knowledge of the great Italianist, from the boy’s youth in fourteenth-century Florence, to the new Neapolitan world, to the birth of the novelist up to suffered twilight in recent years.
And next to the writer attracted by the most disparate fields of knowledge, here is the man of the court, the merchant, the administrator of the Municipality, the auctioneer of vernacular literature. Immersed in that immense continent that is his endless bibliography, Santagata knows how to find the thread for a narration full of curiosities, surprises, comparisons, which is also a sure guide to reading his works, as evidenced by the almost one hundred pages of final annotations .
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