Rosaria Carpinelli Consulenze Editoriali

"If reading is a vice, not that writing is much of a virtue. A novel or a small volume of verse are unwanted commodities. So why so much writing in vain?" Vittorio Sermonti for more than sixty years has been anagraphically a writer: that is, "one of the happy few who owe their misery to the obstinate exercise of writing." Here he collects, sorts, and disarranges the multifaceted fruit of his vice, which is not limited to reflecting on the secret mechanisms of poetry, but ventures to interview Marcus Aurelius and Julius Caesar, draft a couple of opera librettos, translate two theater classics into verse, write short stories, epigrams, aphorisms and a tragic chronicle of the Irpinia earthquake. The voice is always his, the acumen is unmistakable, the intelligence is that cultured and free of one who has been in the world for eighty-six years. A surprising journey on every page, conducted "with the perseverance, with the self-denial, with the unconfessed voluptuousness" with which the most radical vices are cultivated.

Publication date: 17.09.2015
Publisher: Rizzoli