The 'Roberto Pazzi' Study Centre reopens the writer's house

One year after the death of Roberto Pazzi (18 August 1946 - 2 December 2023), poet, writer and journalist originally from Bocca di Magra, but who chose to live and write in Ferrara, his adopted city, the study centre dedicated to him is presented. "If I look down, it is because / I am lent to a body / that for love lingers among things"; these are the words engraved on the monumental plaque in the Certosa in Ferrara, echoing those of Saba's Canzoniere, "the love that makes us our own even when we are disappointed / and when it sings, it sings with its eyes closed", his thesis subject with Anceschi at the Alma Mater.

Gathering his last wishes, the institution that bears his name was conceived in his very own home, in Contrada della Rosa, right in the city centre. "Our intention," says honorary president Stefano Baldrati, "is to open Roberto's rooms to debut authors, to those who still believe in fantasy as a tool to resolve the contradictions and shortcomings of everyday life. That fantasy that had ironically freed Ariosto from the duties of the courtier and that continued to nourish, albeit under the surface, the Magic Realism congenial to Roberto, capable of publishing nine collections in verse and twenty-four novels, the last of which posthumously, La doppia vista.

In addition to organising author residencies to divulge both Pazzi's vision and vision, the study centre is cataloguing the stacks of books scattered around the entire interior perimeter of the flat, from the hall to the study, from the corridor to the bedroom, including recovered manuscripts and typescripts, to make them available to students and researchers. "Roberto Pazzi was always animated by a genuine narrative enthusiasm: a disposition to narrate fuelled by an inexhaustible curiosity for all aspects of the world around him, for the cultural tradition, for the historical past, for the twists and turns of chance and the resistance of reality. Enthusiasm and curiosity that have led him to turn his fictional creations into true critical and paradoxical portraits of human behaviour, the forms of existence, contradictions, hopes, the misunderstandings of life, and the possibilities of fantasy: and all this always with impalpable lightness, with an always unfolding vital joy. In his joy of recounting and understanding always hovered the dream of a conciliation of the human, an available communicative trust,' comments Giulio Ferroni, a member of the scientific committee. In anticipation of the new edition of "Cercando l'imperatore", the debut novel with which Pazzi came close to winning the Campiello, in 1985, the study centre, together with the Liceo "Roiti" and the Institute of Contemporary History of Ferrara, has inaugurated a pathway for young people to approach the reading of his work, entitled "Cercando Roberto Pazzi" and developed by teachers Giorgio Rizzoni and Claudia Mirrione.

"Sometimes, raising my head / in the village, reading the names / of the streets, in me revives / that love for the unknown / prisoners in the sleep of the stones". These are Pazzi's verses from 'Calma di vento' (1987), which stand out on the walls of Stigliano, near Matera. Several panels with the texts of immortal poets, such as Caproni, Pasolini and Loi, will be placed in the streets and squares of the ancient village. Through the project 'Appartengo 2022', a path of sound installations and poetic tiles, conceived by Alessandro Turco, one of the founders of the study centre, the places where the shops teemed with life are brought back to life thanks to the reproduction of sounds, dialogues and soliloquies. The literary reference of Turco, author and director, is the Spoon River Anthology, as only art can 'resurrect the dead'. And Pazzi was also masterful in giving voice to the 'perfect silence' of those who can no longer respond.