Mario Puccini, an Italian World War One writer. The opportunity to know his work in Trieste

Press release

Mario Puccini comes back in the city which gave the title to one of the most representative Italian memorialistic war report of the Twentieth Century, his Davanti a Trieste. The critical edition curated by Tancredi Artico and published by Mursia will be presented on Friday the 3rd March at 6.00 p.m., in the Ubik book store in Trieste (Piazza della Borsa, 15). The new edition is the editorial result of a research projects undertaken by IoDeposito Ngo, in collaboration of Friuli Venezia Giulia Region and with patronage of UNESCO and Council of Europe. The study project has involved many pofessors, Ph.Ds and university researchers. The book launch of Trieste belongs in fact to the third edition of the diffuse artistic and cultural Festival B#SIDE WAR, which is promoted by IoDeposito through numerous Italian and international events such as exhibitions, conferences and research project (www.bsidewar.org).
 

The prolific author Mario Puccini (Senigallia, 1887 - Rome, 1957) was one of the literatus of «Voce» (the most important Italian magazine of the early ‘900) circle, who have been able to deeply influence the fortunes of the following history of literature affecting particularly the neorealist poetry. As many times defined by Vasco Pratolini «one of the master the Italian literature must bring justice», Mario Puccini have been also a soldier, crossing, during the First World War, all the Friuli Venezia Giulia territory, from the Carso to the Piave. From this human experience, in which the literary experience merges with the bellic one, is born a war diaries trilogy that includes Dal Carso al Piave (1918), Davanti a Trieste (1919) and Così ho visto il Friuli (1919), which represents one of the most important memorial and literary record about World War I on the international scene. 

Davanti a Trieste is a staunch and empathic portrait of war days, in which is presented the collective feeling of his comrades and is shown how they perceived reality as if they were a single organism. Lieutenant Puccini gets therefore straight to the heart of things, with his desire to pay tribute to the men who sacrificed their own lives with a valorous and touching simplicity. The writing is limpid and incisive, focused on a strong attention to the human dimension of the conflict, trough an effective formal modernity free from aesthetic temptations (which is the distinctive style of the whole Puccini's literary creation).
 

Thanks to the clear and anti-rhetorical prose, Puccini's pen is able to weave the warp of storytelling with a disarming balance between the immediate crudity of the historical evidence on the one hand and, on the other hand, the human experience transferred to the reader in the form of a poetic literary language, which yearns for salvation and redemption from a senseless and brutal war, able to engulf the reality. The pulsating and genuine compassion of the war-man intertwines with a strong sensitivity about the formal and linguistic experimentation: Puccini's triptych on the Great War is in fact a work able to represent the emotions of a great humanity and at the same time of linguistic and literary innovation, presenting itself as an organic historical evidence of events and of the past of the war. The book curator Tancredi Artico portrays Davanti a Trieste as an «exceptional direct testament of the Great War, which can be at the same level of others Italian literary war works as Guerra del ’15  by Stuparich or Giorni di guerra by Comisso»: Puccini was able to create a memorial work important for its anticlassical statute and for the peculiar chronological concatenation, which makes of writing a mean of salvation. 

(In the above images of Trieste, the quay and Via del Pane)

Contacts:
Event's link: http://www.bsidewar.org/en/upcoming/presentation-of-the-volume-davanti-trieste/
Details: Friday the 3rd March, at 6.00 p.m.; at Ubik book store, Piazza della Borsa, 15, Trieste.
Web: www.iodeposito.org; www.bsidewar.org
Direction: info@iodeposito.org
Press&Communication: daniela.madonna@iodeposito.org