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Biographical notes

Born into a family originally from Senigallia, in the Marche region, Torcoletti was born in Rijeka on 3 May 1881 to Giovanni and Francesca Dergnevich. After finishing high school, he attended the Theological Seminary in Senj, where he was ordained a priest in 1904, and then taught religion in public schools in Rijeka.

Combative and polemic, he opposed the secularizing currents and the nascent socialism of Rijeka. Some of his essays of the time are "Darvinism", "Historical notes on Rijeka freemasonry" and "Will we believe in miracles in the twentieth century?". He then approached historical studies, proving to be a tireless researcher of news. In 1911 he founded a religious propaganda newspaper, "Il Risveglio", for which he wrote articles of a religious nature, some of which also on local history, and which was also distributed outside Rijeka, reaching the Catholic circles of Gorizia, Trentino and Dalmatia.

Between 1917 and 1918 he founded the "A. Manzoni" club, to give voice to the national conscience of young people, but it lasted only a year because the Hungarian police, suspecting irredentist tendencies, then decided to suppress it. On the eve of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, he formed a secret committee that merged with the National Council.

Between 1918 and 1924, he actively participated in the political events of the city, publishing a series of works that aroused a lively echo, including "The Plebiscite of the Dead". In 1919, he founded the Rijeka section of the Italian People's Party together with Annibale Blau, and in 1920 he approved Gabriele D'Annunzio's enterprise in its initial phase. After the revolt of March 3, 1922 that led to the fall of Zanella's government, he sought, without success, a compromise between the opposing parties.

In 1945, he was stopped by Tito's secret police and tried on charges of having provoked the removal of the Croatian parish priest Kukanic in 1919. The trial ended with the order to leave the city. He first stopped in Palermo, then settled in Zoagli in Liguria, as a guest of the Casa della Compagnia di S. Paolo, where he was able to resume his studies in Rijeka. He died in Zoagli on November 20, 1956.

Critical notes

In "The Plebiscite of the Dead" of 1919, he collected the epigraphs of the cemetery to demonstrate that the Italianness of Rijeka was not recent because even the majority of the oldest were in Italian. It was seized by the French command for expressions considered offensive to the Croats, but some copies escaped seizure and were distributed in Italy, arriving to be reprinted by the National Council in a version purged of the offending expressions.

Bibliography

• The Plebiscite of the Dead, 1919
• Scrittori Fiumani, E. Mohovich, 1923
• Essays in the magazine "Fiume" (1923):
  • Bibliographic information on the history of Rijeka
• Tarsatica and the beginnings of Rijeka, Tip. A. Priulla of Palermo, 1950
• Gleaning in the past of Rijeka, Tip. S. Girolamo Emiliani, 1951
• Fiume e i paesi vicini, Tip. S. Girolamo Emiliani, 1954
• Processo a Galileo – Clero e astronomia, 1956

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Born in Rijeka on 9 September 1885 to Antonio and Ersilia Sillich, he was known as a writer, poet, journalist and politician. His maternal grandfather was from Labin, his grandmother was from Venice.

He was one of the inspirers of the "Young Rijeka" in 1905, starting the irredentist movement. His father would have wanted him as his successor in the family business, but his love for politics and art led him to journalism.

In 1910 he took over the editorship of the newspaper "La Bilancia", later taking the place of Emilio Marcuzzi as director of "La Voce del Popolo" when he had been banished from Fiume as an active member of the Giovane Fiume. In 1914 he was elected councillor of the Municipal Representation, dissolved immediately after Italy's entry into the war, and in 1915 he managed to arrive in Rome to enlist as a volunteer. Many of his publications date back to the war period, as he had been chosen by Dante Alighieri to prepare documentary material on Italian claims.

Returning to Fiume in the summer of 1919, while the preparation of D'Annunzio's enterprise was underway, he founded with Iti Bacci "La Vedetta d'Italia", which he directed until November 1920, when D'Annunzio sent him to Rome as a delegate of the Italian Regency of Carnaro to the Italian government. He resumed leadership in October 2021 to lead the polemical campaign against the government of Zanella, then head of the Rijeka Free State.

In May 1923 he was called to Rome as editor-in-chief of the Corriere Italiano, which he then left due to disagreements with Avv. Filippelli, later involved in the Matteotti crime. He then moved to the "Mezzogiorno" of Naples, and then ended his journalistic career in Milan, as editor-in-chief of "L'Ambrosiano".

His career then took a diplomatic turn, starting to work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1928, first as consul in Bratislava, then as first secretary of the embassy in Warsaw. From 1935 onwards, after a brief interlude at the Ministry of Press and Propaganda as deputy director general, he was consul in Graz and then in Toulon until Italy's entry into the war in 1940. In September 1944, he was taken prisoner by the Russians with his wife, and held for six years in prisons in Moscow. When he was released, he learned that his wife had died a few months after the beginning of his captivity. In the long months of confinement, he wrote a lot both in verse and prose, but he was not allowed to take anything with him. He managed to reconstruct in part, from memory, in "Little Romantic Odyssey".

He died in Milan in July 1969, where he lived next to his daughter.

Critical notes

In Moscow Prisons, Odenigo bears witness to the tragic adventure he lived in Moscow. He recalls with detachment, sometimes even with subtle irony, the sufferings endured with a virile soul. All this in a lively and tense language in the incisive re-enactment of the facts. As an admirer of Piero Foscari, an important politician in the first two decades of the twentieth century, he dedicated a biography to him, in which, among others, he reports Foscari's attitude during the negotiations that preceded the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo with Yugoslavia, in 1920.

Bibliography

• Hungary and the Magyars in the War of Nations, Fratelli Treves Editori, Milan, 1915
• Fiume, ville italienne et son role antigermanique, Zurich, Paris, 1917
• Fiume italiana e la sua funzione antigermanica, Athenaeum, Rome, 1917
• Moscow prisons. Six years of experience sovietiche, L. Cappelli, Bologna - Rocca S. Casciano, 1955
• Piero Foscari. An exemplary life ,L. Cappelli, Bologna, 1959
• Piccola odissea romantica, Del Bianco, Udine, 1964

Biographical notes

Industrialist and politician, he was born in Rijeka in 1876, the son of the Rijeka industrialist Luigi Ossoinack. After completing his lower secondary education in his hometown, he attended the Academy of Commerce in Bratislava and later the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Defender of Rijeka autonomy within Austria-Hungary but in opposition to his fellow citizen Riccardo Zanella, he joined the Autonomous League, becoming an unelected member of the Hungarian Diet in Budapest in 1916. At the end of the First World War, he proposed the right to self-determination for his city and on 30 October 1918 he founded an "Italian National Council" chaired by Antonio Grossich to claim the annexation of Rijeka to Italy, thus opposing a "Croatian National Council" which asked for the annexation of the city to the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

In 1919 he participated as a member of the Rijeka Peace Conference in Paris and on 3 March of the same year he was appointed "Representative of Rijeka" at the peace conference as the "last Rijeka deputy in the Hungarian parliament". During the peace conference he wrote a memorandum lashing out against the Habsburgs' policy of divide and rule. His memorandum and his meeting with the president of the United States on April 4, 1919, the day after the meeting with David Lloyd George, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and Georges Clemenceau did not then obtain the annexation of Fiume to Italy, instead Wilson's position continued to prevail.

In the same year he joined the Italian Regency of Gabriele D'Annunzio's Carnaro which then ended in 1920 with the Bloody Christmas. He was against the Free State of Rijeka led by his political opponent and autonomist Riccardo Zanella, continuing to propose the annexation of the city to Italy as a free port.

After the annexation of the city to Italy in 1924 following the Treaty of Rome, he retired from political life and started his business as an industrialist first in Rijeka and then in Luxembourg. He returned to Rijeka in 1939, remaining there until shortly after the Yugoslav occupation of 1945, and then decided to move to Venice, being a very active member among the Julian exiles. In the last years of his life he had moved to Merano, where he died in 1965. In recent years he has written "Atto d'accusa" (Monciatti ed., Trieste, 1960) in which he has collected the documents of his last political activity.



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A scientist of European renown, he was born in Rijeka on 17 August 1872, two years after the city's return to Hungary. Despite the climate of détente between the Hungarian government and the municipality, Lenaz has always had his eyes and heart turned to Italy since adolescence.

He trained in the Gymnasium where the language of instruction was still exclusively Italian. He then continued to Vienna as an undergraduate student at the Faculty of Medicine, where he was elected president of the city's Italian Academic Circle. After graduating in 1895, he remained another six years as an assistant in the polyclinic of nervous diseases directed by Prof. Benedikt, and then in the medical clinic of Prof. Neusser. In 1901 he returned to Rijeka to direct the newly established bacteriological laboratory of the Civil Hospital.

In the political field, he joined the Autonomous Party in which he saw the only guarantor of the autonomy and Italianness of Fiume. He also supported the "La Giovane Fiume" club, created by young people who now looked to Italy as the only salvation, and for which he ran for the Representation.

In 1918 he was a member of the Steering Committee of the National Council and signatory of the Proclamation of annexation to Italy on 30 October. After the anti-French uprisings of July 1919 and the decisions taken by the Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry, he considered the intervention of Gabriele D'Annunzio necessary, welcoming him on 12 September as a liberator.

In 1934, Mussolini intended to appoint him Senator, but when he learned that the motivation was for "patriotic merits", he refused, considering having served the country not a merit, but a duty.

He died in his villa in Laurana on October 2, 1939, without being able to complete his last work, Lessons in Neurology.

Critical notes

His medical studies focused on various branches of medicine. His major work is the Lectures on Hematology (Wassermann ed.), in which he argues that leukemia is the cancer of the blood. He was then the first to point out the importance of the extrapyramidal nervous system. Among his last battles, we remember the one against latent infections of the mouth, teeth and tonsils, as causes of the pathology of nephritis, joint remautism and heart defects.

In 1930 he was awarded the gold medal of the Medical Press and in 1937 the solemn commendation of the Academy of Italy.

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Born in Rijeka on July 15, 1876, she is known for being an educator of great quality, rich in cultural and political interests. He lived in the working-class district of Cittavecchia, establishing himself culturally for his passion for books and his ingenuity.

Thanks to the support of her family, she graduated from the teacher training institutes of Gorizia and Koper. After becoming a teacher, she was hired in the schools of the Municipality, then moving on to the City School, corresponding to the Italian lower technical institute established by the Gentile reform. Thanks to a scholarship from the Municipality, he attended the courses of the Higher Education and the University in Florence in the years 1907-1909. There he met Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice during a teachers' congress, with whom he had been collaborating for years in the field of pedagogy. This relationship then turned into love, with their wedding held in Rijeka in September 2010.

After the wedding, she moved to Catania where her husband taught pedagogy at the University. The entire family, including the two daughters he had, then moved to Rome, where Harasim lived until his death in June 1961.

Critical notes

On the teaching of the Italian language (1906) he was favorably reviewed by Benedetto Croce and recommended to Lombardo-Radice, then her future husband. In the pedagogical journal "Nuovi Doveri", directed by Lombardo-Radice himself, he published the articles Language Exercises, where he describes his avant-garde experiences in language teaching, and Italian and Hungarian Civilization, where he argues for the superiority of the Hungarian school system compared to the school of the time.

His Letters from Fiume, sent in 1909 to the Voice of Florence and concerning the political and cultural conditions of the city, are well known. The letters represent an objective but at the same time bitter examination of the dangers that threatened the Italianness of Fiume.

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Biographical notes

Born on April 5, 1948 in the refugee camp of Servigliano, in the province of Fermo (Marche) to parents from Rijeka, when he was three months old he arrived at the Giuliano Village in Rome, together with two thousand other refugees from Istria, Rijeka and Dalmatia.

These origins, together with having married a woman of Greek mother, from the island of Kos, will influence much of his literary work. The Giuliano Village and its community appear in his first novel "Massacre for a President" published by Mondadori in 1981, which was the first to address the problem of red terrorism in Italy. Until then, Zandel had published the collections of poems: "Primi Giorni", published by O.E.L. in Rome, "Ore ferme", published by SAL in Trieste, and the essay "Invito alla lettura" by Andrić, published by Mursia. The novel "An Istrian Story" of 1987, published by Rusconi, was a finalist for the Naples Prize that year.

He was a manager of Telecom Italia, responsible for publishing activities. Previously, he was an editorial consultant for the publishing houses Mondadori, Bompiani and Rusconi. He is currently senior editor of Oltre Edizioni, for which he edits the Italian and foreign fiction series, and non-fiction "Readings of the world", and Editorial Director of M.E.A. Phoenix, a company that offers publishing services to publishing houses.

Critical notes

Zandel's first novel "Massacre for a President" is apparently on the model of a thriller in recording the maneuvers of some terrorist groups but, unlike serial novels, it does not celebrate the triumph of justice or hand over the guilty to the public prosecution. The story is also intertwined with an external story that revolves around the figure of Raul Radossi, alter ego of the author as well as the narrator, in which the intimate reasons for a life choice that were born in the country of origin of Zandel's grandparents, Fiume, predominate.

The real theme of the novel is in fact Raul's search for his own identity, an attempt to understand what is the relationship that binds him on the one hand with the world of Istrian exiles and on the other to the variegated world of the city in which he lives, Rome, but in which he does not have his biological-affective roots. What emerges from this condition is the impossibility of nourishing nostalgia for a land that he has not lived in but which is that of his people, combined with the inability to feel at ease in a city that he does not feel his own.

"An Istrian Story", published in 1987, tells the story of Ive Miculian, a generous miner, but even in this case, however, the novels seem to be two, and this time the theme is not the search for one's origin, or identity, but that of one's descent, or the future.

The novel "The Borders of Hate" (2002) also plays on the author's origins, telling a story set between Rijeka and the Balkans at the end of the interethnic war of 1991-1995 in the former Yugoslavia. A son, Bruno Lednaz, the writer's alter ego, accompanies the body of his father, who had asked to be buried in Rijeka, his hometown, then Italian, now Croatian, at the time when a few months ago the peace agreement was signed in Dayton, in the United States, which sanctions peace and the division of the territories of the former Yugoslavia between Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Bosnian Serbs.

However, at the borders, the hatred triggered by the war is still alive. Bruno realizes this when, while waiting for a place at the cemetery for his father, he decides to accompany a relative to Lika, a region of Croatia. From this moment on, an odyssey began for him that would be, at the same time, a denunciation of the evils that accompany every war and a condemnation of war itself. In 2011 another novel of denunciation was published that focuses specifically on the theme of the foibe and the exodus, "The Mute Witnesses", in which personal memories and history intertwine on the thread of a personal memory that turns into collective history.

The narrative voice is that of a child born in a refugee camp, raised in extreme poverty surrounded by the painful silence of adults. The encounter with a man, a mute witness of the tragedy, leads him towards a new awareness of his roots and his history.

Zandel also focused on more didactic works, such as "Apology of reading" of 2020, in which the author focuses on all his experience as a writer, passionate reader, reviewer of books, reader of texts that authors send to publishing houses with the hope of being published, with the aim of sharing with all lovers of books and reading a path that prevents surrender in the face of the thousand obstacles that in everyday life they stand between the desire to read and the time to do so.

Critical notes inspired by "Le "ore ferme": il rapporto tra storia e identità nella letteratura di Diego Zandel", by Cristina Benussi in "La Battana" n. 97-98, 1990.

Bibliography

• Massacre for a President (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1981)
• Una storia istriana (Rusconi, 1987)
• Blood Cruise (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1993), Segretissimo n. 1239
• Operazione Venere (Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1996), Segretissimo n. 1306
• The Boundaries of Hate (Aragno, 2002)
• The Man from Kos (Hobby&Work, 2004)
• Eastwards. Tales of beyond the eastern border and the Aegean. With memories of the Julian-Dalmatian village in Rome (Campanotto, 2006)
• "The Lost Son" (Alacran, 2010)
• "The Greek Brother" (Hacca, 2010)
• "The Mute Witnesses" (Mursia, 2011)
• "Being Bob Lang" (Hacca, 2012)
• "The Romanian Consul", short stories (Oltre Edizioni, 2013)
• "Sentimental Manual of the Island of Kos" (Oltre Edizioni, 2016)
• "Balkanica - Journey into Southeast Europe through contemporary literature" (Edizioni Novecento Libri, 2018)
• "Apology of reading - Reflections of an inveterate bibliophile" (Historica, 2020)
• "Dangerous Cruise" (Oltre Edizioni, 2020)

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Biographical notes

His father, Silvio Sincovich, was a magistrate, first a magistrate and later a councillor of the Court of Appeal, and changed his surname to Vegliani in the 1930s, forced by a provision that forbade public offices to those with a surname deemed non-Italian.

Born in Trieste in 1915 as an Austro-Hungarian citizen, and became Italian at the end of the First World War, Franco Vegliani grew up in the various places where his father had his assignments from time to time: the island of Krk, Opatija and Rijeka, until the beginning of the Second World War.

He fought on the North African front, then spent four years in captivity in Egypt. In the years of his long imprisonment in Egypt he gained his narrative experience, giving life to the work "Two Tales". Since the end of the war he has lived in Milan, practicing the profession of journalist.

From a literary point of view, he made his debut in 1935 with "Essay on Ugo Betti". Later, he published Malaparte (1957), an extensive biography of Curzio Malaparte whose confidences he had been at "Tempo" and whose confidences he had collected in the last months of his life.

In 1958 he published his first novel "Processo a Volosca", which was followed by "La frontiera" (1964), "La carta coperta" (1972), and posthumously "Letters on the death of Cristiano Bess". He died in 1982.

Critical notes

In the first volume of short stories "A man of time" (1940) the writer's attention to the implications and psychological nuances of the relationship with the origins and the alternating events of the borders emerges, through prose that prefigures the landscape and humanity of the subsequent novels: the Dalmatian islands, the war and the exile.

The "Trial in Volosko" tells the story of the murder proceedings held, in the pre-war period, against four young people, three Slavs and an Italian. The confrontation between the narrator, of bourgeois condition, and the defendants, of humble origins, between the institutions and the human reality that escapes and contradicts them, is the fulcrum of the novel, which reveals a subversive ethical crisis of the codes handed down and the failure of that guilty innocence synonymous with passive acceptance of the order handed down. Referring to the Trial in Volosca, Claudio Magris (1982) wrote that Vegliani was "the author of one of the most beautiful books of post-war Trieste literature".

In the novel "The Frontier", the idea of frontier is defined in the parallel story of an ensign of the Austro-Hungarian army, who disappeared during a military action in the middle of the front, and of a young Italian officer in 1941. For both, the experience of conflict and the unexpected divergence of the lines drawn by a controversial geographical and human demarcation reveals the fragility of definitions and the roughness of a boundary that reverberates in the everyday life of choices and is the sum of boundaries that consciousness crosses or eludes. This book was made into a film of the same name directed by Franco Giraldi, starring Raul Bova, Claudia Pandolfi, Omero Antonutti and Marco Leonardi (1996) and was screened at the Venice Film Festival. In 1996 the theatrical version by Ghigo de Chiara was also performed by the Italian Drama of Rijeka in collaboration with the Teatro Stabile del Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

The "covered paper" brings the other two novels to completion with the story of the narrator's "fracture" from the places of birth and the end of the indifference that has long made up for every risky reference to denied identity. The narrator, an investigating judge in a provincial town, is entrusted with the case of a young Yugoslavian accused of murder and escaped from across the border, from the same country as the judge. The spontaneous relationship established by the latter with the suspect is, however, contradicted by the discrepancy of time and historical experiences: with reference to the exodus of the Julian-Dalmatians, at the end of the Second World War, the protagonist must distinguish his story from the collective one.

Vegliani's novels, recovering events and regions that have fallen from national memory, suggest a historical reflection on the process of formation of nations and cultures in the Julian region, up to its extreme reflections on individual destinies. Unlike other authors in this area. Vegliani was not really an exile, except in retrospect, who returned to Italy after the conflict had already ended and ceded his city of choice, Fiume, to Yugoslavia. His relationship with his origins, established through literature, is reconstructed, in the absence of a tragic and direct experience, on the inner recomposition of the representations and conflicts of his border.

Critical notes inspired by "The other origin. Disquiet and identity in the narrative of Franco Vegliani", by Patrizia C. Hansen in "La Battana", 97-98, 1990.

Bibliography

• Essay on Ugo Betti, Fiume, Termini, 1937
• A man of the time, Istituto Tipografico Tiberino, Rome 1941
• Malaparte, Daria Guarnati, Milan 1957
• Trial in Volosko, Daria Guarnati, Milan 1958; Sellerio, Palermo 1989
• La frontiera, Ceschina, Milan 1964; Sellerio, Palermo 1988
• Grandparents and grandchildren: history of Italian industrialists, Milan, Successo, 1972
• The hidden paper, Palazzi, Milan 1972
• Lettere in morte di Cristiano Bess, Stamperia Bianca e Volta, Milan 1986 (in 100 numbered copies)
• Due racconti, in "Il banco di lettura" 4, 1989

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Biographical notes

Born in Rijeka in 1909, he taught Hungarian literature at the University of Turin. He has translated numerous texts of this literature, both lyrical and narrative, on which he has also worked intensively as an essayist. He is the author of many works of poetry and fiction, especially of an autobiographical nature.

A large part of his essay writing and his activity as a publisher of texts is dedicated to the history of religious symbols and myths. Editor of most of the "Breviaries of mysticism" published by the Bocca publishing house in Milan, Santarcangeli is also the author of a series of studies, including the following "Hortulus Litterarum ossia La Magia delle Lettere" Milan, Scheiwiller, 1965; "The Book of Labyrinths. Storia di un mito e di un simbolo", Firenze, Vallecchi, 1967 and Milano Frassinelli, 1984 e 1989).

Critical notes

According to Santarcangeli, exile is a denunciation of the contradictions of modern man, marked by the continuous perpetuation of the difficult search for oneself, for a place to feel at ease, for an identity capable of responding to the precariousness of being.

Santarcangeli's message testifies to and exorcises the loneliness of the individual, the destiny of the exile to be "doubly alone", and the moral and civil need of the "different" to be wiser, more generous and better than other men, as emerges from the autobiographical fiction novel "The Port of the Beheaded Eagle" (1959). It is about a Non-Existent City, which has become for the writer a port of memory beyond the ocean of time. The physical body of that city has really been decapitated by history: the irrevocable sentence was issued on June 10, 1940 and was carried out 5 years later.

Of 44 chapters, some are only brief reflections, poetic moments; others are longer and the density and acuteness of Santarcangeli as an essayist can be recognized. Other chapters are dedicated specifically to the city, its characteristic places and also its surroundings, as well as its history and culture, pages in which exile returns as the leitmotif of the book.

Critical notes inspired by "The non-existent city. The theme of exile In «Il porto dell'aquila decapitata»" by Paolo Santarcangeli in "La Battana", n.97-98, 1990.

Bibliography

Italian poetry

• Il cuore molteplice, Ubaldini, Rome 1949
• Canzoni della ricca stagione, Ubaldini, Rome 1951
• Death of a Warrior, Ubaldini, Rome 1966
• Resa dei Conti, Scheiwiller, Milan 1976
• Lettera agli antipodi, Vallecchi, Florence 1981
• Mirror of Illusion, Turin 1982
• Diario del Tigullio, Vallecchi, Florence 1989

Poetry in Hungarian

• Szökőár (Tsunami), Magvető, Budapest 1974
• Üzenet a túlsó partról (Message from the Other Side), Békéscsaba 1980
• Sötét láng (Black Flame), Magvető, Budapest 1985

Fiction in Italian

• Il porto dell'aquila decapitata, Vallecchi, Florence 1969
• Il fuoco e altri racconti d'amore e disamore, Turin 1973
• In cattività babilonese, Del Bianco, Udine 1987

Narrative in Hungarian

• Török induló Válogatott lebeszélések, Szépirodalmi, Budapest 1989

Non-fiction in Italian

• Hortulus litterarum, ossia la magia delle lettere, Scheiwiller, Milano 1965 [trans. in Hungarian, Europa, Budapest 1971]
• Il libro dei Labirinti, Vallecchi, Florence 1967 and Frassinelli, Milan 1984 [Hungarian translation, Gondolat, Budapest 1970]
• Nekya - La discesa agli Inferi, Uni, Milan 1981
• Santa Teresa d'Avila - Amore Divino, Rusconi, Milan 1980
• Homo ridens, Olschki, Florence 1989

Non-fiction in Hungarian

• Beszélgetések a Sátánnal (Conversations with Satan), Europa, Budapest 1987
• Pokolra kell annak menni (The Poet in the Underworld), Gondolat, Budapest 1980
• Magyar-olasz kapcsolatok - tanulmányok -, Akadémiai, Budapest 1989

Literary translations and analysis

• Hungarian lyric of the 900s, Guanda, Parma 1962
• Endre Ady, Poesie, Lerici, Milan 1963
• Endre Ady, Blood and Gold, Accademia, Milan, 1965
• Lajos Kassák, The Horse Dies and the Birds Fly Away, All'insegna del pesce, Turin 1969
• Michel Babits, The Book of Jonah, Arion, Budapest 1976
• Sándor Weöres, Towards perfection - The birth of poetry, Bona, Turin 1976
• Trilogy of Hungarian poets (S.Weöres, GY. Somlyó - Gy. Rákos), Vallecchi, Florence 1984
• Sándor Petőfi, Poesie scelte, UTET, Turin 1985

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Biographical notes

Born on 11 October 1905 in Rijeka in the working-class district of Stari Grad to Adolfo Ramous and Maria Giacich, the youngest of six children, he lost his father at the age of two. From 1915 to 1919 he studied at the Municipal School of Music, then continued his studies of violin and piano privately for ten years. From 1924 to 1925 he attended the Leonardo da Vinci Technical Institute, and then enrolled in the "Egisto Rossi" Teacher Training Institute. At the same time, he worked, respectively, at the State Accounting (1922-1924), at the Prefecture (1924-1925), and then in Milan at an insurance company, where he remained until May 1928. Back in Rijeka, he worked for two years at the City Hall.

He approached journalism from 1923, collaborating until 1925 with the magazine "Delta" in Rijeka, directed by Antonio Widmar. In 1929 he began collaborating with the newspaper "La Vedetta d'Italia" as a theater and music critic, and then became editor the following year. In 1942 he was dismissed by decision of Carlo Scorza, at the time head of the Press Agency, with the vague motivation of reducing staff.

In September 1936 he married the Dalmatian Matilde Meštrović, granddaughter of the Yugoslav sculptor Ivan Meštrović. In 1944, a few months after the occupation of Rijeka by the Yugoslav army, he accepted the editorship of "La Vedetta d'Italia" at the urging of the city authorities who wanted a moderator at the helm of the newspaper. The Gestapo, however, did not trust Ramous too much, so in the summer of 1944 they summoned him to subject him to stringent interrogations, while his home was searched.

In 1946 the Italian Drama was born with Pietro Rismondo as director for a short time, and Ramous then followed him in the position. In his 15 years as director, he has been entrusted with 46 directing as well as some translations of Yugoslav comedies. In 1954, going to Milan with Paolo Grassi, director of the "Piccolo Teatro" and later superintendent of La Scala, he agreed on a tour in Yugoslavia of the "Piccolo Teatro" which achieved great success in Rijeka.

In 1956 he positively solved the problem related to the tragic situation in which the Italian Drama found itself, which was in danger of closing its doors. Not accepting the decisions of the local authorities, concerning the transfer to more peripheral locations and the dismissal of most of the actors, he went to Belgrade to the Federal Government, pleading the cause of the Drama with valid arguments until he obtained full satisfaction.

Once retired, in 1961 he found the ideal conditions to rediscover himself as a poet, novelist and author of short stories. In recent years he has dedicated himself to the project of a meeting between Italian and Yugoslav writers, which was carried out in 1964 with a considerable commitment both by the publisher Rebellato and by Rotary. Death caught him on March 2, 1981, while he was reviewing "The papier-mâché horse", a novel that was very close to his heart as it was closely linked to Rijeka.

Critical notes

The figure and work of Osvaldo Ramous are linked to his hometown, Rijeka, which he lived in before and after the exodus of the Italian population at the turn of the Second World War. Following the exodus, the Italian component of Fiume found in him a prolific cultural animator, who tried to keep a bridge open with Italy in an extremely difficult period. It is no coincidence that even in his lyrics the recurring theme is the dilemma – which unites all the "left" like a curse – between "leaving" and "staying", as well as the problem of the impossibility of recognizing oneself and finding one's peace in a hostile and unknown world.

A poet endowed with a subtle sensitivity, close to hermetic or hermetic lyric at first, he nevertheless remained a loner essentially faithful to himself, intent on questioning his own interiority and participating in the anxieties of contemporary humanity.

Ramous would also have entertained after the Second World War an intense correspondence with Enrico Morovich, an Italian writer and essayist also of Rijeka origin, significant both for the personalities of the two correspondents and for the human story of the exodus, with Morovich who did not accept his friend's repeated invitations, on the one hand torn by the desire to see Rijeka again, on the other assailed by the fear that the emotional state of the sight of his beloved city would reopen the wound of detachment.

Published in 2008 as an unpublished and posthumous novel, as well as difficult to find in Italy, "Il cavallo di papier-mâché" represents the first novel in the field of literature of the Italian National Community that explicitly refers to the exodus, a taboo subject at the time of its writing (1967). Narrating the story of Roberto Badin, who remained in Fiume after the exodus and in some ways alter ego of the author, the novel deals with the transformations, ambiguities and feelings of a difficult era in a territory where different languages and cultures coexisted. In fact, we read in the incipit that "in the course of his not yet very long life, Roberto had five citizenships, without asking for any".

Critical notes inspired by "Osvaldo Ramous. The uprooting of the remainers", by Gianna Mazzieri, in La Battana, n. 97-98, 1990.

Bibliography

Poetry collections

• In the reeds, Fiume, Termini, 1938
• Wind on the pond, Fiume, EDIT, 1953
• 50 poems, Zagreb, Croatian Literary Association, 1957
• Plant Planting, Padua, Rebellato, 1960
• Il vino della notte, Venice, Lombardo-Veneta, 1964
• Medea's awakening, Padova, Rebellato, 1967
• The word in time, Zagreb, Zora, 1969
• Reality of the absurd, Padova, rebellato, 1973
• Mercy on things, Padova, Rebellato, 1977
• Posthumous Viaggio quotidiano, Fiume, Centro editoriale, 1982

Dramas

• A duel, Milan in Il teatro per tutti, 1934
• Special Edition, Zagreb, Zora, 1950 translated into Croatian under the title Posebno izdanje, Zagreb, Glas rada, 1951

Dramas performed

• We set up a show – 1947 – for the inauguration of the Children's Theatre in Rijeka
• With one foot in the water, performed in Rijeka on 4 June 1970

Unreleased dramas

• L'ora di Marinopoli, 1952
• The Longest Road, 1954
• In the Shelter, 1954
• The Idol, 1956
• The Harbor, 1956

Radio Dramas

• Lotta con l'ombra, originally written for the theatre but not exploited, then remade as a radio drama in 1960 (translated into Croatian Borba sa sjenom, and the Spanish Lucha con unas ombra broadcast in Buenos Aires)
• La mia ocarina, 1960 (translated into German Dorina und meine Ocarina and broadcast five times in East Berlin) – broadcast by Swiss radio in Monteceneri on 8 July 1970
• Il farmaco portentoso, 1963, broadcast by RAI II on 18 January 1963 Rendini Magda, 1962
• An almost human heart, 1968, broadcast by Swiss Radio (I program) on 14 Oct. 1970
• Con un piede nell'acqua, 1969, broadcast by Radio Friuli-Venezia Giulia on 15 February 1974
• Un attimo solo, 1974, broadcast by radio FVG on 14 March 1975
• Le pecore e il mostro, 1966, broadcast by radio Trieste on 13 Jan. ’68
• Viaggio senza meta ( 1976), broadcast by Radio Koper on 6 June 1976
• Sull'onda degli echi, 1977, broadcast by RAI I on 16 January 1980
• Guido i'vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io, 1969 broadcast by FVG on 18 May 1972

Fiction

• The Seagulls on the Roof, 1961 – novel that remained unpublished in Italian, but translated into Portuguese by Antonio D'Elia and published in S. Paulo in Brazil, 1964 with the title Gaivotas no telhado.
• Also translated into Croatian by Jerka Belan and Duška Orlandi and published under the title Galebovi na krovu, Zagreb, Naprijed, 1965.
• Serenade to death, a collection of short stories that has remained unpublished in Italian. Translated into Portuguese by Rolando Roque da Silva and published in São Paulo (Brazil) in 1975 in 20,000 copies under the title Serenata ao passado by the same publisher of Gaivotas no telhado, Clube do livro.
• The children of the comet, stories published by the fortnightly "Panorama" of the EDIT of Rijeka in installments during 1984.
• In addition, thirty short stories, not included in the works listed above, published in various magazines and newspapers.
• The papier-mâché horse – unpublished novel, published posthumously in 2008 by the publishing house EDIT Rijeka, Croatia.

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Biographical notes

He was born in Sussak, a suburb of Rijeka, in 1906, when the city was still part of the Kingdom of Hungary. He graduated in accounting in 1924, subsequently working first at the Bank of Italy, then at the General Warehouses.

In 1929 he met Alberto Carocci, director and publisher of magazines, who opened the doors of Solaria and La Fiera Letteraria, with whom he started a collaboration. His first, significant, literary creation dates back to 1936, "L'osteria sul torrente", which was published by Solaria, followed by "Daily Miracles" (1938), "Portraits in the woods" (1939), "Peasants on the mountains" (1942) and "The green dress" (1942). In those years he also published essays and short stories in "Il Selvaggio" and "Oggi".

The last years of the war and the first years of the post-war period, particularly bloody for Fiume and for the whole of Venezia Giulia, led him to interrupt his literary activity for a few years, which he resumed only in 1962, with Racconti e Fantasie.

In 1950 he decided to abandon his homeland, which in the meantime had passed to Yugoslavia, and emigrate to Italy. After living for a few years in various Italian cities, in Naples, Lugo, Viareggio, Busalla and Pisa, he settled in Genoa in 1958, where he resided for over thirty years.

In Genoa he returned to publish, after thirteen years of silence, novels and short stories, including: "The abyss" (1964), "The invisible elevators" (1981), "The marine giants" (1984), "Little lovers" (1990). In 1990 he moved to the Chiavari-Lavagna area, where he later died at the age of eighty-seven.

Critical notes

Morovich's debut stories, written between 1930 and 1935 and collected in the volume "L'osteria sul torrente", do not allow us to identify exactly the future identity of Morovich's fiction. If the first passages of the collection, mostly set among woods and streams, present a calm and meticulous vision of a reality populated by mediocre and sometimes cynical men, the subsequent passages, placed in city environments, reveal the writer's intention to free himself from the minute descriptivism of the previous pages to introduce some surreal accents.

Subsequently, he moves away from realism altogether, choosing an ironic and disenchanted narrative line, fairytale and imaginative, surreal and yet capable of creating the illusion of telling truths, to reveal only in the surprise ending its actual quality of dreamlike tale. From the spring of 1937 his literary commitment turned almost exclusively to fantastic prose, fairy tales, and surreal stories, with writings directly inspired by Morovich's own dreams. These stories were published in newspapers and periodicals, and in a short time he became one of the most sought-after third-page narrators, appearing assiduously in various newspapers ("L'ambrosiano" in Milan, "Il Messaggero" in Rome, "Il Piccolo della Sera" in Trieste, the "Corriere di Alessandria") and in popular weekly news magazines (such as "Oggi") as well as in the usual cultural magazines (such as "Il Convegno", "The Literary Reform", and "Revolution").

He also tried his hand at novels, with more relaxed narrative schemes and attentive to the psychological implications of the characters, but at the same time confirming the dreamlike elements, as in "The Green Dress" (1949), in which real and living characters alternate with ghosts throughout the story.

A year before his death, in 1993 he published "Un italiano di Fiume", a collection of prose that constitutes a moving evocation of his city of origin and his vicissitudes on Italian soil.

Critical notes inspired by "Enrico Morovich: the dreamlike reality" by Francesco de Nicola in "La Battana" n.97-98, 1990.

Bibliography

• The tavern on the stream, Florence, Solaria, 1936
• Daily miracles, Florence, Parenti, 1938
• Portraits in the woods, Florence, Parenti, 1939
• Peasants in the mountains, Florence, Vallecchi, 1942
• The green dress, Rome, Lettere d'oggi, Rome 1949
• The abyss, Padova, Rebellato, 1964 (republished by: Torino, Einaudi 1990)
• Invisible elevators, Genoa, Unimedia, 1981
• The nostalgia of the sea, Genoa, Unimedia, 1981
• The caricature, Genova, Lanterna, 1983 (republished by: Milano, Rusconi Editore, 1994)
• The sea giants, Genoa, Unimedia, 1984 (republished by: Palermo, Sellerio, 1990)
• Nights with the moon, Genoa, Unimedia, 1986
• Miracoli quotidiani (This is not the same text published in 1938, but an anthology of short stories extracted from: L'osteria sul torrente, Miracoli quotidiani, I ritratti nel bosco), Palermo, Sellerio, 1988
• Little lovers, Milan, Rusconi Editore, 1990
• An Italian from Rijeka, Milan, Rusconi Editore, 1993