Franco Vegliani
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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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