Università Roma Tre

The poetry of Franco Fortini


This course offers a reading of the poetic work of Franco Fortini (1917-1994) intertwined with his critical and essayistic production on Italian classics, 20th century poets, and the cultural, political and ideological events of our time. The choice to study Fortini stems from the richness of the themes addressed and a high consideration of the poetic form present in his verse. It also stems from being, Fortini's poetry, a work-world, an aspiration to that world literature of which Goethe spoke, a literature, that is, capable of reading the world in its 'totality'. A 'totality', of course, which must be translated, interpreted, selected. And whose reception must also be investigated. Because without 'this translation, the text does not exist, or is an object, a closed book, a mute hieroglyphic. The ability to understand is proportional to the latitude of the reader's experience, to his or her culture; because culture, in short, is also the possibility of understanding languages other than one's own particular and usual one, languages of other men or classes or times or nations." So wrote Franco Fortini in 1946 in Elio Vittorini's Politecnico. Reading Fortini's poetry thus also becomes a gymnasium of language education to enrich and deepen our communicative capacity. As a frontier educator, Don Roberto Sardelli, wrote, 'the real teachers are not those who make study easy, but those who make it difficult.' And Fortini, from this point of view, is certainly a master of complexity and depth, of stylistic and conceptual unpredictability.
Reading these texts and interpreting them as a critical exercise of the imagination, with the consequent historical-critical commentary, will consolidate three capacities of which the critic Romano Luperini speaks: “the cognitive capacity, widening and deepening specific knowledge of the discipline and of the linguistic and cultural knowledge that is obtained from the dense network of interferences that presides over reading and interpretation; the imaginative capacity, as an existential, emotional and cultural enrichment produced by the contact with the great reservoir of imagination that is literature; the critical capacity, from education to the complexity and the problematic nature of the hermeneutical moment to the partiality and interdialogical character of every truth and to the democratic dialectic of the conflict of interpretations. These three capacities outline the many educational objectives.”
Numerous scholars and educators - Dewey, Bruner, and Gardner, but also, Italians like Montessori, Malaguzzi, Lodi, Ciari and Rodari - have repeatedly supported the centrality of artistic education in learning processes. It is therefore important to underline the importance of the study of poetry for the enhancement of those qualities that are the basis of every authentic educational relationship: listening, depth, attention, critical capacity, and creativity. Poetry, in particular, makes use of a deliberately ambiguous language, based on a multiplicity of meanings, through semantic richness capable of unhinging the flat conformism of so much communication present in everyday speech, in books, in the media, and om the net.
Reading these texts will be considered for use in kindergarten and primary school, using reading aloud and student presentations as possible didactic paths. With the warning, however, that this cannot be the only approach with which one approaches literature.
The study of literature, its aesthetic and cognitive enjoyment, and the ability to be moved by beauty are assets in themselves; they presuppose a disinterested attitude towards “knowing,” a prerequisite fact of reading, in an attempt to stimulate the development of a critical and creative curiosity towards the world. We study it to enrich ourselves as women, men and citizens and also as educators and teachers. We also study it because it is only possible to construct innovative and stimulating educational itineraries for the students if we know the authors we want to use in depth, only if we consciously penetrate the depth of the polysemic richness of a literary text.
As Italo Calvino wrote about the classics of world literature, "do not believe that the classics ought to be read because they ‘serve any purpose.’ The only reason one can adduce is that reading the classics is better than not reading the classics. And if someone objects that it is not worth the effort, I will quote Cioran [...]: ‘while the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. ‘What good will it do you?’ they asked, ‘to learn this tune before dying”.
Starting by reading the texts of Franco Fortini we will then open other “windows” and deepen our knowledge of other authors of Italian and world literature from the present and the past. For this part of the course, students will also be asked to measure themselves against hypotheses of didactic paths for kindergarten and primary school starting with the works indicated in the program.

Exam Texts

1.Franco Fortini, Tutte le poesie, a cura di L. Lenzini, Mondadori, Milano 2021.

2.Franco Fortini, Dialoghi sui classici italiani con Donatello Santarone, Bordeaux, Roma 2024.

3.Franco Fortini, I poeti del Novecento, a cura di D. Santarone, con un saggio introduttivo di P. V. Mengaldo, Donzelli, Roma 2017.

4.Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, I chiusi inchiostri. Scritti su Franco Fortini, a cura e con un saggio di D. Santarone, Quodlibet, Macerata 2020.