Franco Loi is a case of incredible identification. He was born in Genoa in 1930 to a Sardinian father (freight forwarder and then director of a freight yard) and Emilian mother from Colorno (here the article by Cristina Taglietti for 90 years). Having already moved to Milan with his family in 1937, Loi absorbs the Lombard language andhabit morality of the urban working class. In “his” Milan he died on January 4, assisted at home by his daughter Francesca, debilitated by the blindness that had intervened for several years and by the heart failure that has occurred in recent months.
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After the war and the civil struggle actively lived as a boy, Loi began to work as a ceramic designer and then as a worker in the contracts of the railway, from there to the advertising office of the Rinascente and then, having obtained the diploma of accountant in evening schools, he moved to the press office of Mondadori from 1960 to ’67, continuing to collaborate until 83. He was enrolled in the Youth Front and in the Communist Youth Federation, he served in the PCI until 1962 but continued to carry out political activity in the left for the whole of the 1970s. His love of theater was linked to his civil passion, which in 1964 brought him a collaboration with Puecher, Bajni and Marano for a satire show at the Piccolo and between 1969 and 1970 a participation in Nuova Scena.
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As you can guess from the few biographical notes just mentioned, Loi is a culturally atypical figure in the Italian poetic panorama, and this is also demonstrated by the fact that he approached poetry at a rather late age, in 1965, for a “sentimental and voluntary drive”, as he wrote: “I was in love and I tried to give word to my passionate effusions. This amorous effervescence seemed to me poetry ». He began to write in Italian, but for an impulse that he himself could not define, the Milanese language came out as “a current of rhythms and sounds within which words and images found, almost spontaneously, their place”. In a month he wrote about 120 poems, and to recover that same compositional happiness he had to wait until 1970, when due to a coincidence of personal facts (the death of his father and the paralysis of his maternal aunt Zelinda, the dramatic break with politics and with some comrades in struggle) found himself “alone, grieved, assaulted by memories.” From prose he passes back to poetry in the language and finally is again “dragged” towards the dialect: with that verb, “dragged”, he wants to convey the idea of the irresistible force procured by “musical emotion” (“The invisible feng’s bite”) preserved in his personal memory.
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In fact, as has been pointed out by several illustrious admirers of his poetry (including Dante Isella, Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Franco Brevini), that of Loi is a Milanese stranger to the tradition of Carlo Porta and Delio Tessa, as he mixes the proletarian language of the city with elements of the countryside and linguistic contributions from immigrants. of different origin. But all this is freely reworked or reinvented by Loi with the addition of numerous ingredients (motherly Emilian, foreign languages, Latin, literary archaisms), as well as being loaded with civil and mythical force as a projection of a revolutionary imaginary dating back to ‘adolescence. His friend Franco Fortini said that Loi’s “going back” in the dialect is linked to the utopia of childhood-adolescence, becoming “historical awareness, in the series of struggles and defeats of the European proletariat and, in the political dimension, in the” betrayal “that the left would have fulfilled the hope of ’45”. By virtue of this ideal vision, that particular dialect is not an exclusive trait of the humble classes but becomes an all-encompassing language that invests everything even with violence, incorporating within itself the entire and multiple reality of the world.
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The overall effect of grotesque realism and sometimes visionary hyperrealism gradually declines in different forms but often united by a profound chorality that involves characters and figures, such as to become dramatic dialogue over time, epic and fantastic narration “composed for accumulating situations” and “as in uncontainable waves” (Maurizio Cucchi) . It goes from the first tests de I cart (The 1973 map) a Stròlegh (1975), from Theater (1978) a Free (1988, the title means both “book” and “free”), da Bach (1986) a L’angel (1981 and 1994): where Loi develops a sort of personal and generational autobiography, with passages from the civil war, scenes from piazzale Loreto, evocations of the Scelba years, raids in 1968, images of piazza Fontana …
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Long and very long stories that convey a desperate participation towards the destiny (or destinies) of the oppressed and at the same time a vital, libertarian, anarchic energy. It is in the very natural coexistence of lyricism, private memories (“Mariuccia, / prim tettin de my life …») E di cronaca pietosa delle nostre tragedie storiche il tratto stupefacente del grande poeta che è stato Loi, senza alcun dubbio uno dei maggiori poeti del Novecento:« O qu’la dòna grisa de vigogna, / cun la veletta, che va cuj man alzà / e la via Porpora camina ‘m’ ind i sogna / che piassa de Luret la par luntan … ». He goes with his hands raised and the Purple Way walks as in dreams …
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January 4, 2021 (change January 4, 2021 | 21:05)
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