I haven’t experienced the turmoil of the 70s and 80s in Italy, it’s couldron of art, politics, fashion and riots, new narratives and heroes, dangers and culture, but I was experiencing fear and insecurity, I was experiencing the void of a generation, the trouble of becoming an adult. The masterful writer’s true gift is the ability to tell a story and many stories and all the stories, to talk to a specific audience and everybody. But he was able to talk about feelings and people like no one else I’ve read before. I’ve read Pao Pao, Rimini, Biglietti agli Amici, everything I could find, and it didn’t matter if I was reading fiction or non fiction, I could feel that sense of belonging and connection: Tondelli wasn’t telling my story, he wasn’t talking about my times and places. the responsibilities of an adulthood I wasn’t ready to face. By then I was just meeting the voice of my late teens, I was encountering the poet who sang my anguish and insecurity, I was finding the sound of my transition from a world I knew and the unknown. Pavia would have become the place of my heart and my most precious memories, but I didn’t know that yet. It was on a Intercity train travelling from Sanremo, the tiny and boring city where I was born and Pavia, another tiny, cozy and foggy city in the north of Italy. Not even that, it wasn’t about the sight, it was about language, the words, the commas and the full stops.
That day I was just a frightened little girl on a train, but I could feel it, marked into my bones, the foetus of a person, the person I wanted to release. I was nothing like that at the time again, the wild and true part of my identity was about to flourish. His first colletion was a chronicle of real life: drug addicts, dives, dirty toilets, train stations and people constantly living on the edge.
I was 19 the first time I came through one of his works.Īltri Libertini, his first collection of short stories, published in the 70s, was a cult for generations of weird, lonely and brave travellers. Love, life, relationships were often excruciating for Tondelli, and his strong and immediately recognisable style returns to us all the rich and multifaceted spectrum of his perspective and emotions. He was also homosexual, and queer he embraced all the possible meanings of it, with pride, confusion, curiosity, desire, awkwardness, proximity and distance, sometimes joy, strenght and pain, unimaginable pain. He was honest, thorough, restless and deep. He was 36, he was a writer, a poet, a critic and essayist, an extraordinary human being. 25 years ago Pier Vittorio Tondelli died.
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