Ricordo, quando ero studente di liceo, una professoressa che mi fece odiare la letteratura italiana ed un enorme e costoso libro, chiamato Il materiale e l'immaginario in DIECI volumi (ne comprai usati il primo e il terzo, che ho rivenduto non appena finite le superiori) che sembravano scritti proprio per questo scopo. Ho dovuto riscoprire Dante da me all'età di ventitre anni, quando ho iniziato a leggere l'Inferno su "suggerimento" di Borges (ma complice è stata anche la parodia disneyana di Guido Martina!): ho comprato una versione tascabile senza note e l'ho trovato bellissimo. In tre settimane ne sapevo a memoria i principali canti; tuttora mi ripeto, di tanto in tanto, il terzo, quinto, ventiseiesimo, ventisettesimo ed altri dell'Inferno.

Here I collect some links: of course there are myriads of sites devoted to Dante but, alas, also many companies which borrowed his name, and which have nothing to do with the Poet; as a result, often search engines give a lot of unuseful links.

Maybe he is my favorite writer: his poems, tales and essays are literature at the purest and at the highest level I know.

Campana was a great Italian poet of the first half of XX century: nobody told me about him at the high school, I had to discover him by myself, and realize that he was greater than any other Italian poet of his age, especially than those who were taught at high school.

Don't confuse this great writer with that Robert Chambers who wrote Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (in some sense a novelist himself!).

I met him when I was thirteen, and he teached me the delight to read tales and novels: in turn I have been attracted from his books since I knew the comic adapting of his tales (comics and fairy tales are essentially the only thing I've read till I've been ten years old).

I haven't read Moby Dick until I was thirty: but when I did I have been astonished by the content and prose of this chief-work, which is an epic poem of our times, just like Odyssey or Aeneid were in the past. I have read it only on seasides and cities on the sea (in Sicily and Latium) and to intertwine those pages with the song of waves and sea-gulls was marvelous.

Papini is probably the Italian author with the worst ratio fame/talent: he was a scholar, a poet, a writer, a philosopher, an active character in the cultural scene from 1900 to 1915, now almost forgotten. After the Great War of '14-'18 he became catholic and, when fascism gained power and Italy went under its regime, Papini gave his support to the regime, being one of the great intellectuals (like Gentile and Severi) seduced by Mussolini and by his gang: qui potete leggere una sua sintetica biografia. Maybe for this reasons he was forgotten by Italian post-war culture. However his great talent as a writer and a scholar cannot be shadowed by his political choices.

I've found only a few links on Papini, mainly on his futuristic period (just a few months!), so I leave in this pages some of his writings: since they are difficult to be retrieved (they are out of print since several decades) and they were written one century ago, it would be a nice idea to put his best writings on the net. Here I leave a fragment of this hypothetical collection.

To me, the greatest Italian poet of his times, and a thinker much more beyond his epoch: you can find out a lot of sites about his movies, but a few on his poetical works.

Great authors are always the best critics and translators: it is well known that Baudelaire wrote essays on Poe and translated him; Pessoa too did translations in Portuguese (some of them are here on my pages).

Here it follows a list of authors (poets, writers,...) I have a predilection for: for each one I list some titles, not meaning the main titles of that author, but the ones I have read and liked so to suggest it to the reader. Needless to say this is a partial list (not all writers I like and read are included), multilingual (I cite titles according to the tongue in which I have read them, since this have influence on judgment) and maybe subject to changes; whenever possible I have included some links on the net.

Now the question is: why a reading list? I think they are essential: indeed it's certainly true that everyone of us has his/her peculiar net of books, authors, tales, &c. (and not necessarily if we have two or more authors in common also the rest are!) however a statistical role may be played by these lists: for example I have discovered many authors by others author's "suggestions"; thus I believe that who reads a lot should compile a list of the books he/she likes (and also, maybe above all, a list of the books he/she dislikes): for instance, if someone puts in his/her list of favorite books a book I hate, I will be prevent to read other books he/she likes.

Schopenhauer said that the true art is that of not-reading more than that of reading books: thus it's important to know how to avoid titles that would only make lost our time in reading them, because we find them boring, stupid, irritating or worse.

For example Manganelli wrote in a paper that there's no need to read a book to know if we will like it: I cite from his article Il padrino [The Godfather] from the collection Lunario dell'orfano sannita [Samnite orphan's almanac]

I don't believe everyone has Manganelli's dowsing-rod, thus I think that lists like mine can be useful: I hope to be imitated. However some remarks on the arranging of this list are in order, just to avoid misunderstandings and useless perplexities.

I do not trust in the existence of literary genres, at most I could believe in the existence of authors (which sometimes induces in wrong); thus in this page I propose links to sites dealing with authors I like to (re)read (both poets and prose writers).

As it will be noticed by the following list, I am not interested in the classifications made by criticizers in "learned", "pulp", "classical" authors and who knows what else: I am not interested in the moral of a writer nor in his/her political ideas: I can love a writer who, from an ethical and political viewpoint, thinks exactly the contrary of what I think, and I can believe an author whose ideas I share to be a mediocre scribbler.

As Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface of his The Picture of Dorian Gray:

So it does not exist realistic literature, historical literature, fantastic literature, but only good literature and bad literature (according to our personal tastes): in other words, literature (and more generally art) has nothing to do with moral; of course a novel or a tale may be pervaded with a moral or political inspiration which I find hateful, but this will influence only the surface, the matter we touch with reason in a literary work, and not the mystery of its beauty, which we sound with other mental organs.

I cite books published by authors, or also single tales or poems not contained in a particular book but, for instance, published for the first time on a magazine (in this case I warn); if I have not read the work in its original tongue then I also put the original title [enclosed between brackets]; also I try to classify cited works in tales, poems and so on, if they are not contained in a single book.

For some authors I put a link to a list of other interesting links: often between these links you'll find a link to the complete cited text, somewhere on the Net.

There are quite a many sites with text on line, of course most of them are classic of literature, philosophy and so on, but even libraries in their entirety translated in electronic format: the following is a choice of the ones I consult more often. For texts about philosophy, computer science, mathematics look at the specific sections in this site.

See also: Texts on mathematics, Texts on philosophy and the sections devoted to single authors and to their works.