Cristina Campo, La disciplina della gioia

Maria Pertile and Alessandro Giovanardi present Cristina Campo, The Discipline of Joy. With Letters to John Lindsay Opie edited by Maria Pertile and Giovanna Scarca Pazzini, 2021 Thursday, May 4th, the May program of "Books from These Parts," part of the national "May of Books" campaign, inaugurated with the presentation of Cristina Campo, one of the most intense and refined voices in twentieth-century literature. A poet, essayist, and translator of Simone Weil, Dickinson, Eliot, John Donne, W.C. Williams, Hoffmannsthal, and other metaphysical and mystical poets, she was born in Bologna on April 29, 1923, under the name Vittoria Guerrini. On the centenary of her birth, we rediscover her through the volume Cristina Campo. The Discipline of Joy, edited by Maria Pertile and Giovanna Scarca, with Letters to John Lindsay Opie, edited by Alessandro Giovanardi, published by Pazzini in 2021. The book collects the proceedings of the conference held in Florence in 2017 on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of his death (Rome, 1977) and helps bring to the attention of the general public one of the most extraordinary figures of twentieth-century Italian and European literature. Raised in a favorable and cultured bourgeois environment, Cristina Campo had a strong and determined personality, supported by a body of extraordinary elegance and beauty, yet fragile due to illness. She had numerous important acquaintances, linked to the three cities that formed the backdrop of her life: Bologna, Florence, and Rome. Among other things, between 1959 and 1977, she was the life partner of Elémire Zolla, a renowned scholar and researcher of mystical and esoteric traditions. A multifaceted and extraordinary personality, a precious intellectual, translator, poet, and essayist. This volume retraces Campo's life journey, gathering testimonies, numerous critical contributions, and previously unpublished correspondence, exploring the places that shaped her artistic career. It highlights the writer's intense human experience and opens up new perspectives for investigating and interpreting her profoundly significant literary work, unique in the twentieth-century panorama, not only in Italy. Very little was said about her during her lifetime. Only Roberto Calasso, in the Corriere della Sera, wrote an obituary: "She left behind a few unforgivably perfect pages, completely foreign to a literary society that had no eyes to read them. But these are pages that will find their readers in the future—and then they will appear as a truly disconcerting surprise." This is an unmissable opportunity to discover an authoritative and valuable voice, guided by two of the book's editors, among her greatest experts: Maria Pertile and Alessandro Giovanardi. Maria Pertile holds a degree in History of the Italian Language and a PhD in Italian Literature, with a thesis on the unpublished correspondence of Cristina Campo. She studied Medieval Catalan Philology at the University of Girona. She has taught at universities, given lectures, and held seminars in Italy and abroad, and is a translator from Catalan and Spanish. For about twenty years, she has focused on Cristina Campo, publishing her letters to Maria Zambrano, Remo Fasani, and Ernesto Marchese. Alessandro Giovanardi, historian and art critic, received his education at the University of Bologna (Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy) and the University of Siena, Arezzo campus (Master's Degree in Aesthetics and Doctorate in Philosophical Sciences/Textual Sciences). Since 2006, he has taught Sacred Art and Iconography and Iconology at the Alberto Marvelli Institute of Religious Sciences of Rimini and San Marino-Montefeltro. He oversees the cultural activities of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Rimini, edits the history, art, and culture magazine "Ariminum," and is director of the "Francesco Renzi" Museum-Library in San Giovanni in Galilea. His main interests concern the relationship between philosophical thought and artistic imagery, explored through the figures of Pavel Florenskij, Vladimiro Zabughin, Cristina Campo, and Elémire Zolla, to whom he has dedicated several essays. His publications include Pietas and Beauty. Sacred Art in Cristina Campo (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome, 2007), John Lindsay Opie. Symbolic Aesthetics and the Experience of the Sacred (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome, 2011), and Thinking the Border. Vladimiro Zabughin between East and West (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome, 2021). He edited the anthology of essays by John Lindsay Opie, In the World of Icons: From India to Byzantium (Jaca Book, Milan 2014).