Literary Works
URCA CHE PARÒLI!
Wow! What words!
Mi richordo anchora (I still remember)
edited by Giovanni Negri e Gustavo Marchesi with notes by Cesare Zavattini
Einaudi, Turin 1976
Winner of the Viareggio Literary Award as debut novel in the category of fiction, 1977
a lilla – quatro pietre in mortalate (to lilla – four immortalized stones)
edited by Giovanni Negri and Gustavo Marchesi
Vanni Scheiwiller, Milan 1980
Inediti letterari (Unpublished literary works)
edited by Giovanni Negri and Vittorio Erlindo
Renzo Pivetti Editore, Mirandola 1986
Pietro Ghizzardi’s literature
Pietro Ghizzardi was a prolific and tireless self-taught, half illiterate writer and he always considered his literary production on the same level as the pictorial one and, especially after the success of his autobiography Mi richordo anchora (Einaudi, 1976) and the winning of the Viareggio Award as debut novel in the category of fiction (1977), he thought of himself more as a prophetic writer than as a painter, even if talented.
For Ghizzardi the word, the language – his incorrect, ill-formed, dialectal, “sulphurous” language – was the complementary means to painting to express his own being, his thinking, his torment and his joy, struggling to earn the word in itself, inventing an alphabet out-and-out where phonetic and morphologic values coincide with things because they materialize them, extracting them from the universe of concepts throwing them down to the earth.
What the author tries unconsciously to realize is letting orality flow into the permanence of the written composition, reproducing its rhythms, redundance, pleonasms, inflections of the story on himself.
The literary success Mi richordo anchora was thereby followed, in the 80s, by a lilla – quatro pietre in mortalate (published by Vanni Scheiwiller) and Inediti letterari: real acts of reminiscence and defence of the past – which has been forever put in shade by the present day – and of the importance of memory.
Next to the works that have been published there are also numerous unpublished manuscripts, kept preserved at the Historical Archive, in the Casa Museo Al Belvedere “Pietro Ghizzardi”. Many of them were copied out by Giovanni Negri.
Among the unpublished works we can count in particular the four Libri universali degli animali volanti e atterranti (“Universal books of flying and landing birds”) with illustrations, real masterpieces of spontaneous writing, short aetiology poems developed by an “illiterate but writer” (as defined by Angelo Guglielmi), who in these last poetic inspirations embarked on a courageous experiment, made of consonantal stabilization and insisted syllabic iterations with expressive goals.
The certainty that his own work would never fade pushed him to state, often and pleased with his own compositions: “Urca che paròli!” (“Wow! What words!”).