2023-10-31 14:01:43
by CRISTINA TAGLIETTI
Publisher, critic, translator, narrator, cultural organizer, director of the Book Fair from 1998 to 2016, who passed away at the age of 85 after a long illness
It was a life in the name of, and at the service of, books that of Ernesto Ferrero, who passed away at the age of 85 on the morning of October 31st after a long illness that had weakened him in body but not in spirit, always alert and attentive to what was happening around him, in the cultural world, in civil society, in politics. Faithful to a warm, never affected kindness, with a smile that sometimes betrayed a melancholic streak, highly cultured but without snobbery, a keen observer of events and people, Ferrero was many things: publisher, critic, translator, narrator, cultural organizer, director, from 1998 to 2016, of the Book Fair.
Born in Turin on 6 May 1938, he has lived in the Italian publishing world for over sixty years, since 1963 when he began working as head of the press office of the Einaudi publishing house, passing an exam after reading an advertisement in the Press and left his job as an insurer. He then became literary director and, in 1984, in a moment of difficult financial crisis for the publishing house, editorial director until 1989.
There were also other stages in his journey – Boringhieri, Garzanti, Mondadori – but his name, and perhaps his heart, have always remained linked to the Ostrich. A very fine writer, he recounted that experience and those seasons which also saw him as a shrewd director of the famous Wednesday meetings, in a splendid memoir with a pressing narrative pace, The best years of our lives, where the memories of genius, obsessions, anxieties, habits of masters, work and travel companions, are intertwined with those of places and landscapes. I distinctly thought that by an unexpected miracle I had been welcomed into the mythological region where the tree of happiness grows, he writes on the first page, recalling the exhilarating beginning of that adventure.
in the fertile humus of via Biancamano (where he also met his wife Carla, his lifelong companion) which have the roots of solid relationships, based on friendship and competence, such as those with Primo Levi (to whom in 2007 he dedicated, between other, an essay that reconstructs his life and works) and with Italo Calvino, at the center of a biography in images, Album Calvino (Mondadori 2005), but also of his latest work, Italo, released by Einaudi a few weeks ago. With them (Italo and Primo do not waste words, due to the respect they have for them. They speak little and work a lot. They are happy in their burrows he writes), and with the other masters who have made the history of twentieth-century Italian culture inside and outside the Ostrich — Einaudi, Morante, Feltrinelli, Fruttero and Lucentini, Ceronetti, Bobbio, Pavese, Foa, Garboli, Garzanti, just to name a few — Ferrero has woven a constant and fruitful dialogue, also placing them at the center of one of his latest books, Family Album , released by Einaudi in 2022. Those twentieth-century masters portrayed in person formed for him a branched, bizarre, surprising, excessive, dispersed, even conflicting family, like all others, but extraordinary, cohesive in the same passions, in the same feelings.
Over the years his elegant and never opaque writing was applied with the same enthusiasm to cover pages, reviews and newspaper articles, as to novels and essays. Translator of Cline (his version of Journey to the End of the Night published by Corbaccio), of Flaubert (Bouvard and Pcuchet in the Meridiani Mondadori), of Perec (The Condottiero, Voland), Ferrero wrote his books following an eclectic taste and curiosity rooted, which ranged from the crimes of Gilles de Rais, the monstrous protagonist of the French fifteenth century, to the mystery of the papyrus of Artemidoros, from the life of Saint Francis to Emilio Salgari, up to the metamorphoses of the language (Historical Dictionary of Italian Jargons, Mondadori 2002).
As a narrator he made his debut in 1980 with the novel Cervo Bianco (Mondadori), based on the true story of Edgar Laplante who, impersonating a false Indian chief, enchanted (and deceived) Italians in 1924, then rewritten and in recent months republished by Einaudi with the title The Year of the Indian. In 2000 with N., inspired by the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte and his last three hundred days on the island of Elba, he won the Strega prize, in a final challenge with Case amori universi by Fosco Maraini.
At the helm of the Turin Book Fair – alongside president Rolando Picchioni, from whom he was distant in terms of training and ambition, but whose actions he defended until the end – he governed the most difficult storms, with harsh boycotts, with firmness and willingness fielded against host country Israel, to the invitation, later withdrawn, to Saudi Arabia, up to the investigations that led to the crisis of the event and the derby with Milan. As a Savoy soldier, as he defined himself, with the paper rose in the buttonhole of his jacket and a sweet smile on his lips.
October 31, 2023 (modified October 31, 2023 | 12:05)
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