The poet Giampietro Pontiggia, whom the reading public knew under the pseudonym Giampiero Neri, a great loner of poetry, so much so that he was hailed by critics as a “maestro in shadow”, died tonight in Milan at the age of 95. Born in Erba (Como) on April 7, 1927, he was the older brother of the writer Giuseppe Pontiggia, known as Peppo (1934-2003), to whom he was linked throughout his life by a complex relationship.
His youth, in his beloved Lombard province, had been touched by two opposing signs. On the one hand, the killing in 1943 of his father Ugo, who had been secretary of the fascist party in the municipality of Bosisio Parini (Lecco), by Gappist partisans in an ambush in the murky period of the civil war, on the other the meeting with the Professor Luigi Fumagalli, at the Annoni Institute in Erba, who made him dream with its paradoxes, open-air lessons and love for the classics. At the end of the war, Neri obtained his scientific high school diploma, then enrolled in the Faculty of Natural Sciences, but it will be a path that he will not be able to complete, even to meet the economic needs of the family. In 1947 he will begin working at the Banco Ambrosiano and in the bank, while passing through various institutions, he will remain until retirement age.
Encouraged by his brother Giuseppe Pontiggia, Neri continued to cultivate his passion for literature. His first texts came out in 1971 for Mondadori’s Almanacco dello Specchio. Later, then, his debut, in 1976, with a first collection entitled “The Western aspect of the dress”, published by Giovanni Raboni in Guanda’s “Quaderni della Fenice”. When the first work came out, Giovanni Giudici was immediately enthusiastic as well, who, in the “Corriere della Sera”, praised his highly distilled, austere and severe verses. And, in the context of what Luciano Anceschi called the “Lombard line”, Neri, considered the dean of the school, was also known by many for his stony attitude, for his search for stylistic compactness, for his shy character that earned a famous definition by Maurizio Cucchi, that of “shadow master” of Italian poetry.
After the experimentalism of the first collection, Neri’s writing became increasingly clear and dry, attentive to detail, far from any rhetorical artifice. He often lingered on the theme of the vanquished, violence and memory were the continuous bass of his poetic research.
Often rewarded and, in any case, marked by critical acclaim, his works following his debut include: “Liceo” (Guanda, 1986); “From the same place” (Coliseum, 1992), winner of the City of Tirano Poetry Prize; “Teatro naturale” (Mondadori, 1998), awarded the Brancati Prize; “Weapons and crafts” (Mondadori, 2004); “Paesaggi inospiti” (Mondadori, 2009), which won the Alfonso Gatto international poetry prize; “Professor Fumagalli and other figures” (Mondadori, 2012). The 2007 Mondadori Oscar is dedicated to him. In 2014 he received the Dante Alighieri Prize.
In each of his writings, his poems or his poetic prose, Neri knew how to give intense flashes of intimacy with the reader. Almost never giving in to interiority, to visionary strength, instead preferring the representation of History and life, the observation of a rarefied space often that of his country of origin, Erba, also capable of rising to the scene of meaning, of love and of life.
In recent years, Neri had left poetry behind to devote himself to prose, but when asked if he wrote poetry or prose, he replied: “I write poetry in prose”. After all, he had always confided that he was not interested in counting syllables, but in the search for truth: “I have often compared poetry to the search for truth, because it requires time, concentration, qualities that are not in fashion today. We live in mercantile times, in which time is money, but whoever deals with poetry does not follow money, but time in depth”.
Among his favorite authors, Homer (“the rough one of the Iliad”), Cesare and Tacitus, Dante (much more than Petrarch), the “accursed” Villon and Dino Campana, Manzoni, Thoreau, Pound, Pasternak. And of course the two dioscuri of him: Melville and Beppe Fenoglio, of the latter he commented: “He has an extraordinary dryness in the narrative. It is a powerful writing”.
He often returned to Manzoni: “His Betrothed is the modern poem, the only one I know in this sense. All of our contemporary literature is indebted to it. I am thinking, for example, of Bassani’s ‘Giardino dei Finzi Contini’. The ‘poem’ Manzoni was liked by Stendhal, Goethe, and they still like it now … the subject was interesting, the reader found himself because he deals with inexhaustible questions, there is a realistic look at life, at man, at all human affairs “.
Neri’s personal canon can be read in “Return to the classics” (Ares 2021), an interview book with Alessandro Rivali, in which he wrote: “The classics are made to be read, they tell of joy and pain, they are the image of ourselves, they are the wheat, our daily bread. Homer feeds and for this reason all artists return to him. If there weren’t mystery in literature, it would be within everyone’s reach”.
In recent years, Neri had a special familiarity with the Gospels and in an interview with “Osservatore Romano” he confided: “They are an extraordinary, infinite reading: one never stops reading the Gospels because they are always new, always current, present yet forgotten by everyday life, then suddenly a quotation, an image brings them back alive before our eyes. The episode I love most is that of the adulteress, because it confronts us with our miseries, we are all sinners and so we don’t have to judge.”
Among his most recent books: “Personal anthology” (Garzanti, 2022) and the quadrilogy published by Ares composed of “From a nearby country” (2020), “Piazza Libia” (2021), “A difficult journey” (2022) and “A provincial teacher” (2022), as well as “Giampiero Neri – A shadow master”, his biography in the form of a conversation with Alessandro Rivali (Jaca Book 2013).
(by Paolo Martini)