Time.news – Suicide from the Ghirlandina tower, in Modena, in protest against the racial laws: thus ended, on November 29, 1938, the life of Angelo Fortunato Formiggini, a refined and satirical Jewish publisher from Modena who rebelled with an extreme gesture against the “racist” decrees that hit faithful servants of the nation, from the army to culture. The mangled body on the cobblestones of Piazza Grande was that of a man of letters who had been a friend and correspondent of Giovanni Pascoli and Benedetto Croce, author of the first project for an Italian encyclopaedia, then snatched from him by Giovanni Gentile and created by Treccani.
His story, little known also for a sort of conspiracy of silence that survived fascism, is told by Marco Ventura with “Il fuoruscito”, published by Piemme (304 pages, €19.50). This beautiful book gives us back the complex figure of “Formaggini”, as the atypical publisher who was the protagonist of Italian culture signed during the twenty years. It was Formiggini himself who defined himself as a “fuoruscito” as a stranger to cliques, races and parties. Totally immersed, however, in a sector for which he was the first to coin the term “publishing”, launching highly successful magazines, series and “beautiful books”.
Ventura uses two registers: in the part in italics it is the publisher himself who reconstructs his thoughts and memories in the first person as he climbs the 190 steps of the Ghirlandina. In the other it is the author, a former war correspondent of the Giornale, who narrates his life and commitment as a publisher. Formiggini, son of wealthy Jews enriched as jewelers of the house of Este, had an innate comic spirit: at the Galvani high school in Bologna he was expelled for a parody of the Divine Comedy in which he targeted his classmates and professors. Also in the Emilian capital he graduated from the Alma Mater in ‘Philosophy of laughter’. Entering the Accademia del Fiasco, he published the first burlesque volume dedicated to the heroic writer Alessandro Tassoni, author of the poem “Secchia rapita”.
Moving with his publishing house to Genoa and Rome, he published the “Classics of laughter” but also pedagogical, philosophical and art texts, as well as monographs and portraits. The eclectic and visionary Emilian publisher promoted reading with the idea of a circulating library. Extraordinary success was his monthly “L’Italia che writes”, founded in 2018, which in 21 years reviewed 13 thousand books. His pedagogist wife Emilia, known in Rome at the student federation ‘Corda Fratres’, joined him in his appeal for a humanistic overcoming of religious and racial conflicts. In the preface, Aldo Cazzullo, editorialist of the Corriere, invites you to read the book and to let your children and grandchildren read it “to make them understand what a tragedy fascism has been”. If at first he joined the regime lukewarmly in order to be able to work, Formiggini clashed with the Minister of Public Education, Giovanni Gentile, who in the operetta “La Ficozza Filosofica del Fascismo” he compared to a bump on the head of the regime.
With his wife Emilia Santamaria, an educator known in Rome in the student association ‘Corda Fratres’, he proclaimed a humanistic overcoming of hostilities due to racial or religious issues. After her husband’s suicide, she refused to swear allegiance to fascism and for this reason she lost her professorship. “I cannot renounce what I consider my precise duty. I must demonstrate the evil absurdity of racist measures”, wrote Formaggini on the note left to his wife before committing suicide shouting “Italy!, Italy! Italy!”.