Anacleto Verrecchia
Anacleto Verrecchia (15 September 1926 – 4 February 2012) was an Italian philosopher, translator and journalist.
Biography
Anacleto Verrecchia was born at Vallerotonda in the Province of Frosinone. He moved very young to Turin, where he studied, graduating with a degree in Germanistics. In the early 1950s he spent some time in the Gran Paradiso National Park, which he regarded as the most formative of his life. There he was able to contemplate disinterestedly the phenomena of nature. "I went through three universities," he used to say, "the real one, which gave me nothing or almost nothing; the collaboration on the pages of newspapers as an elzevirist,[lower-alpha 1] which forced me to read books that I would otherwise never have read; and finally the most useful university of all, namely the stay in the Gran Paradiso in contact with nature. The fruit of that sojourn is the book that contains his powerfully aphoristic philosophy. Manuscripts that resurfaced much later explain the tardiness of its publication, which did not occur until 1997 at Fogola — it is Diario del Gran Paradiso.
Verrecchia then lived in Germany (especially Berlin) and was for many years cultural attaché at the Italian Embassy in Vienna; he contributed to the cultural pages of Italian newspapers, including Il Resto del Carlino, La Stampa, Il Giornale. Due to his command of the German language, he also collaborated with foreign papers (Die Presse, Die Welt). He did not like to talk about his private life because, he said, "of a philosopher or a writer what interests are the writings and not the personal vicissitudes." A friend of Giuseppe Prezzolini, a translator of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a passionate scholar of Giordano Bruno and Friedrich Nietzsche, in his cultural horizon, however, the figure that stands out the most is undoubtedly that of Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he considered to all intents and purposes a master to be translated and continued.
Characteristic elements of his writings are the irreducible polemical vein and a sacra bilis, but his prose also stands out for its clarity and energy. He always worked on the border between literature and philosophy: in fact, his books are now purely philosophical, now literary. His prose — along with that of Guido Ceronetti, Manlio Sgalambro and Sossio Giametta — has been judged "the best philosophical prose written in Italy today."[1]
Works
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: l'eretico dello spirito tedesco (1969)
- La catastrofe di Nietzsche a Torino (1978; 2022)
- Incontri viennesi (1990; 2005)
- Cieli d'Italia (1991; preface by Vittorio Mathieu)
- Giuseppe Prezzolini: l'eretico dello spirito italiano (1995)
- Diario del Gran Paradiso (1997; 2012)
- Giordano Bruno: Nachtfalter des Geistes (1999; 2002)
- Rapsodia viennese: luoghi e personaggi celebri della capitale danubiana (2003)
- Schopenhauer e la Vispa Teresa: l'Italia, le donne, le avventure (2005)
- Vagabondaggi culturali (2008)
- La stufa dell'Anticristo. Altri vagabondaggi culturali (2010)
- Batracomachia di Bayeruth. Nietzschiani contro wagneriani (2012)
- Lettere Mercuriali (2014; preface by Gianmario Ricchezza)
- Il cantore filosofo. Scritti su Wagner (2016; Introduction, notes and biobibliographical information by Marco Lanterna)
- Il mastino del Parnaso. Elzeviri e polemiche (2017; selection, introduction, notes and biobibliographical information by Marco Lanterna)
Notes
Footnotes
- ↑ Elzeviro is a crisp and elegant typeface created in the 17th century by engraver Christoffel van Dyck (c. 1605–1670) for a family of Dutch printers and publishers, the Elzeviers, from whom the present-day Elsevier publishing house derived its name. In Italian journalism it later acquired the meaning of a learned third-page article with characteristics of essayistic and erudite treatment of a subject.
Citations
- ↑ Lanterna, Marco (2010). "Anacleto Verrecchia, venerando e terribile," Pulp Libri, No. 88, pp. 68–71.
References
- Lanterna, Marco (2015). Il caleidoscopio infelice. Note sulla letteratura di fine libro. Firenze: Editrice Clinamen.
External links
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Anacleto Verrecchia. |
- Commons category link is defined as the pagename
- 1926 births
- 2012 deaths
- 20th-century Italian journalists
- 21st-century Italian journalists
- 20th-century Italian philosophers
- 21st-century Italian philosophers
- 20th-century Italian translators
- 21st-century Italian translators
- Atheist philosophers
- Germanists
- German–Italian translators
- People from Vallerotonda
- University of Turin alumni
