“VERSES ARE MADE TO TAKE A WEIGHT”

THE BATTLES OF VITTORIO SERENI

Abstract

The Second War and reconstruction marked a whole generation, just as the transformations in an increasingly industrialized country and the entrance in the capitalist system are relevant stages of the changes intrinsic in a social humus. Vittorio Sereni (1913-1983) brings an emblematic trajectory, infantry lieutenant of the Italian army, poet, teacher, Olivetti employee and director of the Mondadori publishing house. Initial apprehension in the face of the conflict is lifted when he is arrested by the Allies and taken to camps in North Africa, from where he will leave only in 1946. Sereni, therefore, does not share the atmosphere of his peers, who will be part of Resistenza. This feeling of exclusion from history runs through his poetics, operating as a singular lens on moments in individual and collective history, as with industrialization in the 1960s, when other living-dead people are produced and forgotten. The anthropological gesture of this writing, then, embraces a complex existential condition alive-dead-alive.