Life and career of Angelo Fortunato Formiggini in an exhibition at Modena's Estensi Galleries

We then move on to Formiggini’s youth, in a landscape in great turmoil.Italy, leaving behind the wars of independence and with the First World War far away, presents itself as a laboratory of ideas and movements. The unitary state ushers in the new century with the assassination attempt on King Umberto I and with the political front dominated by Giovanni Giolitti, whose governments will characterize the period before World War I and, in 1911, accompany Italy to the colonial enterprise in Libya.

These were dense years in terms of culture as well. Prominent among the literati are, for example, Giosuè Carducci, the nation’s “poet vate” or, again, Giovanni Pascoli, destined to play a decisive role in the Formiggini affair. Then there is no shortage of other voices, from the lyrical and aestheticizing voice of Gabriele D’Annunzio to the bombastic tones of the Futurists, first and foremost Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

It is in this climate of profound change that the young Formiggini’s experience is situated. After his sojourn in Rome, here he was in Bologna where in 1907 he obtained a degree in philosophy with a thesis on the “philosophy of laughter,” presented here in the original, with which he inaugurated a theoretical reflection on humor and laughter that constituted the prelude to editions and book series to which he would give life in the following decades. Alongside this, a number of gifts received by Formiggini himself, such as a “tin book” from his futurist friend Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, will be on display.

In 1908, Formiggini began his publishing experience, based on the ideals of universal brotherhood he had been inspired by during his youth. The start of Formiggini’s editions, in the sign of the Modenese poet Alessandro Tassoni, is marked by the Miscellanea tassoniana, and by the burlesque collection entitled La Secchia: illustrious names such as Giovanni Pascoli, Giulio Bertoni, Carlo Frati, Albano Sorbelli and Giulio Bariola were involved in the two enterprises. Moving to Genoa in 1911, the publishing house reached its highest peaks, with 29 titles published in 1912 and 46 in 1913. At the outbreak of World War I, Formiggini, a convinced interventionist, then left for the front, persuaded that postwarEurope would rise again “civilized and fraternal,” if there was “communion of culture among peoples.” For this reason, during a sick leave that would last from late 1915 to 1917, he had fourteen crates of books sent to fellow soldiers accompanied by a “letter to combatants” in which he explained the need to establish field libraries. Even during the hardships of the conflict, Formiggini thus remained a publisher, convinced that only the dissemination of knowledge through books could restore the fortunes of peoples.

Once the war ended, the second phase of Formiggini’s publishing adventure was situated in the context of the fascist regime. Formiggini, who had not failed to look favorably on the new political developments, had to measure himself against the situation that had arisen. His relationship with the regime and, above all, with its hierarchs, large and small, is not easy. The consequences of the new order imposed by Fascism are also felt, inevitably, on the level of cultural organization: Formiggini shows an ambiguous attitude, trying to find a balance in the framework of repression and control that soon comes to be established. On the one hand, biographies dedicated to personalities invisible to the regime appear in the production of the 1920s and 1930s, such as the “Medals” dedicated to antifascists such as Luigi Sturzo, Giovanni Amendola or Filippo Turati; on the other hand, Formiggini attempts to please Mussolini himself and, more generally, his entourage with works such as the Battaglie giornalistiche, in which the polemics that the Duce had conducted from his printed columns are proposed to the public.

On the whole, Formiggini calls Mussolini’s “a formidable attempt to give Italy a new and vibrant soul of faith,” which, however, he had seen in the hierarchs and other men of the apparatus bad executors. The real rupture with the regime and, in many ways, the beginning of the final disgrace of Formiggini’s publishing venture comes with his clash with philosopher Giovanni Gentile, one of the regime’s most distinguished exponents. The 1930s mark a time of rapid decline for Formiggini’s company. Despite attempts to reconfigure the corporate structure (the publishing house is transformed into the Società Anonima Formiggini), the capital suffers a 40 percent devaluation and the liabilities created are met by Angelo Fortunato with the sale of many family lands and properties.

In 1937, the regime even went so far as to confiscate Formiggini’s house near the Campidoglio in Rome, where Mussolini had ordered urban redevelopment around the present-day Via dei Fori Imperiali. Finally, in 1938, with the release of the Race Manifesto and shortly thereafter, the racial laws, the Ministry of Culture investigates the ethnicity of the employees of Formiggini’s publishing house. For the Modenese publisher, these are months of disillusionment, in which he does everything in his power to be “discriminated against,” that is, exempted from race regulations. He writes unsuccessfully to the Ministry of War to apply for the war cross that would have saved him from the racial laws. Among the documents from the publishing company’s archives, confidential and stormy letters emerge, addressed to Mussolini and other hierarchs of the fascist regime. His human story comes to a tragic end when the publisher throws himself from the tower of Modena cathedral.

Two exceptional documents ideally close the itinerary: Formiggini’s holographic will and the virtual reconstruction, based on period photos and archival research, of the “House of Laughter,” the private collection of manuscripts and prints on humor, which Formiggini jealously guarded until his last days to make a gift, upon his death, to the Biblioteca Estense.

The exhibition is accompanied by a review dedicated to the collection of postcards from Angelo Fortunato Formiggini’s Casa del Ridere collection, an ambitious and varied collecting project that he himself called “a kind of library and museum of everything pertaining to Laughing, without limits of time or geography.” The exhibition Entitled Laughing in Wartime. The Great War Recounted by Angelo Fortunato Formiggini’s Postcards, curated by Nadia de Lutio and Erica Vecchio, in the Campori Room of the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria will return an overview of the orientations and main events of the Great War, read through the lens of humorous postcards. Following that philosophy of laughter so dear to the Modenese publisher, visitors will be able to retrace the history of such figures as William II and Franz Joseph, the crucial years of the conflict and its tragic damage.

In addition to their undoubted value as historical evidence of the Great War, these postcards still preserve the vivid beauty of the artistic and satirical strokes of important illustrators of the time such as Aurelio Bertiglia, Attilio Mussino, Golia (pseudonym of Eugenio Colmo), and Virgilio Retrosi.

For all information you can call +39 059 4395711 or visit the official website of the Estensi Galleries.