Farewell to Marco Santagata, writer and distinguished Italianist

He left us today in Pisa, at the age of 73, the writer and distinguished Italianist Marco Santagata, suffering from a long illness that had put him into an irreversible coma for several hours. Born in Zocca, in the Apennines of Emilia (the same village where Vasco Rossi was born: the two were good friends), in 1947, Santagata had graduated from the University of Pisa and in 1970 had majored in Italian literature at the University of Pisa. He had taught Italian literature for a long time at the University of Pisa: he was highly regarded by his students for his vast culture and the verve he put into his teaching. He was also a visiting professor at Harvard, the Sorbonne, the University of Geneva, the University of Mexico City

A great expert on Francesco Petrarch (he was the most important living Petrarchist), but also on Dante Alighieri and early Italian poetry as well as nineteenth-century lyric poetry (Santagata was also a scholar of Leopardi), he signed fundamental essays on Petrarch, such as Per moderne carte. Petrarch’s Vulgar Library (1990) and The Fragments of the Soul. History and Tale in Petrarch’s Canzoniere (1992), or L’amoroso pensiero. Petrarch and the Romance of Laura (2014), but also on medieval Italian poetry, such as The Two Beginnings of Italian Lyric (2006). Santagata had also edited the edition of Petrarch’s works in Italian for Mondadori (1996) and, again for Mondadori, published the annotated edition of the Canzoniere (1996). His books on Dante are also very popular and widely read, for example the 2013 Guide to Inferno and especially Dante. The Novel of His Life (2012).

Santagata was, however, also a successful writer: with his debut novel, which came at the age of forty-nine, namely Papa non era comunista (1996), Santagata had won the Bellonci Prize for unpublished work, and then, in 2002, with Il maestro dei santi pallidi, had also come the Campiello Prize. In 2015 he had been a finalist for the Premio Strega with Come donna innamorata, a novel featuring the figure of Dante Alighieri.

“With the passing of Marco Santagata, a member of the Committee for the celebrations of the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death in 2021,” said Cultural Heritage Minister Dario Franceschini, “the world of Italian culture loses a scholar and Dante scholar of great value, a passionate storyteller and a sharp literary critic.”

Farewell to Marco Santagata, writer and distinguished Italianist

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