Seventy years after the birth of Pier Vittorio Tondelli, a multi-voiced account dedicated to the man who wrote with rare originality and innovative vigour about the stories and cultures that shaped the late 1970s and 1980s. A ‘writer of our region’ who, despite the international scope of his work, was able to portray Emilia and Romagna, their many facets and transformations, whilst maintaining a strong bond with his homeland and its people. Pier Vittorio Tondelli lives on here, in the words and memories of those who knew him or drew inspiration from his work and his poetics. We begin in Correggio, the village that so inspired stories and words, yet from which one often longed to escape. The words of his brother Giulio, two years Pier Vittorio’s senior, open the narrative along the mist-shrouded roads of the Bassa, which cut through rows of vines and old barns converted into homes. The curtain then rises on the stage of the Bonifazio Asioli Theatre in Correggio. Here, Professor Alberto Bertoni, lecturer in contemporary Italian literature at the University of Bologna, has brought together four figures from the arts who, directly or indirectly, knew Pier Vittorio Tondelli well: the writer Enrico Brizzi, the director Licia Lanera, the musician and performer NicoNote, and Massimo Zamboni, musician and writer. The voices and stories of the five protagonists gathered in the theatre are interspersed with memories from his brother Giulio, vintage interviews with Pier Vittorio Tondelli himself, and contributions from two long-standing figures on the Italian music and arts scene: Vinicio Capossela and Luciano Ligabue, the latter also a fellow citizen of Tondelli and, at the time, even resident of the same block of flats as the Correggio-born writer’s family.
