Giorgio De Maria (1924 - 2009) was an Italian musician and author. He is best known for his 1977 novel '' The Twenty Days of Turin''. He was part of the musical group Cantacronache.

Biography

He was theater critic for

l'Unità (; English: "the Unity") is an Italian newspaper, founded as the official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1924. It was supportive of that party's successor parties, the Democratic Party of the Left, Democrats of the Left, a ...

from 1958 to 1965. In 1958, he founded with

Italo Calvino Italo Calvino (, ; ;. RAI (circa 1970), retrieved 25 October 2012. 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian novelist and short story writer. His best-known works include the ''Our Ancestors'' trilogy (1952–1959), the '' Cosm ...

, Sergio Liberovici, Emilio Jona and Michele Straniero the avant-garde music group Cantacronache, a blatant reference to the collaboration between the worlds of culture and song (in the same years in France, figures and styles such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Prévert were uniting in the generation of

Singer-songwriter A singer-songwriter is a musician who writes, composes, and performs their own musical material, including lyrics and melodies. In the United States, the category is built on the folk- acoustic tradition with a guitar, although this role has ...

). The group remained in business for four years, devoting itself to the recovery of political and

Italian resistance movement The Italian Resistance ( ), or simply ''La'' , consisted of all the Italian resistance groups who fought the occupying forces of Nazi Germany and the fascist collaborationists of the Italian Social Republic during the Second World War in Italy ...

songs, producing songs from the anarchist, socialist and even Italian Jacobin traditions. His love of

Sarcasm Sarcasm is the caustic use of words, often in a humorous way, to mock someone or something. Sarcasm may employ ambivalence, although it is not necessarily ironic. Most noticeable in spoken word, sarcasm is mainly distinguished by the inflectio ...

was one of the souls of the group. In 1963 he wrote for the Teatro Stabile di Torino Apocalypse made to measure, a comedy in three acts. In the 1970s he worked for television (his was the text Proof of Appeal for Sipario) and at the fortnightly New Society. In 2017, eight years after his death, news of an American edition of his novel The 20 Days of Turin translated by Ramon Glazov and published by Norton Publishing House, which, before then, had published only one Italian author,

Primo Levi Primo Michele Levi (; 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was a Jewish Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works i ...

, caused a stir. The Australian journalist had been impressed by the book whose style mixed

Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe (; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales involving mystery and the macabre. He is widely re ...

with Lovecraft and which seemed to predict, forty years in advance, the creation of Facebook. Indeed, the novel described the Library, a place to which citizens could bring a writing in which they described themselves, and where they could go to read biographies and wishes left by others.

References

1924 births 2009 deaths Writers from Turin Italian male novelists 20th-century Italian novelists Musicians from Turin 20th-century Italian male musicians 20th-century Italian male writers {{Italy-writer-stub