

Human tools
Vittorio Sereni was undoubtedly one of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century. “The poet of Luino” (as Luciano Bianciardi called him, in reference to his hometown, in the province of Varese) moved to the city of Milan at the age of twenty, where he formed friendships with poets and intellectuals of the time, including Alfonso Gatto, Luciano Anceschi and Leonardo Sinisgalli. Thanks to the latter, in 1952 he joined the Propaganda Service of Pirelli, a company where he worked until 1958. The first article written by Sereni for the pages of the Pirelli Magazine in April 1952 was entitled “Case Lombarde”. At the time Sereni was already an established poet, his first publication was the collection of poems "Frontiera" (Frontier) from 1941, published shortly before he was called back to the front. On the other hand, in his “Diario di Algeria” (Algerian Diary) from 1947, he writes about his imprisonment in North Africa during the Second World War. The article "Una P lunga cinquant’anni” (A P fifty years long) dates back to 1958, and in it he reconstructs the history of the Pirelli logo. Sereni would continueto collaborate with Pirelli Magazine even after he leftthecompany: He wrote the story "La cattura"(The Capture) in 1963, while in 1964 he published "Il fantasma nerazzurro” (The Nerazzurri ghost). “Gli strumenti umani” was published in 1965 by Einaudi and is considered by many critics to be the pinnacle of his poetics, which moves away from the hermeticism of the first two collections and arrives at a more refined and personal style. The collection starts from the post-war period seen through the eyes of the author, his torments and regrets for having been far from the events of the Resistance in Italy, and then continues with the years of the economic boom and with the story of a Milanese landscape in continuous transformation, among public housing and factories. Sereni's poetics arise from his interaction with the world, from his loved ones, from dialogues, from places. The poet traces a relational geography, in which lyrical moments and of metaphysical reflection arise from the concreteness of objects, spaces and situations. Guanda republishes the work in an edition commented by Michel Cattaneo, who guides the reader, explaining Sereni's poetics, his stylistic choices and the connections with the Italian poetry of his years but also of the past.
Gli strumenti umani (Human tools)
Vittorio Sereni
Guanda, 2023