This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Alessandro Bonsanti Contemporary Archive arm of the Gabinetto Scientifico G.P. Vieusseux. A celebrated writer and editor, Bonsanti became director of the Vieusseux in 1941, a post he held until his death in 1984, having just won Florence’s mayoral election. He oversaw the devastating flood of 1966, when the Arno destroyed 250,000 volumes from the historic library. Unlike other Florentine institutions, which elected to simply replace damaged volumes, Bonsanti recognized the historical value of the material he was entrusted to: books that had been read by the likes of Mark Twain and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose signature you can still read in the historic ledger. Thus, he founded the Laboratory for the Conservation of Books, and, later, the Contemporary Archive, which was subsequently named after him. A number of prominent Italian writers have their own room at the Contemporary Archive, such as Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Claudio Magris and Carlo Emilio Gadda. “I call it the condominium, many of these figures knew each other in life. Here they reunite and interact in death,” Elisa Martini, a knowledgable Vieusseux representative, tells me, as she graciously shows me around.
The archive’s latest room, opened in January, marks another milestone: the 70th anniversary since the publication of Metello by Florentine writer Vasco Pratolini. Born in 1913, he grew up in poverty in the Santa Croce neighbourhood and, at the age of four, lost his mother to influenza one month after she had given birth to his brother, Dante. His father, realizing he lacked the ability and the means to raise two children by himself, gave away the young Dante for adoption, who was renamed Ferruccio by his aristocratic foster family.
The young Vasco had to abandon his studies due to economic hardship and worked tirelessly as a door-to-door salesman, bottegaio and barman, experiences that instilled in him a camaraderie with the working classes, while keeping up with his love of literature. In 1929, he moved to the Oltrarno, where he met the painter Ottone Rosai, who would become his mentor and father figure. He started writing in various Florentine literary magazines, such as Il Bargello, Letteratura and Campo di Marte and, in 1943, he joined the partisan resistance in Rome. In 1944, he published Il quartiere, translated into English as either The Naked City or A Tale of Santa Croce. The novel follows a group of disenfranchised youths growing up in Santa Croce, caught between their sentimental education and political awakening.
Throughout this time he had a strained relationship with Ferruccio. The class-conscious Vasco struggled to relate to the high-class environment his estranged brother had grown up in. The young writer also had a hard time repressing the lingering negativity stemming from the death of their mother. Slowly and with great difficulty, the two reconciled their differences as they crossed paths in the alleyways of Florence. In 1945, Ferruccio passed away from tuberculosis. He was just 27, and left behind Lucia, a baby girl, whom Vasco adopted. He wrote about his troubled relationship with his brother in Family Diary.
Although he had started to achieve some semblance of literary success, Pratolini remained a struggling writer, who made ends meet by translating from French and teaching. His room in the Bonsanti Archive shows three drafts of Metello: the first is entirely written by hand, the second is half handwritten and half typed, and the third is fully typed. Pratolini did not own his own typewriter and would steal it from his editor Enrico Vallecchi when he could get away with it. There are a number of letters between the two, in which Enrico asks Vasco for his typewriter back. Tired of writing by hand, he purchased a typewriter, but he sent the bill to Vallecchi. The editor reluctantly agreed to pay, asking in exchange that Pratolini use it to write a masterpiece.
By February 1955, when Metello was released, it was evident that Vasco had kept his end of the bargain. The novel is a sweeping epic set during the Risorgimento and the burgeoning industrial revolution in Italy, dealing with the first movements for workers’ rights. It resonated with people from all walks of life, such as a 16-year-old farmer from Valdichiana, who read Metello and wrote letters to Pratolini at night by candlelight. His first letters were riddled with spelling mistakes, but as the correspondence continued and Pratolini recommended books to him, his register gradually improved and he pursued a journalism career. Eventually, his letters stopped being handwritten: he had bought himself a typewriter. “I call them the silent ‘Metelli’: women, middle-class folks, farmers, students, mothers, a varied sample of humanity that was struck by this novel, legitimizing Pratolini as a seminal writer,” remarks Elisa.
Vasco Pratolini belonged to the Florence of artisans and lived-in streets, which the writer knew like the back of his hand, in the same way that James Joyce knew Dublin. Though the Oltrarno may no longer be the same, Vasco Pratolini has returned. You can visit his archive and others by appointment at the Archivio Contemporaneo Alessandro Bonsanti in via Maggio by sending an email to archivio@vieusseux.it or calling +39 055 290131.
