Giuseppe Pontiggia was born in 1934, and two defining characteristics of his personality were apparent from the start: his resistance to conformism and his almost colossal dimensions. Born in a breech delivery, he was already a giant as a newborn, weighing five and a half kilograms. He grew up in a family attuned to art and literature: his mother, a housewife, maintained a lifelong passion for theatre; his uncle on his mother’s side taught at the Brera Academy; his cousin, Ezio Frigerio, would become an internationally renowned scenographer; and his father, Ugo, an official at Banco Ambrosiano, curated a rich library at home. In 1940, confined to the house due to pneumonia, young “Peppe” found solace in his father’s library, marking the beginning of his relationship with literature.
On November 17th 1943, Ugo Pontiggia was assassinated by two partisans due to the public positions he held. His death shattered the family’s financial stability, forcing them to sell much of the library and move from Erba to Como. In 1948, they moved again, this time to Milan, where Giuseppe attended the Carducci Classical High School. During this period, he began writing his first poems and produced essays that included translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses into hendecasyllables. These years also saw him develop a deep love for chess, sparked by his uncle Dante, a passion that would later feature in his writing.
Just three years later, at the age of 17, Pontiggia graduated and began working at the Milan branch of the Credito Italiano bank to support his family. In 1953, seeking an outlet for his growing dissatisfaction with work, he completed the manuscript for La Morte in Banca (Death in the Bank) and submitted it to Elio Vittorini, who encouraged him to pursue humanistic studies despite his job. For poetry, Pontiggia turned to Luciano Anceschi, who advised him to study Petrarch, teaching him to “achieve extraordinary effects with minimal means.” He enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at the Catholic University of Milan and, with the help of friends like Vanni Scheiwiller, managed to balance his studies with work.
In 1955, his younger sister Elena, not yet twenty, inexplicably took her own life. The fact that it was suicide was kept from their mother, but the tragedy profoundly affected Giuseppe. The loss of his sister deepened his intellectual bond with his brother Giampiero, known as his “fellow traveller to the Hesperides,” who would go on to become one of Italy’s most important contemporary poets under the pseudonym Giampiero Neri.
After years of waiting, La Morte in Banca, a novel born of his biographical experiences in the workplace, was finally published in 1959 in the notebooks of the Milanese magazine Il Verri. The novel was later revised for a Mondadori edition in 1979. As a young man, Pontiggia came into contact not only with Anceschi but also with figures like Balestrini and Porta. In the 1960s, he was associated with the Neoavanguardia movement and collaborated with Il Verri, working alongside intellectuals and writers such as Eco, Sanguineti, Giuliani, Arbasino and Manganelli.
In 1961, under further guidance from Vittorini, Pontiggia began teaching literature at evening schools in Milan, a role he continued until 1978. This period, marked by his involvement in the intellectual circles of Il Verri, inspired L’Arte della Fuga (The Art of Flight), published by Adelphi in 1968. The work, influenced by the anti-novel theories of the Gruppo 63, was critically acclaimed but considered challenging by the general public due to its experimental nature. The text dismantled traditional novelistic structures such as spatial-temporal coherence, plot, and character consistency, cementing Pontiggia’s reputation as an innovative and daring writer.
With maturity, however, Pontiggia embraced more traditional and realistic forms, abandoning the extreme positions of the intellectuals associated with Il Verri. During the 1960s, he began significant collaborations with Italy’s most important publishing houses. Thanks to the mutual respect established through his excellent revision of the translation and preface of Lucan’s work, Pontiggia cultivated a friendship with Luciano Foà and played a decisive role in shaping the editorial direction of Adelphi in its early years (notably suggesting the publication of Guido Morselli’s works). He also wrote dozens of commentaries and introductions for new releases. After meeting Vittorio Sereni, he began collaborating with Mondadori in 1969, editing the fourteen issues of L’Almanacco dello Specchio and strongly advocating for the publication of Stefano D’Arrigo’s Horcynus Orca (1975).
In 1978, he published Giocatore Invisibile, aiming to “find the meeting point between simplicity and complexity, between literariness and allegory, between the visible and the hidden,” openly drawing inspiration from Dickens’ prose in David Copperfield and Pickwick Papers. From that year onward, despite a relatively sparse output, Pontiggia produced his most famous works, including La Grande Sera, subsequently revised in 1995. Initially published in 1989, the novel won that year’s Strega Prize. It unfolds as an investigative narrative involving suicides, disappearances, anonymous letters, and false leads. However, Pontiggia’s innovation lies in not reconstructing the truth—there is no resolution to the plot. Instead, the novel offers a range of possibilities, leaving unease and ambiguity in its wake, a nuance that distances it from traditional detective stories and emphasises its psychological depth. The novel immediately garnered two prominent admirers: Alberto Moravia and Valentino Bompiani.
Maintaining a constant dialogue with his works, Pontiggia frequently revised and altered his novels over the years. In 1990, a new version of L’Arte della Fuga was released by Adelphi, followed by a third revised edition of La Morte in Banca in 1991 for Mondadori—a collection comprising a short novel and sixteen stories. Over time, Pontiggia explored various fields, from satire to ballet, while remaining faithful to his preferred narrative form. In September 1993, he published Vite di Uomini Non Illustri, which was highly praised by both readers and critics. In his later years, he authored Nati Due Volte in 2000, a widely acclaimed novel addressing a theme he had never previously tackled in his numerous writings and speeches—one that personally resonated with his love for his son: disability.
After years of intense work devoted to promoting culture and producing writings and other works, Pontiggia passed away on June 27th 2003. After conversing at length with his wife Lucia, he went to bed and died of cardiocirculatory collapse.
Born in Brianza and spending most of his life in Milan, Pontiggia had no direct connection to Maremma except for a single text, a story whose title references one of the region’s iconic products: Il Morellino. Not new to highlighting Italy’s culinary treasures—such as his short piece on culatello,a famous cured meat, collected in Prima Persona (2002)—Pontiggia recounts the discovery of Scansano wine, which he drank almost by chance in an old tavern in the Grosseto area. A forerunner in the field of enogastronomy, Pontiggia acknowledged Morellino’s excellence before it was officially recognised as a DOCG wine in 2007. The story dedicated to this wine remained unpublished until his death in 2003 and was later included in an anthology of short prose about Maremma featuring authors such as Antonio Franchini and Nadia Fusini: Everyone says Maremma Maremma. Twenty Italian writers talk about the land, its people and its moods(Effigi, 2010).
In this short story, Pontiggia draws from two quintessentially Italian elements: the tavern, and wine. From these, he conducts a subtle ethical investigation of the individual, their choices, and the impact of those choices on dialogue between human beings. A writer of immense erudition—as shown by his library of over ten thousand books—Pontiggia frequently reflects on the process of knowledge, which naturally leads him to ethics and its extensions. These extensions pose a fundamental question: is something right or wrong? This question underpins every decision we make, imposing a moral framework. Pontiggia places such inquiries in constant tension with truth, stripping his literature of manneristic or formalist temptations.
His morality, having moved beyond the phase of L’Arte della Fuga—a work met with a cool reception from both critics and the public—manifests itself in the simplicity of his prose, which fosters a sincere dialogue with the reader. This allows the reader to focus less on the surface of the text and delve deeper into its nuances of meaning. As Daniela Marcheschi writes in the Meridiani volume dedicated to the author, which she edited: “The pursuit of an integral and free human experience is articulated through the indomitable responsibility of choice, the mediations of intelligence, and the expansion of rational values, whereas moralism is more often a rigid and repetitive assertion of predetermined principles.”
Il Morellino embodies the ethical and communicative power of language, a topic that profoundly preoccupied Pontiggia. The narrative is brief; the details are just sufficient to outline the scene, and perhaps resonate more with Italian readers who are familiar with settings like the one described. Despite its brevity, the story is imbued with a value that evokes one central sentiment—a feeling that any good dinner at an inn or tavern should inspire: the satisfaction of discovering something unfamiliar in a warm, familiar setting far from home.
The story is essentially a brief recollection of a meal at a Grosseto inn, where Pontiggia, dines in company. The host, unwaveringly honest about his offerings, recommends only the best dishes, omitting those that had not stood the test of generations of experimentation. At the end of their order, when the group is asked about drinks, they confidently request the house wine, trusting that everything from the inn would be excellent. Yet again, in his relentless honesty, the owner surprises them by suggesting a different, superior wine: Morellino di Scansano. This local wine becomes the crowning element of the evening, embodying both the astonishment of the diners and the innkeeper’s loyalty. The host was under no obligation to tell the truth, nor was there any chance that the diners would return in the future to complain about an unpleasant night caused by his cooking.
This act of truthfulness, which might strike readers as an unnecessary admission of fault, reflects the innkeeper’s unassailable hospitality. It mirrors the honesty of Pontiggia’s prose, which offers the reader a simple yet meaningful image, much like the carefully chosen words he uses to communicate with his audience. With a conscious and inimitable elegance, the memory of an inn becomes a poetic manifesto.
It is important to underline the memory-based nature of the story, which becomes as essential as the events it recounts. The kindness of the host is not forgotten; rather, it serves as the foundation for the memory—not just of the inn and its food, but also of the territory where it occurred. It is no coincidence that after recalling the events, Pontiggia identifies the location as “in the Grosseto area.” Through the natural process of memory that inspires this story, Pontiggia implicitly conveys a suggestion that resonates today: in a country like Italy, often overwhelmed by mass tourism, it is worth remembering that honest hospitality will be warmly remembered. When we think of our territory—or perhaps, more generally, of the everyday gestures we perform—it would be wonderful to focus on the honesty and loyalty they communicate, so that those who share these moments with us will, when recalling them, have just one word at the tip of their tongue: “Love.”
A great enthusiast of enology, Pontiggia often uses wine as a metaphor, particularly in his essays on reading. If, as he suggests, “explaining to a non-reader why books captivate is like explaining to a teetotaler why wine cheers,” in Prima persona, there is also a section titled Assaggiatore di Libri (Taster of Books), in which the reader tasked with evaluating a literary work becomes akin to a taster savouring wine.