Alessandro Baricco
Italian literary culture in the latter decades of the twentieth century found itself navigating between the weight of a long novelistic tradition and an appetite for leaner, more elliptical forms of storytelling. Alessandro Baricco, born in Turin on 25 January 1958, emerged from that tension as a writer whose work operated across several registers at once.
Educated at the University of Turin and writing in Italian, Baricco did not confine himself to a single mode of expression. He worked as a writer, playwright, and screenwriter, while also establishing a presence as both a television and radio presenter — a range of activity that placed him at an unusual intersection of literary and broadcast culture. His notable works include Castelli di rabbia and Silk, two texts that differ considerably in scope and texture, suggesting a writer willing to move between scales and tones rather than settle into a fixed manner.
In 1993, Baricco received the Viareggio Prize, a formal acknowledgment that placed him within a lineage of Italian writers who had passed through the same award. That recognition drew critical attention to his early work and confirmed the seriousness with which his writing in Italian was being received.
Across plays, screenplays, and broadcast work, Baricco has continued to engage the multiplicity of roles that characterized his career from its earliest recognized moment. The Viareggio Prize of 1993 remains the concrete point of critical reception against which his wider output — spanning Castelli di rabbia, Silk, and work in both television and radio — can be placed.
Quotes by Alessandro Baricco
La sconcertante scoperta di quanto sia silenzioso, il destino, quando, d’un tratto, esplode.
Jasper Gwyn taught me that we aren’t characters, we’re stories,” said Rebecca. “We stop at the idea of being a character engaged in who knows what adventure, even a very simple one, but what we have to understand is that we are the whole story, not just that character. We are the wood where he walks, the bad guy who cheats him, the mess around him, all the people who pass, the color of things, the sounds.
Growing up, loving, having children, growing old – and all this while we are elsewhere, in the long time of an answer that doesn’t arrive, or of a gesture that doesn’t end. How many paths, and at what a different pace we retrace them, in what seems a single journey.
In this transparency, the footprints of the little birds spoke with a muffled voice. What they spoke of was entirely without significance, or else something capable of lifting a life off its hinges: there was no way of knowing.
It was surprising to consider that in fact there were signs, that is the embers of a voice destroyed by fire.
Because despair was an excess that did not belong to him, he submitted to what was left of his life, and began again to look after it, with the unyielding tenacity of a gardener at work the morning after the storm.
He was, besides, one of those men who like to witness their own life, considering any ambition to live it inappropriate.
He wasn’t much cut out for serious conversations. And a goodbye is a serious conversation.