Queer Places:
Torre Farnese, Via Fontane del Duca, 29014 Castell'Arquato PC
Via del Portico d'Ottavia, 7a, 00186 Roma RM
Cimitero di Fiorenzuola D'Arda
Fiorenzuola d'Arda, Provincia di Piacenza, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Aldo Braibanti (Fiorenzuola d'Arda , September 17, 1922 – Castell'Arquato , April 6, 2014) was an Italian writer, screenwriter and playwright. Intellectual, anti- fascist partisan and poet, in his life he has dealt with art, cinema, politics, theater and literature, as well as being a passionate myrmecophile.
"Il signore delle formiche" (2022) by Gianni Amelio is the story of Aldo Braibanti
and his homosexuality's trial in Italy in the 1960s.
He spent his childhood in Fiorenzuola d'Arda, often accompanying his doctor father on his repeated journeys through the province of Piacenza, where he soon discovered the centrality of the natural world and developed an acute and radical thought on the subject of ecology and environmental protection, with respect to animal life and in particular to the interest in the habits of social insects: ants, bees and termites. At the height of the Fascist period he lived "in an enlightened family firm in its refusal of any authoritarian and clerical situation", and between the ages of seven and eight he began to write his first poetic texts. Among his scholastic interests were Dante, Petrarca, Carducci, Pascoli and D'Annunzio, but above all Leopardi and Foscolo and it is in that period that his poetic activity begins, immediately abandoning rhyme and stylistic traditions to write "poems in freedom". The first theatrical attempts (Amneris), the first philosophical dialogues (The Old Man of the Mountain) and the first "hymns to nature" date back to that time. From 1937 to 1940 in Parma he attended the Liceo Classico Romagnosi where he was taught by, among others, Ferdinando Bernini. Excellent student he got waived from paying tuition fees. On November 27, 1939, he wrote and secretly distributed a manifesto at school, addressed to "all men alive", in which he invited his high school friends to unite and organize themselves against the fascist dictatorship. After his high school studies in Parma he moved to Florence and enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy. Here was born the love for Leonardo, Giordano Bruno and above all Spinoza. He began to devote himself to collages and assemblages, often according to the "objets trouvés" technique, while the observation of ants began to take shape in an interest that aimed to be increasingly scientific.
From 1940 he took part in the partisan Resistance in Florence, participated in the birth of the first anti-fascist intellectual movements, joined the "Justice and Freedom" movement and in 1943 in the clandestine Communist Party, together with Gianfranco Sarfatti, Teresa Mattei (Chicchi), Renzo Bussotti and others. At the basis of the decision there are no ideological differences with the shareholders, but the desire to "get to know another class". In fact, the Communist Party, unlike "Justice and Freedom", was above all the party of the working class, which "carried the greatest weight of the class struggle: "I who came from a different social class wanted to make my own the forms and aims of the anti-fascist struggle starting precisely from the urgent needs of the world of work". Under fascism Braibanti was arrested twice: the first in 1943 following a raid that also involved the future republican secretary Ugo La Malfa. He was released from prison on 25 July when, following the fall of fascism, Pietro Badoglio gave the order to first release the teachers and then the students - while many of the arrested "adult communists" were shot by the Germans. The second arrest took place in 1944, together with Sandro Susini, Mario Spinella and Zemiro Melas (Emilio), by the fascists of Koch - Charity. All of his writings up to 1940 were seized by Italian SS troops and they were lost forever.
In 1946 he was one of the organizers of the World Youth Festival which took place the following year in Prague and became a collaborator of the PCI as head of the Tuscan Communist Youth. In 1947 he abandoned active politics resigning from all his posts with a poem published in the magazine Il Ponte. He declined Botteghe Oscure's invitation to change his mind, believing he was "not a politician". The post-war period was also the period in which he graduated in theoretical philosophy with an original research on the theme of the grotesque, "understood as a crisis of the ideal, and therefore as a middle ground between the tragic and the comic".
The abandonment of politics coincided with the choice to devote himself to the various cultural aspects, above all the artistic ones. Also in 1947, the community experience of the Farnese tower of Castell'Arquato began, an artistic workshop with Renzo and Sylvano Bussotti, Roberto G. Salvadori, Fiorenzo Giorgi and others, which for six years became a ceramic and multipurpose studio. The works of the Farnese tower have been exhibited in various exhibitions in many American and European cities, including a massive participation in the Milan Triennale. At this point Braibanti could finally devote himself to poetry, to writing plays, to screenplays, but also to his artificial anthills and a profound contact with the ecological reality of the time. The texts that will flow into the four volumes of the collection entitled Il circo (Atta, 1960) date back to that period, as well as the beginning of the cinematographic operation entitled Few rags of the sun, which remained unrealized, but which years later will find a continuation in the films Horizon of events and Morphing and in the screenplays of Across the Planet and Talks with a Grain of Rice. At one point the municipal administration of Castell'Arquato no longer renewed the lease for the tower. The laboratory was closed and each member began a path indicated by their own cultural and artistic tendencies.
In 1956 Aldo Braibanti took part in the works for the national congress of the PCI , but his speech was very controversial in relation to some aspects of a certain widespread Stalinism. For this, he is not admitted among the delegates. Braibanti abandoned party alignments, while remaining respectful of fraternal relations with his old comrades of the resistance and of the consequent politics. In 1960 Eugenio Cassin, known during the period of the Florentine Resistance, distributed through the Schwarz publisher the four volumes of The circus and other writings: the first contains poems from 1940 to 1960, the second and third theatrical works, the fourth essays and various writings. From the same year are the work Guide for exposure and the Italian translation of Cristoforo Colombo's Logbook (1960). In 1962 he moved to Rome. In that period he worked in the theater with the young Carmelo Bene, resumed his collaborations with Sylvano Bussotti and Vittorio Gelmetti, collaborated for a short time in the foundation of the Quaderni Piacentini together with the brothers Piergiorgio and Marco Bellocchio. The collaboration with Gelmetti resumed for the radio version of his theatrical work Ballata dell'Anticrate, which would be broadcast by Radio 3 in 1979. Until 1968 Braibanti worked on a complex theatrical operation entitled Virulentia: "a chain of monographic shows that I called "tenders", and which in the end would have resulted in the mirror game of a cinematographic screenplay". In fact, between 1967 and 1968 he brought to film Transfert per kamera verso Virulentia with Alberto Grifi. "Virulentia developed in particular the relationship between persuasion and violence, and between overt persuasion and hidden persuasion". It was the period in which the shows of the Living Theater and Grotowski arrived in Italy, very different from the work of Braibanti, which had a great impact especially in the Roman environment. “Each announcement of Virulentia took place in a series of tableaux vivants, in which deconcentration and meditation produced a series of “free paths”, through which the textual proposal was finally recomposed. It was a theater in which even the word played a gestural role”. The work on Virulentia is illustrated by Braibanti himself in some of the essays in Impresa dei prolegomeni acratici. In 1967 in Rome he held an exhibition of assemblages together with Giampaolo Berto. It was 1968 when the judge read the sentence of the infamous "Braibanti case".
Arriving in Rome in 1962, Braibanti continued his research and for a year and a half asked and obtained the collaboration of his friend Giovanni Sanfratello, a 23-year-old young man whom he had met during the period of the artistic laboratory of the Farnese tower of Castell'Arquato : "I moved to Rome, and Giovanni Sanfratello accompanied me, because by coming to Rome he could better defend himself from the absurd pressures of his father, due to religious, ideological and political reasons. The Sanfratellos, also from Piacenza, were ultra-conservatives, Catholics and among the most fascists, and they could not accept that their son could choose a life so different from theirs". On 12 October 1964 Ippolito Sanfratello, Giovanni's father, presented a complaint to the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office against Braibanti: the accusation was plagiarism. Braibanti was accused by Sanfratello of having influenced his son and of having imposed his own visions and principles on him. In reality it was intended to pursue the homosexual relationship of the two. In early November, four men break into the Roman boarding house where the two were staying and take Giovanni away by force, in a car where his father was waiting: Giovanni was transferred first to Modena to a private clinic for nervous diseases, then to asylum in Verona where, according to Alberto Moravia, he underent “a large number of electroshocks and various insulin shocks. All this against his will, keeping him isolated from his friends, his lawyers and anyone who would listen to his arguments”. Giovanni was discharged after 15 months of internment, with a series of clauses that ranged from the obligatory domicile in his parents' house to the prohibition of reading books that were less than one hundred years old. Giovanni Sanfratello, despite everything, at the trial declared that he "was not subjugated by Braibanti". But those who denounced plagiarism did not give any value to Giovanni's spontaneous declarations. The prosecutor went so far as to declare that: “the young Sanfratello was sick, and his illness had a name: Aldo Braibanti, gentlemen of the Court! When he appears, everything is dark”. Instead, weight was given to the declaration of a young man with whom Aldo Braibanti had made some trips throughout Italy in the summer of 1960, Piercarlo Toscani, who at the time of the meeting was 19 years old and who accused him declaring among other things: "Braibanti had tried to enter my mind with his political ideas, i.e. communism in the name of a higher freedom and atheism. He began to prevent me from reading my usual leisure. These impediments were not based on of an external arrogance, but on the basis of an internal, intellectual arrogance, which is much stronger than the other”. Some official right-wing newspapers rail against what they call "the professor", "the monster", "the homosexual".
After a trial that lasted 4 years, in 1968, Aldo Braibanti was sentenced to nine years, which became four on appeal, a sentence confirmed in Cassation. He served two years in prison and the other two were forgiven because he was a partisan of the Resistance. This sentence had a great echo in the international press, which highlighted the profound anomaly of the disputed crime and its management by the Italian procedural system: after all, the controversial rule on plagiarism, introduced in the penal code during the fascist period by Alfredo Rocco, led to a conviction in this unique case after the war. This offense was declared unconstitutional in another case, about twenty years later, without being contested again; the heated debate sparked by Braibanti's conviction also contributed to the unfavorable climate. The sentence caused a wide echo throughout Italy: Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio, Adolfo Gatti, Giuseppe Chiari and numerous other intellectuals and men and women of culture mobilized in favor of Braibanti. The newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, l'Unità, defended him with great courage, so much so that on the day of his condemnation an editorial by its director Maurizio Ferrara, also a former partisan, appeared on the front page in which he denounced the obscurantist climate that the process evoked. Marco Pannella's radicals also mobilized, and he was denounced for slander against the public prosecutor in the first instance trial against Braibanti and in turn supported a trial for this reason in L'Aquila. Immediately after the sentence Pier Paolo Pasolinihe would write: “If there is a man who is «mild» in the purest sense of the term, it is Braibanti: in fact, he has never relied on anything or anyone; he never asked or demanded anything. So what is the crime that he committed to be convicted through the pretext accusation of plagiarism? His crime was his weakness. But he chose this weakness and wanted it, refusing any form of authority: authority, which, as an author, in some way, would have come naturally to him, only if he had accepted, even in the slightest degree, any common idea of intellectual: or the communist one or the bourgeois one or the Catholic one, or the simply literary one... Instead he refused to identify himself with any of these - finally clownish - intellectual figures". Carmelo Bene said in 1998: "An ignoble fact. One of the many petals of this rotten flower that is Italy. He was sentenced to eleven years, for a crime never brought up until then. Plagiarism. What's more, against an adult... Everything is plagiarism, what a discovery! Any thinking and speaking subject is subjected to plagiarism on a daily basis. Later, always too late, this crime was canceled by the penal code. Against Braibanti, social retaliation was unleashed, the revenge of the masses. He was the best intellectual that Italy had at the time. He had pictorial, literary and musical interests. A prophet thirty years ahead of schedule. He was one of the first to condemn consumerism. The "diverse" at the time in Italy numbered . Him, Pasolini, a few others". While Braibanti himself would recall thirty-five years later in Emergenze : “that trial, to which I felt morally extraneous, cost me two more years in prison, which, however, did not serve to obtain what the accusers wanted, i.e. to completely destroy the presence of a man of the Resistance, and free thinker, but so disconnected from the social world as to be the useful idiot suitable for an emblematic repression. Unfortunately, the guilty superficiality of most of the media has since then tried to label me in such a hateful way that as a reaction I have ended up closing myself more and more in an isolation of protest, outside any cultural market".
In prison Braibanti continues his activity as a poet, writing a play entitled The other wound in which he brings the adventure of Sophocles' Philoctetes back in a modern key, and which was performed by Franco Enriquez in 1970, with electronic music by Pietro Grossi and the scenography by Lele Luzzati. Other writings were included in the collection of essays published again in 1970, edited by Finzi-Ghisi, which has the title State Prisons.
Released from prison, he resumed the cycle of Virulentia, but soon abandoned it for a new cycle of theatrical laboratory, Ballades of the Anticrate, which soon also became a series of radio dramas, preceded by Lo scandalo dell'immaginazione and followed by Stanze di Azoth. Braibanti carried out the theatrical work as a laboratory and the various works are linked by "a sort of infinite canon, which made all the theatrical works into a single continuous proposal". For this reason, his shows did not have reruns, but unique representations that Braibanti interpreted as "the moment of saturation of the laboratory". This is the case with works such as Il Mercatino, presented in Cagliari in the 1970s, and Theatri epistola, presented in Segni in the 1980s. In 1979, on the occasion of an exhibition of assemblages in Florence, he published the work-catalogue Objets trouvés, and again in the 1980s he collaborated with the magazine "Legenda" in which he published seven art prose. 1988 is the year of the publication of the Impresa dei prolegomeni acratici (Editrice 28, 1988) a text with varied themes: "of historical criticism and a re-foundation of pedagogy, but above all I describe the development crisis that took me out of classical psychoanalysis, to coherently direct me towards a more strictly biological interpretation of behaviour”. Enterprise of the acratic prolegomena wants to highlight the crisis of language. "Language is a photograph of man: like man all words are born, live and die". In 1985 he wrote the screenplay for the film Blu cobalto directed by Gianfranco Fiore Donati and interpreted by Anna Bonaiuto and Enrico Ghezzi, among others. The film, presented at the Venice Film Festival, received an award from the Fice (Italian Federation of arthouse cinema) and from the Lega Cooperative. In 1991 he published Pilgrimage to Rijnsburg in the music section of the Venice Biennale. In 1998 Un giallo o mille came out with poetic texts and collages. From 2001 is Frammento Frammenti (Empirìa editions) which collected most of his poems from 1941 to 2001. In 2003 Emergenze was published. Conversations with Aldo Braibanti is a long dialogue with Stefano Raffo in which Braibanti retraces his life and his work as a libertarian thinker: “I call "libertarian" anyone who does not take refuge in a theory of "values", and manages without anguish to always question everything. Every knowledge worthy of the name moves, through a selective memory, towards the endless prairies of the unknown, drastically denying any temptation of unknowability. The result is a total relativity of all truths, of all ethics, of all aesthetics. Ethics and knowledge are identified in the respect and defense of life”. Among his videos is Horizon of events, made in the 1980s.
In 2005 he was notified of an eviction from his house in via del Portico di Ottavia in Rome, where he had lived for forty years, an old house in the center of Rome where Braibanti lived on the minimum social pension: after a question from Senator Tiziana Valpiana on his poor living conditions, the Constituent Teresa Mattei - who had been Braibanti's prison companion during fascism - with the active support of Franca Rame proposes the establishment of a "Pro Braibanti Committee", to which some members of parliament from L'Unione (including Franco Grillini and Giovanna Melandri) petitioned for the assignment of the annuity based on the Bacchelli law, which was granted on 23 November 2006. In 2008 the building in via del Portico d'Ottavia changed ownership and shortly after Braibanti and his library made up of thousands of volumes were forced to leave the house. Braibanti spent his last years in Castell'Arquato, in serious financial straits and trying to complete the works the Catalog of amulets, the New dictionary of current ideas and the video feature entitled Almost nothing. He died in Castell'Arquato, of cardiac arrest, on April 6, 2014, at the age of 91.
My published books:
