Giovanni
Testori (May 12, 1923 – March 16, 1993) was an Italian writer, art historian and critic. Narrator with an intense production, which began with The Secrets of Milan, a cycle intended to represent, in a neorealist-populist key, the life and environment of the Milanese suburbs, he was also a painter and playwright: among the dramas in inspirational verses Religious Interrogation of Mary (1979).
The Catholic Giovanni Testori was homosexual, but he never made a flag of his
homosexuality, even if he did not hide it.
Graduated in philosophy from the Catholic University of Milan, he made his debut in 1954 with a short story, Il dio di Roserio, which, with the subsequent collection Il ponte della Ghisolfa (1958), began the cycle, The secrets of Milan. Other stories followed, La Gilda del MacMahon (1959), a novel, Il Fabbricone (1961), some comedies or "dramatic" stories, La Maria Brasca (1960), L'Arialda (1960), and, out of the cycle, La nun of Monza (1967), Herodias (1969), L'Ambleto (1972), Macbetto (1974), Edipus (1977). But over time the fervor of the first impulse has diminished in
Testori, and that taste for a mixed writing, in its tendency to speak, of the Milanese language and dialect, has succumbed to an inclination for pastiche (remember the example Passio Laetitiae et Felicitatis of 1975); that is, he made room for basic lyricism, even in autonomous forms of poetry (I trionfi , 1965; Crucifixion , 1966; Love, 1968; Forever, 1970; In Your Blood, 1973; Ossa mea [1981-82], 1983; Diademata, 1986). Of religious inspiration the dramas in verse Conversation with death (1978), Interrogatorio a Maria (1979), The " Promessi sposi " alla prova (1984), Tre lai (post., 1994)). A scholar of figurative arts and a painter himself,
Testori was the author of numerous essays, including notable ones on Gaudenzio Ferrari (Il gran teatro montano, 1965) and on Tanzio di Varallo (1973), authors, especially the last, close to ways of his personal pictorial research. In the Eighties he founded with the actor F. Branciaroli and the director E. Banterle the Compagnia degli Incamminati with which he staged some of his works including In exitu (1988) and Verbò (1989). In 2012 the Art Museum of the City of Ravenna paid homage to the intellectual with the exhibition Caravaggio, Courbet, Giacometti, Bacon, Miseria and splendor of the flesh. Testori and the great European painting , curated by C. Spadoni; in the same year the poetic anthology Giovanni Testori was edited by D. Rondoni, Poems 1965-1993. In 2015, the Crucifixion '49 exhibition set up at the Mart in Rovereto documented
Testori's artistic experiments through 26 unpublished drawings which outlined the creative path that would flow into the frescoes of the church of San Carlo al Corso in Milan and in works such as the Crucifixion.
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