Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was a poet and publisher born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. He was the son of Carlo Ferlinghetti, a first-generation immigrant from Brescia, Italy, and Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto, a second-generation French American woman. Upon returning from World War II, and throughout the rest of his life, Ferlinghetti strived to build connections with his Italian roots. 

In 1953, Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights Booksellers and Publishers in San Francisco with Peter Martin. City Lights would go on to publish numerous works by authors associated with the Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg's 1956 Howl and Other Poems. The bookstore also served as an early meeting spot for Beat Generation members, located in what had once been the city's prominent Little Italy (which served as the backdrop for Ferlinghetti's 1976 work The Old Italians Dying). The Italian enclave of San francisco, not unlike the ethnic neighborhoods of New York City's Lower East Side, contributed to the Beats' understanding of Italian and Italian American culture and their transnational poetics.

One of Ferlinghetti’s earliest trips to Italy took place in 1965 when he was invited to perform at the eighth edition of the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, then one of Italy’s most vital cultural and literary events.The festival also offered Ferlinghetti, as it did for other Beat poets, an opportunity to encounter and establish connections with authors in whose intellectual and artistic lineage he strived to position themselves, including Ezra Pound and Charles Olson. The 1965 edition of the festival took place between June 26 and July 2, with Ferlinghetti’s reading of “To Fuck to Love Again,” a celebration of love and rebellion, scheduled for June 30. When the time for Pound’s performance finally came, it mesmerized the audience and Ferlinghetti to the point of driving him to tears. 

Ferlinghetti would return to Italy numerous times, both for personal visits and literary events. His connection to Italy is also evident in both his written and his later visual work. His travelogs, documenting the poet’s multiple trips to Italy in poetic form are collected in the 2015 volume, Writing Across the Landscape. His poetry frequently references Italian and Italian American culture (e.g., The Old Italians Dying, A Coney Island of the Mind). He also translated works by several Italian authors, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Primo Levi, into English.

Ferlinghetti's work wouldn't be introduced to Italy until the late 1960s, when Guanda Editore published Italian translations by Romano Giachetti and Alfredo Rizzardi of A Coney Island of the Mind and an unpublished collection of plays titled Tremila Formiche Rosse.

Please note: This entry was authored by Stefano Morello and researched collaboratively with the students in Morello’s and Cristina Iuli’s 2022 undergraduate course “L0482 - LETTERATURA NORDAMERICANA II ANNO A 2022/2023” at the University of Eastern Piedmont.

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