Background
Bertolucci was born November 18, 1911, in San Prospero, Italy, to a family of agricultural bourgeoisie of northern Italy. He was the son of Bernardo (a landowner) and Maria Rossetti (a landowner) Bertolucci.
Mathematics and Computer Science Building at the University of Parma.
University of Bologna, Italy.
Bertolucci was born November 18, 1911, in San Prospero, Italy, to a family of agricultural bourgeoisie of northern Italy. He was the son of Bernardo (a landowner) and Maria Rossetti (a landowner) Bertolucci.
At the age of six Attilio was sent to a boarding school a few miles from his home in Parma, where he began writing verse and other things in order to fill up the time. Bertolucci completed high school in 1931. After a failed attempt at law school he attended University of Parma School of Law, 1931-35, studied art history under the noted Italian scholar, Roberto Longhi; University of Bologna and got degree in art history in 1935.
Italian poet Attilio Bertolucci began to write very early in his life. His early start perhaps prepared him to be ready to publish his first book of poems at the age of eighteen. Upon the encouragement of his friends and former high school teacher, Cesare Zavattini, he published the collection Sirio (“Sirius”) in 1929. It contains twenty-seven poems that evoke dream-like images of the countryside near Parma where Bertolucci grew up. But Bertolucci himself explained that his landscape images are metaphor, not strict reality. His work won national acclaim when he took second place in a contest in 1933.
Subsequently, he began to publish in journals until his second collection came out in 1934. ''Fuochi in novembre'' (''Fires in November'') exalts everyday objects and colloquial language as he again describes the rural areas of Italy he intimately knows. For example, one poem is about the area his parents moved to when he was just a few months old and is titled ''Emilia.''
Upon graduation from University of Bologna, he began a career as a high school teacher of art history. During this time, Bertolucci also started writing essays on literature that were published in journals.
In 1939, he founded a series on foreign poets called “La fenice” (“The Phoenix”). For the next few years he directed this program which nurtured his interest in foreign writers whom he had always found more inspirational for his own writing than those closer to home. During the period leading up to and including World War II, Bertolucci did little writing.
When Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1943, Bertolucci left teaching for a while and took refuge in a family residence in an Apennine village. In a 1980 interview with Sara Cherin, Bertolucci explained that he was too depressed about world circumstances to write. Instead, he and his wife went into seclusion for most of the rest of the decade. Bertolucci took up teaching art history again in 1951 after moving with his family to Rome.
His third collection of poetry, La capanna indiana (“The Indian Hut”) was published the same year. The volume combines poems from his first two books with new works gathered under the section title “Lettera da casa” (“Letter from Home”), as well as the long, three- part poem, “La capanna indiana,” and a short piece called “Frammento escluso” (“Excluded Fragment”). The poetry in this award-winning collection is described by Andrea Ciccarelli in the Dictionary of Italian Literature as “an elegiac, colloquial analysis of his private history.” But the newer poems written between 1935 and 1950 show evidence of change in the poet’s outlook.
Bertolucci gave up teaching in 1954 and began pursuing other interests, including working for the RAI (Italian Broadcasting Company), editing literary journals, and consulting for the Garzanti publishing company. In 1955 he published an expanded edition of La capanna indiana that included eighteen new poems which deal with the suffering he felt when he left the countryside to settle in Rome.
In 1954 his father died. The poet then began to have anxiety attacks, and in 1958, he went to a mental hospital. His next book of poetry, Viaggio d'invernó (“Winter Voyage”) was not published until 1971. Eighty-four poems from the period 1955-71 are included in this volume which won Bertolucci both the Etna-Taormina and the Tarquinia-Cardarelli prizes. The poems in Viaggio d’invernó reflect the poet’s consciousness of his own aging process and again reflects on the personal crisis he feels at being separated from the idyllic countryside.
Since ''La camera da letto'', Bertolucci has published several works, including the poetry collection ''Verso le sorgenti del Cinghio'' (“Toward the Springs of Cinghio”), published in 1993, and most recently La lucertola di Casarola, released in 1997.
Bertolucci died in Rome in 2000.
Quotes from others about the person
Mark Pietralunga explains in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, ''The reality of war, the deaths of loved ones, and the sight of his children growing up have affected the serenity of Bertolucci's personal environment. Bertolucci reacts to these changes by retreating further into his protective, conservative space in order to defend himself from the violence of these new experiences.''
Attilio married Ninetta Giovanardi (an elementary-school teacher). Their children: Bernardo, Giuseppe.