Background
Guido Morselli was born on August 15, 1912, in Bologna, Italy. He was the son of Giovanni Morselli, a pharmaceutical company manager, and Olga Vincenzi. The family moved to Milan in 1914.
Via Festa del Perdono, 7, 20122 Milano MI, Italy
Guido Morselli studied at the University of Milan.
Guido Morselli during his military service
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli
Guido Morselli was born on August 15, 1912, in Bologna, Italy. He was the son of Giovanni Morselli, a pharmaceutical company manager, and Olga Vincenzi. The family moved to Milan in 1914.
Guido Morselli got a classical education at a Jesuit preparatory school. Also, he attended the University of Milan, where he received a law degree in 1935.
After education, instead of starting a legal practice, Guido Morselli toured Europe, honing his command of European cultures and languages. During military service in World War II, Morselli spent three enforced, isolated years in Calabria, on Italy's southwest coast. In a cruel twist, Morselli's first book, Proust o del sentimento, was published while he has cut off from the main currents of Italian culture. Fittingly, the work concerns a struggling writer whom the Italian literary mainstream has neglected.
After the war, Guido Morselli returned to Varese, his affluent family's new home, and spent the following decade writing for various newspapers. The second and last book he would see published came out during this period. Realismo e fantasia is a philosophical text covering a range of subjects from religion to art. In 1958 Morselli moved to an isolated area at Sasso di Gavirate near Lake Maggiore. He spent the next twenty-five years of his life in a house he built and named Santa Trinita. Though he faced numerous publishers' rejections, he continued writing and spent time horseback riding and tending to his small farm. Morselli moved back to the more urban surroundings of Varese in 1973. Several months he killed himself.
Guido Morselli's work began to gain popularity shortly after his death in 1973, when his small circle of friends, led by critic Dante Isella, started to advance his works. His isolation, more than anything, may have contributed to his publishing failures. Although Morselli's writings were profoundly philosophical and about scholarly subjects, they are also rooted in Morselli's world. His obsession with religion and sexuality would most certainly have appealed to a mid-20th century European public, while his more specific inquiries about post–World War II communism and the de-Stalinization of Europe in the 1950s raised political hackles even in the 1970s when they were published. Italian critics cited these successes as they pointed an accusing finger at the publishing world of Morselli's time.
In the book, Un dramma borghese, involves a recovering father and daughter, he from rheumatism, she from an appendectomy, landing in the same hospital room. Their interaction raises the danger of incest, prompted by the eighteen-year-old girl's blossoming sexual passions, and suicide, introducing a Browning pistol which surfaces later in Morselli's work and which the author used to kill himself eleven years later.
Il comunista is a political novel about elected official wrestling with his party allegiance. Walter Ferranini, an up-and-coming Communist party member of the 1958 Rome parliament, finds himself opposing contemporary Marxist doctrine. The party investigates and sanctions him for his careful study of Marx and Engels, and the man/party philosophical split.
In the book, Roma senza papa, Morselli composed a satire about the condition of papal Rome thirty years into the future, in 1997. Confessionals computerized, the papal residence is a motel complex, and the Vatican has allied with the Soviet government to oppose secularized schools and divorce while advocating birth control, euthanasia, and the mystical use of drugs. The pope himself characterized as a snake-charmer, illustrating the deterioration of the religious hierarchy by claiming that "God is not a priest. And not even a friar." He holds court at one point with Jacqueline Kennedy. In Roma senza papa, Morselli believed "religion belongs to the common man and not to age-old institutions."
In Morselli 's book, Contro-passato prossimo, set in the war-ravaged Europe of 1915, sees the Allied victory as illogical. In Divertimento 1889 Umberto I, the reluctant second king of Italy, followed to the Alps where he hopes to quietly to abdicate and have romantic affairs along the way. As the title suggests, Morselli offered the piece as indeed a mind-settling exercise in which he claims to "have found pleasure."
The manuscript for Morselli's Dissipatio H. G. has returned to the author shortly before his suicide. The text is somewhat autobiographical, following the suicide efforts of its protagonist and his discovery of a world without humanity. Morselli suggested that the end of all creation will, and should, happen peacefully.
(The book was published after Guido Morselli's death in 1973.)
1974(The book was published after Guido Morselli's death in 1973.)
1989(The book was published after Guido Morselli's death in 1973.)
1986(The book was published after Guido Morselli's death in 1973.)
1976(The book was published after Guido Morselli's death in 1973.)
1977(The book was published after Guido Morselli's death in 1973.)
1978(The book was published after Guido Morselli's death in 1973.)
1980(The book was published after Guido Morselli's death in 1973.)
1977(The book was published after Guido Morselli's death in 1973.)
1988Guido Morselli's goal was not to offer solutions to transcendental inquiries but to capture philosophical thought in its nascent state.
Quotations: Guido Morselli: "Art stylizes reality, it does not reproduce it; it wants unity or concentration, while life by its very nature is many-sided and disparate."
Quotes from others about the person
Charles Fantazzi: "He had always been averse to the excesses of rhetoric and bombast, which he regarded as the chief bane of Italian writing, and was the fierce enemy of all forms of exaggerated romanticism and idealism."