Giovanni Arpino
Giovanni Arpino (27 January 1927 – 10 December 1987) was an Italian writer and journalist.
Life
Born in Pula-Croatia to Piedmontese parents, Arpino moved to Bra in the Province of Cuneo. Here he married Caterina Brero before moving to Turin, where he remained for the rest of his life.
He graduated in 1951 with a thesis on the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin. The following year he made his literary debut with the novel Sei stato felice, Giovanni (1952), published by Einaudi.
Arpino took up sports journalism, writing for the daily papers La Stampa and Il Giornale. Together with Gianni Brera at the La Gazzetta dello Sport, he brought a new literary quality to Italian writing on sport. His most important work in this line was the 1977 football novel Azzurro tenebra. In Italy, he got to know the Argentinian writer and fellow sports enthusiast Osvaldo Soriano.
Arpino also wrote plays, short stories, epigrams, and stories for children.
He won the Strega Prize in 1964 with L'ombra delle colline, the Premio Campiello of 1972 with Randagio è l'eroe, and the 1980 SuperCampiello with Il fratello italiano. His novels are characterised by a dry and ironic style.
His novel Un delitto d'onore was adapted for film as Pietro Germi’s highly regarded 1962 comedy Divorce, Italian Style, starring Marcello Mastroianni.
His story Il buio e il miele was adapted into two films: Dino Risi’s Profumo di donna, with Vittorio Gassman. American Martin Brest directed the English-language Scent of a Woman (1992), which earned Al Pacino an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Arpino died in Turin in 1987. His birthplace of Bra has celebrated his links to that town by establishing a multifunctional cultural centre and a prize for children's literature.
Works
- Sei stato felice, Giovanni (1952)
- Gli anni del giudizio (1958)
- La suora giovane (1959)
- Un delitto d'onore (1960)
- Una nuvola d'ira (1962)
- L'ombra delle colline (1962)
- Un'anima persa (1966)
- La babbuina (1967)
- Il buio e il miele (1969) translated as Scent of a Woman (2012)
- Randagio è l'eroe (1972)
- Racconti di vent’anni (1974)
- L'assalto al treno ed altre storie (1974)
- Rafé e Micropiede (1974)
- Domingo il favoloso (1975)
- Il primo quarto di luna (1976)
- Azzurro tenebra (1977)
- Il fratello italiano (1980)
- Le mille e una Italia (1980)
- Un gran mare di gente (1981)
- Bocce ferme (1982)
- La sposa segreta (1983)
- Il contadino Genè (1985)
- Passo d'addio (1986)
- La trappola amorosa (postumo, 1988)
In 2005 Mondadori published a volume of selected works edited by the literary critic Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti.
Filmography
- In Renzo e Luciana, an episode from Boccaccio '70 taken from Italo Calvino’s L'avventura di due sposi and directed by Mario Monicelli (1962), Arpino worked on the screenplay alongside Calvino, Susi Cecchi D'Amico and Mario Monicelli.
- His Il buio e il miele was turned into the well-known and multiple prize-winning film Profumo di donna (1974), directed by Dino Risi with Vittorio Gassman as Captain Fausto Consolo and Agostina Belli as Sara. This film in turn was remade in 1992 as Scent of a Woman (1992).
- In 1977 Dino Risi's film Anima persa, with Vittorio Gassman as Fabio Stolz and Catherine Deneuve as Sofia Stolz, was freely adapted from Arpino's novel of the same name.
- In a 1991 documentary for the French television series Un livre un jour Arpino appeared as himself.
References
- This article was based originally on its counterpart in the Italian Wikipedia, it:Giovanni Arpino, which is licensed under the GFDL.
Further reading
- Mariano D’Amora, ‘Giovanni Arpino’ in Encyclopedia of Italian literary studies, ed. by Gaetana Marrone and others, 2 vols (New York; London: Routledge, 2007) II, 95–97.
- Parco Letterario: Giovanni Arpino (in Italian)
- "Giovanni Arpino romanziere delle Langhe", di Giorgio Barberi Squarotti Archived 2007-12-27 at the Wayback Machine (in Italian)
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- 1947 Ennio Flaiano
- 1948 Vincenzo Cardarelli
- 1949 Giovanni Battista Angioletti
- 1950 Cesare Pavese
- 1951 Corrado Alvaro
- 1952 Alberto Moravia
- 1953 Massimo Bontempelli
- 1954 Mario Soldati
- 1955 Giovanni Comisso
- 1956 Giorgio Bassani
- 1957 Elsa Morante
- 1958 Dino Buzzati
- 1959 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
- 1960 Carlo Cassola
- 1961 Raffaele La Capria
- 1962 Mario Tobino
- 1963 Natalia Ginzburg
- 1964 Giovanni Arpino
- 1965 Paolo Volponi
- 1966 Michele Prisco
- 1967 Anna Maria Ortese
- 1968 Alberto Bevilacqua
- 1969 Lalla Romano
- 1970 Guido Piovene
- 1971 Raffaello Brignetti
- 1972 Giuseppe Dessì
- 1973 Manlio Cancogni
- 1974 Guglielmo Petroni
- 1975 Tommaso Landolfi
- 1976 Fausta Cialente
- 1977 Fulvio Tomizza
- 1978 Ferdinando Camon
- 1979 Primo Levi
- 1980 Vittorio Gorresio
- 1981 Umberto Eco
- 1982 Goffredo Parise
- 1983 Mario Pomilio
- 1984 Pietro Citati
- 1985 Carlo Sgorlon
- 1986 Maria Bellonci
- 1987 Stanislao Nievo
- 1988 Gesualdo Bufalino
- 1989 Giuseppe Pontiggia
- 1990 Sebastiano Vassalli
- 1991 Paolo Volponi
- 1992 Vincenzo Consolo
- 1993 Domenico Rea
- 1994 Giorgio Montefoschi
- 1995 Mariateresa Di Lascia
- 1996 Alessandro Barbero
- 1997 Claudio Magris
- 1998 Enzo Siciliano
- 1999 Dacia Maraini
- 2000 Ernesto Ferrero
- 2001 Domenico Starnone
- 2002 Margaret Mazzantini
- 2003 Melania Gaia Mazzucco
- 2004 Ugo Riccarelli
- 2005 Maurizio Maggiani
- 2006 Sandro Veronesi
- 2007 Niccolò Ammaniti
- 2008 Paolo Giordano
- 2009 Tiziano Scarpa
- 2010 Antonio Pennacchi
- 2011 Edoardo Nesi
- 2012 Alessandro Piperno
- 2013 Walter Siti
- 2014 Francesco Piccolo
- 2015 Nicola Lagioia
- 2016 Edoardo Albinati
- 2017 Paolo Cognetti
- 2018 Helena Janeczek
- 2019 Antonio Scurati
- 2020 Sandro Veronesi
- 2021 Emanuele Trevi
- 2022 Mario Desiati