Carla Vasio, the only female writer and poet of Gruppo 63, died at the age of 102

Born in Venice on 12 February 1923, Vasio managed the famous Libreria dell’Oca in Rome from 1967 to 1972, a meeting point for Italian and foreign writers and artists. Among his books are “L’origine” (Feltrinelli, 1966), “Romanzo Storico” (with Enzo Mari, Milano Libri, 1974), which Italo Calvino spoke of as “one of the most extraordinary Italian books”, “Come la Luna forza leCloud” (Einaudi, 1996) and “Laguna” (Einaudi, 1998).

More recently with Nottetempo he published “Piccoli impediments to happiness” (2015), “Tuono di midnight” (2017) and in particular “Vita privati di una cultura” (2013) in which he retraced the history of Gruppo 63 on the occasion of the half century since the birth of the literary and artistic neo-avant-garde launched, among others, by Alberto Arbasino, Luciano Anceschi, Nanni Balestrini, Renato Barilli, Achille Bonito Oliva, Umberto Eco, Enrico Filippini, Alfredo Giuliani, Angelo Guglielmi, Giorgio Manganelli and Edoardo Sanguineti.

With sharpness of vision and soft irony, Vasio’s book is the fascinating live portrait of the protagonists of the renewal that shook the world of literature and art in Italy between the 1950s and the beginning of the 1980s. In “Private life of a culture” he also brought together his memories of the people he knew well, including Henri Michaux, Angelo Maria Ripellino, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Giorgio Manganelli, Amelia Rosselli, Gillo Dorfles, Enzo Mari, Italo Calvino, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Fernanda Pivano, Allen Ginsberg, Rossana Rossanda, Giacinto Scelsi, the Jungian psychoanalysts Ernst Bernhard, with whom he was in analysis for some time, and Aline Valangin, Goffredo Petrassi, Alvin Curran and many others. Ernst Bernhard thus proposed her to Bobi Bazlen as a potential translator for Adelphi: “Very fine, cultured and probably very good”.

After living the first years of her life in Venice (at school she was the companion of Rossana Rossanda, future founder of “Il Manifesto”) who she left for Rome in 1934 following her father, a journalist for the “Gazzettino”, Carla Vasio studied at the Mamiani high school and graduated in music history. As an exponent of the neo-avant-garde, publishing the novel “The Horizon”, with which she won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1966, she dedicated herself for years to art, supporting abstractionism, and managing the Libreria dell’Oca. She then moved to Japan, and from this period she began to compose haiku, which she also worked as a collection editor. He won the Feronia-Città di Fiano Prize for fiction in 1999. (by Paolo Martini)