Lucio Piccolo

Pino Cerami
[edit]	Pino Cerami	

Lucio Piccolo di Calanovella (October 27, 1901 in Palermo – May 26, 1969 in Capo d'Orlando) was an Italian poet.

Biography
Lucio Piccolo, also known as Baron Lucio Piccolo di Calanovella, was first cousin to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard. Piccolo endowed himself with a vast library and mastered the major languages of the European literary tradition (as well as Persian), while living a life of relative solitude. He was also a very capable pianist, though he never performed publicly. He shared a "pastoral" home in Capo d'Orlando, Sicily, with his mother, his sister Giovanna, and his brother Casimiro. All four were spiritualists; his brother Casimiro was a painter in a style resembling Arthur Rackham. 

In 1954, aged 50, he published in a private edition a "plaquette" containing nine lyric poems which he mailed to Eugenio Montale. The postage costs were grossly underestimated by the sender (35 lire), and to take possession of the book, Montale had to make up the difference by paying a further 150 lire. Montale, impressed by the high quality of the poetry of this  unfamiliar writer, invited Lucio Piccolo to participate in the San Pellegrino Literary Meeting. Upon meeting Piccolo face-to-face, Montale was taken almost completely by surprise: he had expected that this previously unknown author would be a young man, not a baron in his fifties.

Piccolo's works were published that year as Canti barocchi e altre liriche ("Baroque Songs and other Lyrics"). A letter accompanying the volume sent to is Montale, stated Piccolo's intention to capture the world and atmosphere of Palermo's churches and convents, and the case of mind of people associated with them, before the memory of them, fast fading, died completely. However, that letter was almost certainly written by di Lampedusa, not by Piccolo himself. Giorgio Bassani, in his preface to the first edition of The Leopard wrote that Piccolo's poems ranked as the best forms of pure lyric produced in Italy at that time.

His poetry was appreciated by Yeats, Pound, and Montale.

Works
 9 liriche, Sant'Agata di Militello, 1954 (self-published)
 Canti barocchi e altre liriche, preface by Eugenio Montale, Mondadori, Milan, 1956
 Gioco a nascondere. Canti barocchi e altre liriche, preface by Eugenio Montale, Mondadori, Milan, 1960; reprinted 1967
 Plumelia, All'insegna del pesce d'oro, Milan, 1967
 La Seta e altre poesie inedite e sparse, ed. Giovanni Musolino and Giovanni Gaglio, All'insegna del pesce d'oro, Milan, 1984
 Il raggio verde e altre poesie inedite, ed. Giovanna Musolino, All'insegna del pesce d'oro, Milan, 1993
 Le esequie della luna e alcune poesie inedite, ed. Giovanna Musolino, All'insegna del pesce d'oro, Milan, 1996
 Antologia poetica, ed. Giuseppe Celona, All'insegna del pesce d'oro, Milan, 1999
 Canti barocchi e Gioco a nascondere, Scheiwiller, V, 2001
 Plumelia. La seta. Il raggio verde e altre poesie, preface by Pietro Gibellini,  Scheiwiller, V, 2001
 L'oboe e il clarino, Scheiwiller, Milan 2002
 9 liriche, Museo Lucio Piccolo, Ficarra, 2010

References

External links
Foundation Lucio Piccolo

1901 births
1969 deaths
Writers from Palermo
Italian male poets
20th-century Italian poets
Sicilian-language poets
20th-century Italian male writers