The Luminous Spirit of Marche: from the Foglia to the Esino

Mario Puccini tenaciously guarded his Marche region roots like an exile clinging to the secret heart of his land. Distanced and participative, solitary and supportive, storyteller and essayist, journalist and translator, bookseller and editor, fi ghter and intellectual, extroverted and introspective, surreal and verist, tied to tradition and faithful anti-conformist, evasive but at the same time an enthusiast supporter of cultural circles, he is still “one of the Maestros to whom justice must still be done” on the literary scenario of the early Twentieth Century (Vasco Pratolini). One of the forgotten great, a fault to put right in order to salve the guilty conscience of Italian literature. The fi gures from the “sacred and profane epic” fl ing themselves from the landscape, on a wild and violent backdrop contained in a gentle physical timidity. Epos of the humble and forgotten, those defeated by the agonizing wounds of life, that only the written page can bring together with dignity and emotion to say: “Art alone can give to man the great emotions of fraternity”. Far from Marche, an exile by inspiration and necessity, Puccini reties the bond with the land and “cities of the soul”, which becomes a burning and lasting bond. The places of Marche throb in his veins like a powerful lifeblood and are the blanket where stories unfold, the backdrop over which men throw their intangible troubled shadows, where the past may be traced like a golden thread in an unknown weave. These cities of Puccini are riotous universes, scattered galaxies, heavens, nebulas, mysterious thresholds of the absolute, points where finite and infinite meet, epiphanies of the sacred, osmosis of life and death. They are moods, landing places, escapes, obsessions and falling in love. Ancona, Jesi, Recanati, Senigallia, Frontone, Catria, the villages, towns and cities of Marche appear from the balcony of Puccini’s narration like sudden glances, scattered in this corner of Italy forgotten by history. Fleeting urban fragments and slivers of countryside imprisoned by the windows of a speeding train or car, very similar to what occurs in his interior wanderings to the “traveller in poetry” of di Viva l’anarchia! (1921). A humanised landscape with marked spiritual, psychological, aesthetical and moral features that are the luminous spirit of Marche.