Renato Fucini

To get to know Renato Fucini we must turn to Davide Puccini, essayist, fine scholar, but above all a lover of Italian literature. His operation derives from the need to re-propose a forgotten author whose works are no longer found.

The only book still in circulation contains about 5000 errors on 1000 pages. Fucini’s texts have been misunderstood, ruined by relatives, by printers, from edition to edition. Puccini had to go back to the manuscripts, contained in Florentine libraries, and carry out a painstaking reconstruction of the original.

The volume is weighty, it consists of about 700 pages and collects all the works published in life by Renato Fucini, not the posthumous ones, considered inferior. It includes one hundred sonnets in the Pisan vernacular plus others in the language, all the short stories collected in “Le veglie di Neri” (1882), “In the open air” (1897) and “In the Tuscan countryside” (1908) and the essay “Naples with the naked eye” (1878).

Davide Puccini has dedicated five years of work to Fucini’s work and, as I have said, has dealt with the subject above all from a philological point of view. Often the printers did not understand the words of the Pisan vernacular. They chose the lectio facilior, corrected bimbino with child, sterzatori (who cleaned one out of three trees) with excavators, ruining a text that had value precisely for ethnographic precision: Fucini, in fact, never chose his terms at random, but used them because they were typical of the place he was narrating or writing poetry about.

The volume contains many pages of bibliography, Davide Puccini traced all the editions — to the point that he was able to evaluate at first glance a small book in my possession and date it to the early twentieth century as an edition containing at least thirty errors.

But Puccini also carried out a work of revaluation against the criticism which, after the death of Renato Fucini, decreed his slow decline and downsizing to a “minor exponent of literature.”

In life, Fucini was very successful. In Florence, then the capital of Italy, at the Michelangelo café, a destination for artists such as Edmondo de Amicis (who wrote the preface to the edition in my possession) the reading of the sonnets in the vernacular, which he wrote for fun, had the success that today the interventions of Benigni have. Then he published them at his expense and it was a best seller.

Fucini was aware of his limitations, he knew that he did not have the long breath of a novelist, but the short breath of a narrator of short stories and, however, once published, his works had resonance even outside Tuscany, they were adopted in the school as long as the thirties and Croce wrote about them in a flattering way. But later, slowly, oblivion fell on Fucini and beyond, it was the object of criticism from many famous people such as Cassola, who cut it down in the preface to a BUR edition. In 1968 he was considered a reactionary, not very attentive to the social question, whereas, instead, he was a Mazzinian and a Garibaldian, imbued with the ideals of the Risorgimento that he saw betrayed. In the sonnets, but above all in short stories such as “They go to Maremma”, we hear all his painful participation in the misery of the humble, the understanding of the phenomenon from within, avoiding the defect of popular literature (such as that, for example, of Lorenzo the Magnificent).

He was also accused of having chosen a too easy language, the Tuscan, it is not clear what he should have done, since his stories are mainly set in Maremma.

The sonnets are classic in structure but original in content, because they are dialogued, moved, with jokes and various characters including Neri Tanfucio, the pseudonym adopted by Fucini to publish, which we find each time as a different character. The poems are from Pisa and Florence, populated by humble, boorish, degraded characters; they are hilarious, fiercely cheerful but always with a bitter and sad note. (See “The mother, the child and the friend”)

The language is a vernacular that often has more of Livorno than Pisa. Puccini mentions the phenomena of labdacism (the L that becomes r) and hyper-correctness (where one is wrong for fear of making a mistake).

Renato Fucini was born in 1843 in Monterotondo, in the Grosseto Maremma, where his father David, a doctor, had settled for the treatment of malarial fevers, but he was from Livorno and felt very attached to the Labronica city, where he attended the elementary schools of the Barnabites. He lived in Livorno from 1849 to 1853 — in the city just reconquered by the Austrians after the riots of 48 — and, reading a handwritten poem in the Livorno vernacular, he had the idea of ​​carrying out the same operation with the Pisan one. Fucini frequented the Macchiaioli in Castiglioncello, where he owned a house, and, in particular, was a friend of Giovanni Fattori, to whom he provided inspiration for the painting “Lo staffato”. But his acquaintances are wider and they do not only concern the Tuscan area. In addition to the aforementioned Edmondo de Amicis, he was also a friend of Verga, whose naturalism he absorbed.

“Naples with the naked eye” deserves a separate discussion, a report commissioned by P. Villari, the first in Italy to make known the existence of a “southern question”. Without going into detail, I will say that Fucini was able to grasp the essence of the city at first glance, with which he immediately entered into empathy, understanding the phenomenon of the Camorra in a non-superficial way and telling the crudest aspects, from the “talponi” (compare the Tarpone of Leghorn), that is the rats that crowded sewers and alleys, to the cemetery with 365 pits, one for each day of the year, in which the dead were thrown from above with a pulley, without much ceremony.

In conclusion, if Pirandello’s essay on humor is still to come, we can say, however, that Fucini’s was undoubtedly a comedy that “makes you think”.

Fucini died in Empoli in 1921 of throat cancer.