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 A TOURNAMENT OF MISFITS:
TALL TALES AND SHORT

Aldo Palazzeschi
Translated by Nicolas J. Perella

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i
 THE LORENZO DA PONTE ITALIAN LIBRARY

General Editors
Luigi Ballerini and Massimo Ciavolella,
University of California at Los Angeles

Honorary Chairs
†Professor Vittore Branca
Honorable Dino De Poli
Ambassador Gianfranco Facco Bonetti
Honorable Anthony J. Scirica

Advisory Board
Remo Bodei, Università di Pisa
Lina Bolzoni, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Francesco Bruni, Università di Venezia
Giorgio Ficara, Università di Torino
Michael Heim, University of California at Los Angeles
Amilcare A. Iannucci, University of Toronto
Rachel Jacoff, Wellesley College
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
Gilberto Pizzamiglio, Università di Venezia
Margaret Rosenthal, University of Southern California
John Scott, University of Western Australia
Elissa Weaver, University of Chicago

ii
A TOURNAMENT OF MISFITS:

TALL TALES AND SHORT

ALDO PALAZZESCHI

Translated by Nicolas J. Perella

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London

iii
 © University of Toronto Press 2005
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada

isbn 0-8020-3850-6 (cloth)

isbn 0-8020-4889-7 (paper)

The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Palazzeschi, Aldo, 1885–1974

A tournament of misfits : tall tales and short / Aldo Palazzeschi ;
Translated by Nicolas J. Perella.

(The Lorenzo da Ponte Italian Library)

translated from the Italian.
isbn 0-8020-3850-6 (bound)
isbn 0-8020-4889-7 (pbk.)

I. Perella, Nicolas J. (Nicolas James), 1927– II. Title. III. Series:

Lorenzo da Ponte Italian Library
pq4835.a18a26 2005 853’.912 c2005-904224-9

This volume is published under the aegis and with the financial
assistance of: Fondazione Cassamarca, Treviso; Ministero degli Affari Esteri,
Direzione Generale per la Promozione e la Cooperazione Culturale;
Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Direzione Generale per i
Beni Librari e gli Istituti Culturali, Servizio per la promozione del libro
e della lettura.
Publication of this volume is assisted by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Toronto.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its

publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development
iv Program (BPIDP).
For Caterina and Ruggero,
godparents of this volume

v
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Tall Tales and Short xi

A Solitary Gentleman 3

Servite Domino in Laetitia 15

The Black Mark 23

Our Friend Galletti 42

Bistino and the Marquis 63

A Small Sentimental Gem 83

Little Maria 84

The Beautiful King 95

Dagobert 123

The Gift 136

A Small Gastronomic Gem 159

The Portrait of the Queen 160

The Hunchback 174

Summer Noontide 185

Silence 190

vii
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

For their suggestions and encouragement, I am grateful to Professors

Massimo Ciavolella and Luigi Ballerini of UCLA as well as to Ron
Schoeffel of the University of Toronto Press and the Press’s reviewers.
I owe special thanks to Barbara Tessman for her scrupulous and,
for me, highly profitable copy-editing of my manuscript. Without the
willing attention and advice of Ruggero Stefanini and Caterina Feucht
this translation would never have been completed.

ix
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction:
Tall Tales and Short

There is a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a

lightness of frivolity. In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem
heavy and dull.
Italo Calvino, “Lightness”

Aldo Palazzeschi (born Aldo Giurlani, 1885–1974) is surely the major

twentieth-century Italian writer who has been most neglected in the
English-speaking world. Yet, in his homeland and, to a lesser degree,
in France and Germany, he ranks high as a poet and a writer of fiction.
Born in Florence on 2 February 1885, Palazzeschi seemed destined to
follow in the footsteps of his successful merchant father, who entered
him in a technical institute. Although Palazzeschi earned a diploma in
accounting in 1902, his interests ran in a different direction – namely
the theater – and in that same year he enrolled in a school for actors.
But neither was he meant for that profession, and after a few years the
none-too-promising actor found his true calling as a writer of poetry
and prose fiction. The time spent in the world of the theater was not
wasted, however; throughout his subsequent long literary career its
attraction and influence were to characterize much of his work. Many
of his poems create the impression of spectators watching and listen-
ing to a character, the poet himself or a fictive double, who is at center
stage; and his 1911 masterpiece, the experimental anti-novel Il codice di
Perelà (literally The Code of Perelà, but published in English as Man of
Smoke), represents an extreme theatricalization of the novel.

xi
 Introduction

At the time he was writing the first version of Il codice di Perelà,

between 1908 and 1910, Palazzeschi enjoyed a modicum of notoriety as
a writer of verse in two veins. One is characterized by a dreamy, enig-
matic, fairytale atmosphere (suggesting a link with the art nouveau
style and the Franco-Belgian symbolists) and a subdued tone conveyed
in a deceptively simple language. Not without some irony and mischie-
vousness, the poems evoke a sense of loneliness, of transgression and
castigation, a repressed sexuality, and an occasional sadomasochistic
touch. This is the case in his first two slim volumes of poems: I cavalli
bianchi (White Horses, 1905) and Lanterna (Lantern, 1907).
The other vein, introduced warily in the 1909 volume Poemi (Poems),
parades irreverent, parodic elements in which the concealed or clos-
eted self begins to break free by way of exhibitionistic nose-thumbing
at conformist bourgeois propriety, even taking over some of the the-
matic repertory of the earlier volumes and reworking it in the new
manner. It was this latter vein that won the admiration of Italy’s flam-
boyant founder (in 1909) of futurism, F.T. Marinetti (1876–1944), who
quickly enrolled the young Florentine poet in his avant-garde coterie.
While the many early-twentieth-century avant-garde movements in
Europe varied in their respective interests, they had in common a
desire to break with the past. The term futurism, chosen for the Italian
movement by Marinetti and a few of his closest adherents, was pre-
ferred to other terms such as dinamismo and elettricismo precisely
because it clearly implied a rejection of the past in favor of people and
ideas of the future. To a great degree the movement was, in its early
stages, culturally anarchistic and therefore well suited to endorse the
incendiary imagination of Palazzeschi. His volume of poems L’incen-
diario (The Arsonist, 1910 and 1913) and experimental novel Il codice di
Perelà were published in Marinetti’s Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia,” as
was Palazzeschi’s iconoclastic and somewhat tongue-in-cheek mani-
festo Il controdolore (An Antidote to Pain, 1914), which had first appeared
in the Florentine periodical Lacerba, 15 January 1914. Il controdolore is a
futuristic manifesto that preaches the superiority of laughter over grief
while, paradoxically, situating the source of profound laughter in deep
suffering. But Palazzeschi was a revolutionary sui generis, and his early
poetry, even in its most aggressive mode, has little in common with

xii
 Introduction

futurism beyond a protest against bourgeois values and the reigning

literary taste. To this extent, there is merit in what Marinetti said about
him in a 1913 assessment of L’incendiario whose poems debonairly carry
forward the iconoclastic trend begun in Poemi :

In all the poems of L’incendiario (The Arsonist) Palazzeschi is absolutely

original. He enters into all the regions of human sadness – graveyards,
hospitals, convents, alleyways of dead cities – but only after having dis-
missed with an ironic guffaw all the sacred guardians of these places:
Lamartine, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rodenbach and Maeterlink
... At the source of Palazzeschi’s genius is a ferociously destructive irony
that topples all the sacred motifs of Romanticism: Love, Death, Cult of
the Ideal Woman, Mysticism, etc.1

Marinetti’s characterization errs insofar as it gives the impression that

Palazzeschi’s laughter and irony lean heavily on the side of sarcasm
and acridness: in fact, they possess, for the most part, an inimitable
lightness. In this respect Marinetti’s use of the word “ferociously” is
hardly appropriate and bespeaks more what he wanted to see than
what Palazzeschi’s texts suggest.
Palazzeschi was emboldened by his association with futurism to fur-
ther accentuate the impish and at times roguish, even quasi-sadistic,
component of his anti-bourgeois spoofing. But he was far from being a
meek follower of Marinetti, who went tirelessly from city to city and
country to country holding futuristic “happenings” (sometimes ending
in a riot) and seeking converts to his message of liberation from tradi-
tion’s restrictive and moldy rules so as to give way to an aesthetic and
ethic of speed and dynamism that exalted the machine (“a roaring
automobile is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”); vio-
lence as a breeder of vigor; the destruction of syntax and elitist poetic
language; the insistence on the use of “free words” and free verse.
Though Palazzeschi participated in Marinetti’s frenetic proselytizing,
he must have chafed under the domineering force of the great “impre-
sario,” for he was “futuristic” in his own fashion. When Marinetti’s
stance became more politicized and blatantly supercharged with belli-
cose sentiments and openly interventionist on the question of the First

xiii
 Introduction

World War, Palazzeschi, who was by nature a pacifist, broke with the
movement by issuing a declaration of independence printed in the
Florentine periodical La voce (The Voice ) on 28 April 1914: “As of today
I will have nothing more to do with the Futurist movement. If F.T.
Marinetti were to make use of my name in support of his movement,
he would be doing so abusively.”2 Despite the break and the bitterness
that immediately followed upon it, the two men were to remain on
friendly terms.
Palazzeschi is perhaps the most elegantly prankish debunker of
social and literary myths Italy produced in the twentieth century, but it
would be a mistake not to see behind the irony and the fun a core of
pain and a desperate yearning for liberation from society’s rigid code.
As a social being, he felt himself a deviant, but he was saved from a self-
destructive bitterness by his capacity for irony, which he often directed
at himself, and by the discovery that he could laugh at himself as well
as at others. Something of this can be seen in the lyric “Chi sono?”
(“Who Am I?”) which opens the 1909 volume Poemi. As a key statement
of Palazzeschi’s literary and psychological persona, made even as he
appears to be seeking his own poetic identity, the poem offers a good
introduction to him.

Son forse un poeta?

No, certo.
Non scrive che una parola, ben strana,
la penna dell’anima mia:
“follía.”
Son dunque un pittore?
Neanche.
Non ha che un colore
la tavolozza dell’anima mia:
“malinconía.”
Un musico, allora?
Nemmeno.
Non c’è che una nota
nella tastiera dell’anima mia:
“nostalgia.”

xiv
 Introduction

Son dunque ... che cosa?

Io metto una lente
davanti al mio cuore
per farlo vedere alla gente.
Chi sono?
Il saltimbanco dell’anima mia.

(Am I perhaps a poet? / No, surely not / My soul’s pen writes /

but one word – quite a strange one: / “madness.” / Am I then a
painter? / Not even that. / My soul’s palette / Has but one
color: / “melancholy.” / A musician, then? / Not that either. /
My soul’s keyboard has but one note: / “nostalgia.” / Am I then
... what? / I place a [magnifying] lens / before my heart / so
that everyone can see it. / Who am I? / the mountebank of my
soul.)

Although follía, with its dual meaning of madness and play (even
madness-as-play), is the most marked characteristic of Palazzeschi’s
writings, taken along with “melancholy” and “nostalgia” it makes for an
interesting triad, all three elements of which are present to one degree
or another in his works (poetry and prose) throughout his long career.
The melancholy is connected with his acute sense of being different;
the nostalgia with a desire for past innocence, for “normality,” but per-
haps also for what cannot be: the free, unselfconscious expression of
his otherness. In this regard Palazzeschi must have envied Gabriele
D’Annunzio’s uninhibited (but, alas, all too serious) flaunting of his
inimitable amoral self. Be that as it may, “Chi sono?” and the poem
“Lasciatemi divertire” (“Let Me Have My Fun”) from the 1910 volume
L’incendiario make for an impudent polemic against some hallowed
ideas concerning poetry, such as, for example, the idea of the poet as
national bard, a leader of leaders, singing of weighty matters. The type
was still represented by the 1907 Nobel Prize–winning poet-orator Gio-
sue Carducci, despite the fact that his literary dictatorship had given
way to two other writers: Giovanni Pascoli and D’Annunzio. Both of
these writers could lay claim to the wreath of the bard, but more
important chords in their lyres are at issue here. In his truer poems –

xv
 Introduction

some of exquisite beauty, others falling into unbearably pathetic

excess – Pascoli (1855–1912) brought to an excruciating extreme the
tendency of the lyric poet to project an anguished inner life onto the
external world. In singing of his inner life he cultivated and caressed a
suffering and timorous self while embracing a psychologically self-
gratifying regression to infancy and the womb. There was much of this
aspect of Pascoli in Palazzeschi himself, and in this connection “Chi
sono?” may be seen as an act of self-exorcism. But it is the spectacularly
gifted Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938) who was Palazzeschi’s great-
est bête noir, the writer who in several literary genres and in his life pro-
mulgated the poetic of an aestheticizing sublime and the bold
affirmation of a self claiming to be the match for all experience and all
of nature. Regarding D’Annunzio, whose influence was enormous,
and was evident even in the work of those poets of the first half of the
twentieth century (Eugenio Montale, for one) who were seeking to
escape from his rhetorico-poetic presence, Palazzeschi’s typically
parodic solution was particularly felicitous in the poem “La fontana
malata” (“The Sick Fountain”), which mimics D’Annunzio’s great lyric
“La pioggia nel pineto” (“Rain in the Pine Grove”). In “Chi sono?”
Palazzeschi disclaims any right to the title of poet in any traditional
sense and, since the disclaimer is made in an artfully crafted lyric, pro-
poses a new and provocative definition of the poet as a saltimbanco, a
carnivalesque entertainer, a jongleur or clown of his soul – that is, for
himself, as well as for others.
By this resolution, ambiguous on the surface, Palazzeschi separates
himself from yet a more immediate (and more congenial) group: the
young contemporary Italian poets of a crepuscular mode, who, in their
poems, renounced the traditional role of poet in a more subdued and,
a touch of irony notwithstanding, more resigned manner. Through its
first sixteen lines, “Chi sono?” would seem to adopt the same stance.
The three renunciations speak of three disqualifying “diseases”:
madness, melancholy, and nostalgia, the last two being particularly
endemic to crepuscularism. But with the announcement of his voca-
tion as a saltimbanco, what precedes acquires a ludic character, and the
whole poem appears as an ambiguous joke or spoof. Melancholy and
nostalgia are embraced by and subsumed into laughter (that is, they

xvi
 Introduction

can be laughed at); and madness – follía – given initially as a quasi-

clinical term (madness in the sense of dementia), is resemanticized
into its meaning of lightness (or lightheartedness), mirth, exuberant
play. The word thereby paradoxically becomes an affirmation of sanity
and health. What has triumphed is allegría (joy, fun), the unnamed
fourth term that rhymes with the upturned triad. Zarathustra’s exhor-
tation has been followed: the Spirit of Gravity has been killed. Follía,
malinconía, and nostalgia are stood on their heads by the Spirit of Light-
ness. So too is the word anima (soul) – a weighty word/concept despite
its original connection with breath. Some readers may be inclined to
find the poem more wistful than the previous remarks suggest, but the
sense of ambiguity can be invoked here with cause. A clown’s mask can
be sad, even tragic, or wildly happy.
As for the image that leads into the self-disclosure of the poet-as-
saltimbanco/jongleur (i.e., the poet who places a magnifying lens before
his heart so that a crowd of spectators can better see it), the truth is
that both in his poetry and his prose Palazzeschi never revealed his
heart too directly, but rather by way of a gallery of oblique and often
grotesque reflections. This is so despite the increasing use of the first-
person pronoun in his poems, for even then the self-portrait is carica-
tural, like the distorted images reflected in a hall of mirrors. More-
over, Palazzeschi’s technique (narrative and dialogic) is such that the I
seems to be looked upon (or looked at) by the author as though it
were someone other than himself. The reflections we speak of here
would include also the parade of “curious” crowd-attracting characters
that inhabit so many of his poems and his numerous novels and short
stories. Indeed, the mirror image, of which the magnifying glass is a
variant, has a prominent place in his writings. There is frequent use of
the mirror image in the early poems, most conspicuously as a meta-
phor for the soul – that is, for introspection. To look into the mirror is
to look at and, it may be, to see and be disquieted by a side (the truth)
of oneself that is unbearable. This is the case, for example, in “Gioco
proibito” (“Forbidden Game”), where a mirror or mirrors (not specifi-
cally indicated) kaleidoscopically reflect a variety of menacing spectral
images. More schizoid yet is “Lo specchio” (“The Mirror”), where the
poet aggressively shouts insults at “his” image in a manic dithyramb of

xvii
 Introduction

narcissistic exhibitionism. Significantly, Palazzeschi’s first published

work of prose (1908), a diaristic epistolary novel of oedipal fixation,
esthetic narcissism, and homoerotic love, was called :riflessi (:reflec-
tions).3 When he republished the novel in 1943 (with revisions that
make even more conspicuous use of the mirror image), Palazzeschi
renamed it Allegoria di Novembre (November Allegory), and “Gioco proi-
bito” subsequently acquired the title “:riflessi.”
As hinted above, there is a close connection between the mirror
motif and the motif of the crowd that gazes at someone and gossips
about him or addresses him with scorn. Struggling to come out of him-
self, Palazzeschi oscillated between the poles of concealment and exhi-
bitionism. We may mention in this regard at least “Una casina di
cristallo” (“A Little Glass House”), where the I of the poem scandalously
offers the most intimate aspects of his life to the view of all by deciding
to build and live in a glass house in the center of town. And in the poem
“Postille” (“Glosses”), among the daily insults passersby write on the
nameplate of the “recluse” poet’s villa are such choice expressions as
“pederasta passivo,” “fesso,” and “poeta del cazzo.” The sadomasochis-
tic strain in this exhibitionist complex is obvious enough; but with
Palazzeschi we are not in the world of Genet. The Italian writer is quite
able to turn the tables on the gazer. Il codice di Perelà, for example, is in
great part built around the “spectacular” gag wherein the gazing stock
(here, the novel’s protagonist) is used as a foil to put on exhibit the
absurdities and grotesqueness of the gazers. The latter become the real
laughing stock for the reader. Palazzeschi’s own liberation came when
he realized that he could be the spectator free to look at the world and
laugh at its folly. To keep laughter healthy necessitated first an ironic
distancing from his own “folly,” which had been to take his social and
existential malaise too seriously. He would neither live a life of quiet
desperation nor be addled by a sense of self-importance.
From 1909 on, in both poetry and prose, Palazzeschi was to be the
most elegantly prankish debunker of social and literary myths Italy
produced in the twentieth century.

Before passing more directly to Il codice di Perelà, the curious novel

:riflessi (we do well here to refer to the 1908 version and title of what

xviii
 Introduction

later became Allegoria di Novembre) merits a further word. Palazzeschi’s

first piece of prose fiction, immediately preceding Il codice di Perelà,
seems to be a book that for better or worse he had to write, if for no
other reason than to chase from his soul the anxiety and despair of his
own youth. In this sense it can be seen as a major step toward his liber-
ation, paralleling what he was then doing in his poetry. Among other
things, it marks the first appearance in his prose of a character who is
bizarrely different from society’s reputed norm. But the limited auto-
biographical component of the novel indicated by Palazzeschi can be
safely accepted. There are indeed single thematic elements in the
book that may be found in his early poems as well as in his later narra-
tive works: the castle or villa, the ball, the great party, the uneasy pres-
ence of old women. But the decadent atmosphere of the story as well
as its details hardly correspond to Palazzeschi’s true nature. Its protag-
onist is another of the writer’s oblique reflections.
The first, and by far the longer, of the book’s two sections consists
exclusively of letters written (one per day during an unspecified
November) by the twenty-nine-year-old Prince Valentino Kore. The let-
ters are written to a twenty-year-old friend, Johnny, from whom the
prince has departed in order to withdraw to a villa where, fifteen years
earlier, his mother committed suicide at the height of a party. The last
letter speaks of the prince’s preparations for a great party to which
nobody has been invited, and it closes with an assertion of serenity.
The letters reveal a sophisticated but peculiar aristocrat of ultra-
refined sensibility who prefers his solitude to society. Acutely aware of
his superiority, he is obsessed with a narcissistic cult of beauty and pos-
sessed by an unconscious and morbid wish for reunion with his dead
mother. The novel’s brief second part – a complete reversal of the first
part in tone, style, and narrative mode – proceeds by way of a number
of short reportorial news bulletins and flashes, police dispatches, and
other testimonials. The prince has disappeared on the eve of the great
party he so carefully and so theatrically prepared. This theatricality
(the idea of a grand fête to which all are welcome but to which nobody
has been invited) and the reclusive prince’s disappearance suggest an
extraordinary ambiguity between the desire to display oneself and the

xix
 Introduction

recoil to self-concealment. The contradictory bulletins and dispatches

that set forth the various conjectures regarding the disappearance
(from suicide, accident, or foul play to hoax or withdrawal to a monas-
tery) reflect parodically on one another. Taken together, they make
for a burlesque of the curiosity of society in general, wreaking havoc
on its need to know how things stand. Among the last reports is one,
dated December 9, that reads like an author’s (Pirandellian as much as
Palazzeschian) wry comment: “There is still much talk about the case;
everyone insists that his/her account is the true one; but the truth is
hidden for now.”4
There can be no doubt that the novel’s second part is meant to throw
a ludic light on the first part and thereby undercut what most critics con-
sider to have been written in all seriousness. According to this view, the
second part of :riflessi is a badly attached addendum that may not even
have been in Palazzeschi’s mind from the beginning. Without doubt,
the author intended it as a palinode. But a case can be made for reading
the first part, too, in a parodic key. Whether intended or not, the first
part of the novel reads like a parody of the diaristic-epistolary novel
bequeathed by Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and, more par-
ticularly, Ugo Fosculo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1802; rev. ed. 1816),
with strong accents of the estheticizing decadence of D’Annunzio and
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891) and the dreamy, ambigu-
ous symbolism of the dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1944). As
an author of prose, Palazzeschi did not yet possess the secret of lightness
that Il codice di Perelà was soon to display.
One of the century’s most significant and original masterpieces,
Il codice di Perelà is as far removed from the decadence that pervades
:riflessi as one can imagine. Written in a ludic and sometimes surreal-
istic, sometimes expressionistic vein, it is an existential fable whose
central theme is the tragicomic opposition between the aspiration
toward lightness (and liberation) and the heaviness of existence (thus
a remarkable and fully developed anticipation of the more recent pre-
occupation with the theme as found in Milan Kundera and Italo
Calvino). Quite literally a “man of smoke,” the protagonist, Perelà, in
whose very name an existential vision of life is coded (PEna, REte,
LAma: Pain, Net, Blade), appears one day to delight, inspire, and

xx
 Introduction

alarm the men and women of the city. His popular rise and disgrace-
ful fall – marked by a series of encounters with every type of modern
citizen – make for an often hilarious and sometimes nightmarish
social satire. The pattern of Perelà’s story makes use of a parodic, but
not irreverent, revisitation of the life of Christ. Hailed first as a mes-
siah figure and entrusted with the weighty task of prescribing a new
code for the nation, the man of smoke, whose only real quality or
essence is lightness, eventually is suspected of carrying out an incendi-
ary campaign of universal destruction. The bewildered Perelà is tried,
found guilty, and immured within a solitary cell built atop a mountain
especially to hold him. But the cell contains a fireplace, and it is by
removing the beautiful boots that alone had anchored him to earth
(he had slipped into them at his “birth,” when he came down from
the inside of a chimney where he had been formed from compacted
smoke over a period of thirty-three years) that Perelà escapes, rising
into the blue sky and dissipating into nothingness. The narrative
modes and the variety of prose styles adopted by Palazzeschi in his
avant-garde fable make of it an anti-novel that perfectly houses his fan-
tastic anti-hero.
Perhaps one is struck above all by the radical theatricalization of the
novel. Of the eighteen “chapters” (from less than a page to forty
pages), only a few are in a strictly narrative mode. The majority may
more properly be called “scenes”; some combine the scene with a con-
cise present-tense narration whose style is often that of on-the-scene
reportage or stage directions of a play. Dialogue and direct discourse,
without a guiding authorial or narrating voice, are often used alone to
advance the story line, without external comments or description, as
throughout the long first chapter. When Palazzeschi does take per-
sonal command of the narrating voice, he remains unconventional,
playfully mimicking and parodying different genres and prose styles,
from the classic fairy tale to grammar school readers, from journalese
to D’Annunzio. And there is one chapter that, after several pages of a
quick exchange of dialogue by unnamed persons (all of whom are
women), turns into a series of tales that could almost be an eleventh
day appended to Boccaccio’s Decameron.
Though not published until 1926, his next novel, La piramide (The

xxi
 Introduction

Pyramid ), was written between 1912 and 1914. Its abulic protagonist
attempts to project or externalize himself in a variety of other types, to
no avail. He then contemplates a series of travels in which he might
discover and realize himself. But this also comes to naught. Better the
desire and dream than the reality, which would surely end in disillu-
sionment. A lack of psychological depth in the presentation of the
characters keeps this otherwise interesting and pessimistically oriented
work from being fully satisfactory.
Published posthumously in 1988, the scabrous Interrogatorio della
Contessa Maria (Interrogatory of the Countess Maria) was in all probability
written in 1925–6. Its structure is that of an interview of sorts, in which
a somewhat shy and circumspect poet (Palazzeschi, unnamed), his
curiosity greatly aroused by the intriguing presence of an aristocratic
lady in a café (in a Tuscan city of the 1920s), manages to establish a
friendly rapport with her. In the first half or so of the book, the “poet”
recounts their several meetings and conversations, during which the
thirty-five-year-old countess reveals herself in a wholly unselfconscious
but ironic, polemical way (and in lively idiomatic language) to be a
practitioner and champion of pleasure and of total freedom in sexual
matters. She derisively batters prevailing social norms and cultural val-
ues (in literature, music, and art in general) while the taciturn poet
appears scandalized but is ambiguously attracted, as though being
exposed to life as it is lived in its spontaneous embrace of joy and not
in the paleness of literature. The book’s second half is taken up by the
countess’s more detailed account of her life, given in response to the
poet’s urgent request.
With Stampe dell’Ottocento (Nineteenth-Century Prints, 1932), Palazzeschi
forgoes the fantastic and the more unconventional aspects of his earlier
prose and narrative modes, bringing us a series of sketches that evoke –
with an aura of nostalgia mixed with gentle humor – figures, customs,
and the atmosphere of the last two decades of the century in which he
was born. Interestingly enough, the essential structuring technique is
wholly in keeping with the great constant of Palazzeschi’s manner:
development of character and “story” by way of binary opposites.
Sorelle Materassi (The Materassi Sisters, 1934) is the most felicitous of
Palazzeschi’s novels in what may be called a (relatively) conventional

xxii
 Introduction

novelistic style. Here, as in Stampe dell’Ottocento, he does without the

fantastic and reverts to an even more traditional narrative representa-
tion with a longer, more sustained fiction grounded in a specific social
and historical milieu. Yet enough of his earlier experimental fiction
informs the novel’s style and content. The contrast highlighted by the
author is that which exists between one generation and the next,
between the old and the young, opposites that are presented more as
psychological than physiological categories. The two middle-aged Ma-
terassi spinsters, seamstresses much in demand among the wealthy
ladies of the city, have retained, buried within them, a zest for life.
The occasion for their reawakening comes with the arrival of their
fourteen-year-old nephew, Remo, child of another sister, who has died.
Handsome, selfish, even violent, the unscrupulous Remo takes advan-
tage of his two aunts and their old woman servant, Niobe (even more
indulgent with and enchanted by him than are her mistresses), bring-
ing them to financial ruin in the few years he is with them. But for all
that, the spinsters have throbbed with new life (including erotic desire
and jealousy), and when the young man leaves them definitively, run-
ning off with a rich American heiress, they continue to be “faithful” to
him, consoling themselves by talking about him late into the night. In
the years that have passed, the Materassi sisters have become younger
in spirit, and, with the memory of Remo’s beauty and vitality, they con-
tinue to be young, living perhaps in the illusion that he might yet
return. The novel ends with the sisters and Niobe laughing freely over
a joke that concerns a photograph they have of Remo in bathing
trunks. What would their former well-to-do clients – ladies all – have
thought if they had seen it!
I fratelli Cuccoli (The Cuccoli Brothers, 1948) narrates the story of a
middle-aged bachelor who adopts four teenage orphan boys, three of
whom, over the years, bring him to financial ruin and eventually to his
death. The story thus has important parallels with Sorelle Materassi, but
in place of the comic verve of the earlier novel, I fratelli Cuccoli is told in
a serious and often solemn mode and with an uncharacteristically mor-
alizing intent. Palazzeschi was at this time experiencing a religious cri-
sis that, for all the Christian elements that pervade his work for a few
years, was never fully resolved. In 1941 he had moved to Rome, where

xxiii
 Introduction

he lived (save for long stays in Venice – his “third” Italian city – and
Paris) until his death. The didacticism and moralizing that vitiate I fra-
telli Cuccoli are carried to excess in the quasi-propagandistic Roma
(Rome, 1953), a novel that marks the lowest point in his narrative pro-
duction in terms of structure and style.
Palazzeschi did not continue in this cultural and artistic morass. In
the climate of a new wave of Italian avant-gardism in the 1960s, the
octogenarian astonished the Italian literary world with a return to the
high fantasy, humor, and irony of his early fiction, publishing three
more novels and a considerable amount of poetry. Il Doge (The Doge,
1967) can be said (in one sense) to pick up again the theme of the
imagination’s superiority over reality, but it can hardly be limited to
that formula. Against the backdrop of a fable-like Venice, Palazzeschi
evokes the mythicized figure of a doge who is never seen but whom the
variegated population of the city (including its tourists), in an alternat-
ing swing between high hope and fearful anxiety, expect to make an
epiphanic appearance. The real protagonist, as was suggested by Euge-
nio Montale, is not the non-existent doge but the collective (and pluri-
linguistic) language or vociferation of the inhabitants.5 In Stefanino
(1969) the eponymous hero – an anatomical anomaly born with geni-
tals and head in inverted position – is among the author’s most bizarre
or fantastic characters; like the man of smoke, he is an ironic example
of the sense of “deviance” that Palazzeschi felt throughout his life. But
unlike the passive and naïve Perelà, Stefanino himself knows how to
reply aggressively in defending his “abnormal” nature and the right
and naturalness of being different from others. As in Il codice di Perelà
and Il Doge, others (the crowd or society in general), with their many
voices and curiosity, form a sort of second protagonist. Less satisfying
as a work of fiction is Storia di un’amicizia (Story of a Friendship, 1971), a
work that too often sacrifices inventiveness in aspiring to be not only a
novel but, it would seem, also a psychological or moral treatise on
friendship and the opposition between optimistic and pessimistic atti-
tudes toward life (exemplified in the book’s two protagonists/friends).
Palazzeschi’s last years also brought him back to poetry. In 1968 he
published Cuor mio (Heart of Mine), although some of the poems date
from 1945–6. In 1972 appeared Via dalle cento stelle (Street of a Hundred
Stars). Amid the satire, punning, sneers, and guffaws, one senses the

xxiv
 Introduction

perennial love for life and poetry (whether the medium be verse or
narrative prose) of an author who never ceased being a keen observer
of people. A number of poems were published posthumously under
the title Sinfonie e altri versi (Symphonies and Other Verses). Significantly,
the best of them is the first, “Piazza della Libertà” (“Liberty Square”),
whose very title emblematizes the overarching theme of all his work: a
desire for the freedom to be one’s self.
Finally, among Palazzeschi’s finest work are his short stories, which
span the whole length of his literary career. He himself speaks of hav-
ing begun to write in the genre as early as 1907, but the nine earliest
were published between 1911 and 1913; eight of these were included in
the author’s first volume of short stories, Il re bello (The Beautiful King),
published in 1921. Palazzeschi continued to publish stories in various
periodicals, collecting them for a second volume, Il palio dei buffi (A
Tournament of Misfits), published in 1937. In 1951 a third volume
appeared: Bestie del ’900 (A Twentieth-Century Bestiary), short stories and
fables set in a society made up of humans and animals. A fourth, and
last, volume of stories came out in 1966 under the title Il buffo integrale
(The Complete Misfit). In the meantime an edition of Tutte le novelle (The
Complete Short Stories) was published in 1957 by the publishing house of
Mondadori (Milan); an updated volume, also published by Monda-
dori, appeared in 1975. The latter volume, which combined the 1957
edition of Tutte le novelle with Il buffo integrale, can be augmented by a
new edition of Il re bello edited by Rita Guerricchio (1995), which
contains thirteen of the fifteen stories from the original. The remain-
ing two stories from the 1921 edition, “Il gobbo” (“The Hunchback”)
and “Il re bello,” were included by Palazzeschi in the original Tutte le
novelle and appear in the 1975 edition as well. In all, he wrote ninety-
two tales.
For the 1957 edition of Tutte le novelle, Palazzeschi did not organize
the tales in chronological order, nor does the posthumous 1975 edi-
tion. But it can be said that the earliest of them have primarily a theat-
ricalizing, dialogic structure. Although, this mode is used occasionally
in the later tales, already in the 1921 volume Il re bello Palazzeschi’s
style begins to shift to a more conventional narrative mode, used in his
major “middle period” novel, Sorella Materassi. But while the syntactical
order is conventional, the prose is rhythmically rich and flowing. In

xxv
 Introduction

this sense the narrative mode may be considered as realism, but of a fre-
quently whimsical sort, so that one may prefer to label it “antinaturalis-
tic.” The mode has a stylistico-semantic purpose in that extravagant or
fantastic situations or entire tales (tall and short) are told in an appar-
ently matter-of-fact yet humorous way, as, for example, in the stories
from Bestie del ’900 or in a short story such as “Piccola Maria” (“Little
Maria”). And even in the mostly traditional prose style of the majority
of the stories, Palazzeschi remains an incomparable master of dia-
logue.

ii
Everything deserves to be laughed at except to laugh at everything.
Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, 17 December 1823

By laughing I escape from heaviness.

George Bataille, Le Coupable

One must be struck by the place and role of gaiety and laughter in
Palazzeschi, and, before turning to the short stories translated for this
volume, it will be useful first to touch again on his futuristic manifesto
Il controdolore, in which hilarity is proposed as an antidote to even the
greatest grief and the worst pain. Palazzeschi here proclaims the wis-
dom and superiority of laughter and joy over tears and suffering, and
roots the former in the latter: “The more laughter one succeeds in
drawing from suffering, the greater and more profound one will be.
One cannot laugh profoundly save after an immense labor, a labor of
digging into the depths of human suffering.”6
Among the proposals for a “renewal” of society and individuals,
Palazzeschi would have cemeteries become the settings for riotous
glee, hospitals the scene for masked balls, and so on, because “nothing
is profoundly sad, everything is joyous.”7 Another outlandish dictum
from the manifesto gives us a taste of Palazzeschi’s deflation of the
perennial Romantic cult of feminine beauty. As such it is also an exam-
ple of the misogynous streak that appears frequently in his writings:

xxvi
 Introduction

Young men, let your wives be humpbacked, blind, lame, bald, deaf, rick-
ety, toothless, fetid, with simian gestures and a parrot-like voice, etc. ...
Such creatures as these are the only ones that have already attained the
inheritance of happiness. Do not dwell on your lady’s beauty, if unhap-
pily for you she should seem so to you. Examine it closely and you will
discover its deformity. Do not wallow voluptuously in the scent of her fra-
grance; a pungent coil of the stench which is the deep truth of her flesh,
so adored by you, might surprise you one day and smash your fragile
dream, leaving you a victim of grief.8

Yet another passage enrolls hunchbacks among the likely (rather

than unlikely) subjects of mirth:

A hunchback is singled out for you by Nature so that you may laugh
behind his back; and it is precisely on his back that she set the treasure of
his merriment. A hunchback poet who were to poetize dolefully all life-
long could never be profound; instead he would be the most superficial
of men. He will have stopped to whimper at the surface of his hump, like
a child at the word “boo,” after having robbed us of his dorsal treasure’s
strongbox because he wasn’t able to penetrate it.9

The polemical thrust at the hunchback-poet refers to the “hunchback

of Recanati,” Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), Italy’s greatest post-
Renaissance poet, toward whom Palazzeschi had an ambiguous atti-
tude, although his references to him here and in the short story “Il
gobbo,” which appeared first in 1912, seem more negative than not.
In the posthumously published Interrogatorio della Contessa Maria, the
author still uses a more or less jocular manner when addressing the
“question” of Leopardi, but one senses a secret respect, if not admira-
tion, for his great predecessor. In fact, Leopardi, the poet of universal
pain, was not to be shrugged off. Despite Palazzeschi’s jubilant romp
over society’s most commonly held norms and values (and prejudices)
in the name of a liberating laughter, one may well sense the persistent
presence of hunchback Leopardi, who was far from neglecting the
matter of laughing. Among the thoughts on laughter that he recorded
in his notebooks (Zibaldone), the following is one that Palazzeschi (and

xxvii
 Introduction

Pirandello for that matter) surely knew and pondered:

Laugh freely and loudly over anything at all, even the most innocent of
subjects, with one or two persons, in a café, in a conversation, on the
street: all the people who hear you or see you laughing in such a way will
turn their eyes toward you, they will look at you with respect, and if they
had been talking, they will become silent, they will seem mortified, they
would never dare laugh at you. If at first they were looking at you boldly
or haughtily, they will lose all of their bravado and haughtiness in your
regard. In short, simply to laugh aloud gives you a decided superiority
over all bystanders without exception. The power of laughter is terrible and
awful [awesome]: whoever has the courage to laugh is master of others no less than
whoever has the courage to die. (23 September 1828)10

In light of Leopardi’s views, the first of the three passages from Il contro-
dolore quoted above is telling: “One cannot laugh profoundly save after
an immense labor, a labor of digging into the depths of human suffer-
ing.” This thought returns like a refrain several times in the manifesto.
It is a fact that Palazzeschi’s adolescence and early manhood were
marked by turbid emotions and an inner torment connected with his
sense of being not merely different from others but “deviant.” His lib-
eration from his inner ghost may be no more reducible to a rational ex-
planation than is a religious conversion. Late in life, in speaking of his
first novel, :riflessi, which had been published fifty years earlier, he
referred to that liberation as a mystery and a miracle. That novel, he
wrote:

faithfully reflects a troubled and well-nigh desperate youth, such as my

own was until the day when, as by a miracle or an enchantment whose
mystery I cannot explain (a deepened knowledge of life, of others and
myself?), it was resolved in hilarity. And while I have remained a faithful
recluse, protective of my solitude, ever since that day I have been quite
merry, merrier and merrier. Few people in this life have laughed as
much as I have laughed.11

Making allowance for the residue of pain and bitterness that could

xxviii
 Introduction

never be dissolved, the deliverance was real, and, however it came

about, it coincided with Palazzeschi’s awareness that laughter, or
“lightness,” was the only way in which he could be original as a writer.
But the feeling that he was different, painfully so, was never to leave
him. Several of his stories show this side of his personality. Indeed, he
is often a surprisingly effective narrator of utterly bleak existences. The
truth is that laughter and pain were never too distant from each other
in him, and, as we have seen in his manifesto Il controdolore, the one
could reflect or even emerge from the other. That they were an indivis-
ible pair is clear from the characterization he gave of the figures that
inhabit his short stories. He speaks of them as being so many buffi (in a
non-operatic sense). The term may conjure up a plethora of words for
an English translator, words suggesting eccentricity and comicality,
something or somebody “funny” or odd. But Palazzeschi’s own defini-
tion, made in connection with the publication in 1957 of his collected
short stories, pinpoints the ambiguity in his use of the term:

The title that best characterizes all the stories is the one used for [my]
second volume [of stories] Il palio dei buffi (1937). I will say what I mean
by “buffi.” “Buffi” are all those persons who, because of some [peculiar]
trait or natural divergence of various kinds, writhe in discomfort amidst
the general community of humans. This discomfort assumes at one
and the same time tones of heightened comedy and deep gloom. That is
why this volume forms a tragicomic drama in which the “buffi” are
brought to the dock.12

Were it not for this dimension of human suffering, Palazzeschi’s varie-

gated gallery of buffi would not rise above the status of grotesques. It
would not be at all amiss to speak (in English) of his buffi as “misfits” –
the term I have used in translating the titles Il palio dei buffi and Il buffo
integrale.

The Stories in This Volume

The reader of the stories translated for the present volume will notice
that the buffi are not limited to the protagonists of Palazzeschi’s tales;

xxix
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