Alessandro Bonsanti (November 25, 1904 in

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...

– February 17, 1984 in Florence) was a writer and Italian politician.

Biography

Alessandro Bonsanti, writer, was born in

. Very young, after completing his studies, he moved to work in

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...

, where he worked for three years as an employee at a local bank, collaborating in the magazine ''La Fiera Literaria'', where he published his first Brigants story in

Maremma The Maremma (, ; from Latin , "maritime and) is a coastal area of western central Italy, bordering the Tyrrhenian Sea. It includes much of south-western Tuscany and part of northern Lazio. It was formerly mostly marshland, often malarial, but ...

. Returning to Florence, he came into contact with the literary environment that animated '' Solaria'' (the European magazine, which existed from 1926 to 1936), who was a collaborator and director, publishing military narrative (1927) ''The loving servant'' (1929) and ''the whims of 'Adriana'' (1934), republished in distant Racconti 1962, texts of the past that have to do with a distant social history. In 1937 Bonsanti founded and assumed the direction of publishing at a magazine that collected the inheritance of ''Solaria''. In 1941 he took over as la direzione del Gabinetto scientifìco-letterario Vieusseux (Director of the Vieusseux Scientific-Literature Cabinet), left vacant by

Eugenio Montale Eugenio Montale (; 12 October 1896 – 12 September 1981) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature. Life and works Early years Montale was born in Genoa. His family were che ...

. This was a prestigious assignment that Bonsanti held with great willingness and firmness, making for almost forty years an untiring promoter of various cultural initiatives. During the war, he published two books: ''Dialoghi e altre prose'' (Dialogues and Other Prose) (1940) and ''Introduzione al gran viaggio (''Introduction to the Great Trip) (1944). The following year he assumed the position of Director of ''Il Mondo'', which he himself founded with

and Arturo Loria. Other books to remember are: ''La vipera e il toro'' (1955) and ''cavalli di bronzo'' (1956). In recent years Bonsanti's interests were also addressed to active politics; in this period he was approaching the Republican Party of Spadolini and in 1983 was elected mayor of Florence, head of a pentapartito junta, which was not completed due to his death in 1984. His daughter Sandra, a journalist, was a member of the Republic. Alessandro Bonsanti is buried in the

Cimitero delle Porte Sante Cimitero delle Porte Sante (''The Sacred Doors Cemetery'') is a monumental cemetery in Florence located within the fortified bastion of the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte. History The idea of a burial site near San Miniato was conceived ar ...

in Florence. He was nominated for the

Strega Prize The Strega Prize ( it, Premio Strega ) is the most prestigious Italian literary award. It has been awarded annually since 1947 for the best work of prose fiction written in the Italian language by an author of any nationality and first published ...

Main works

* ''La serva amorosa'', Firenze, 1929 * ''I capricci dell'Adriana'', Firenze, 1934 * ''Racconto militare'', Firenze, 1937 * ''Dialoghi e altre prose'', Firenze, 1940 * ''Introduzione al gran viaggio'', Roma, 1944 * ''La vipera e il toro'', Firenze, 1955 * ''Sopra alcuni personaggi eventuali'', Sarzana, 1956 * ''I cavalli di bronzo'', Firenze, 1956 * ''Racconti lontani'', Milano, 1962 * ''La buca di San Colombario'', 4 vol., Milano, 1964–1973 * ''La nuova stazione di Firenze'', Milano, 1965 * ''Teatro domestico'', Milano, 1970 * ''Portolani d'agosto'', Milano, 1978

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bonsanti, Alessandro 1904 births 1984 deaths Writers from Florence Mayors of Florence 20th-century Italian male writers Italian magazine founders