Sergio Turconi

Sergio Turconi, one of the most reliable and respectable names that the Italian community of Rijeka could boast in the field of literary criticism, was born in Caronno Petrusella near the town of Varese in 1928, and died on Drena in 2019. He arrived in Rijeka in the second half of 1946 to participate in the construction of socialism in society with Alessandro Damiani i Giacomo Scottie. All three came from Italy, at short intervals from each other and from different regions, and all three started working in EDIT publications, starting with “La Voce del Popolo“, where Turconi was the first editor, and later other publications. Turconi has always been involved in the cultural sector mainly as a literary and historical critic of literature.

La Battana Quarterly Promoter for Culture

He should also be remembered as a promoter, together with Luciano Giuricino, the two-week ‘Via Giovanili’ and the three-month period for culture ’La Battana“, of which he was editor-in-chief from 1964 to 1989, together with Eros Sequi and Lucifer Martini. He remained attached to the Italian Community even when he left Rijeka for Belgrade at the beginning of the 1960s, where he was a correspondent ’La Voce’ and where he graduated and obtained his doctorate with the dissertation “Italian Neorealist Poetry” (1970). Later, he was a lecturer at the Department of Italian Studies at the Faculty of Philology of the University in the capital of Yugoslavia, in that position until his retirement in 1997. For many years he travelled between Belgrade and Istria, making a valuable contribution to the creation of new pages of literature by Italians of these countries. In 2014, he returned from Belgrade to Rijeka on Drenovo, where he spent the last years of his life.

For decades he was engaged with “La Battana” in the organization of conferences of writers at the international level and during that time worked on the survival and growth of literature in the ranks of the Italian community of Istria and Kvarner. He was, along with Giacomo Scotti, the last survivor of the second generation of our writers. After Ramous, Sequi and Martini, three of Italian descent, Turconi was the first in the three that also included Damiani and Scotty.

Commitment to the affirmation of Italian literature (CNI)

There is no periodic publication of EDIT, from daily newspapers to journals that have entered its history, on whose pages Turconi's texts do not meet. We should not forget its important role at the international conferences of critics and historians of literature for the affirmation of literary creativity of the CNI.

Turconi has always preferred literary criticism and essayism over his artistic work. His main researches are the study of neorealist cinema (‘Neorealism’, Nolit, Belgrade, 1961) and literary criticism entitled ‘Italian neorealist poetry’ (Mursia, Milan, 1977). Only a few times he devoted literature to personal writings. Among his essays, it is worth noting the “Literature of Italians in Yugoslavia and its Emigrants”, in the “Literatures of Emigration” (prepared by Jean-Jacques Marchand, Issues of the Giovanni Agnelli Foundation, Turin, 1991). In this text, Sergio Turconi reaffirmed the fundamental historical role of the first generation of compatriot writers, passed on to those of the new generation.