Alienation, Innocence, and Death in Naples: Unmasking the Poetic World of Antonio De Curtis

ABSTRACT

As well as being one of the greatest comedians of the twentieth century, Antonio De Curtis (1898–1967), better known by the pseudonym of Totò (his comedic mask), was also a noteworthy dialectal poet. Intersecting the growing interest of scholarship in Neapolitan culture and following the recent new edition of De Curtis’s complete work of poems and songs, Il principe poeta: tutte le poesie e le liriche di Totò (2018), this study intends to draw scholarly attention to his neglected poetical work in dialect, exploring, in Pasolini’s words, the poetic innocence which is inextricably linked to his use of Neapolitan dialect. Unveiling the poet behind the mask and placing his opus in the wider context of Italian dialectal poetry, the article offers a close reading of ‘’O schiattamuorto’, ‘Bianchina’, and ‘Riflessione’, exploring the distinctive use of the theme of death.

SOMMARIO

Oltre ad essere stato uno dei più grandi comici del Novecento, Antonio De Curtis (1898–1967), meglio conosciuto con lo pseudonimo di Totò (la sua maschera comica), è stato anche un poeta dialettale degno di nota. Intersecando la crescente attenzione accademica verso la cultura napoletana e facendo seguito alla recente pubblicazione di una nuova edizione dell’opera completa di poesie e canzoni di De Curtis, Il principe poeta: tutte le poesie e le liriche di Totò (2018), questo articolo intende richiamare l’attenzione degli studiosi sulla trascurata opera poetica in dialetto di De Curtis, esplorando, nelle parole di Pasolini, la sua innocenza poetica, indissolubilmente legata all’uso del dialetto napoletano. Svelando il poeta dietro la maschera e collocando la sua opera nel più ampio contesto della poesia dialettale italiana, l’articolo offre una lettura ravvicinata di ‘’O schiattamuorto’, ‘Bianchina’ e ‘Riflessione’, esplorando l’uso distintivo del tema della morte.

KEYWORDS:

• Antonio De Curtis
• dialectal poetry
• Novecento
• Neapolitan language and culture
• death

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• Antonio De Curtis
• poesia dialettale
• Novecento
• alienazione
• lingua e cultura napoletana
• morte

Introduction

In his seminal study on dialectal poetry in twentieth-century Italy, Le parole perdute (1990), Franco Brevini explains the major difficulties he encountered searching for texts in dialect, which are usually excluded from the mainstream of national publishing and confined to smaller and scattered publishing houses. ‘Lo studioso che si accosti alla produzione dialettale del nostro secolo’, writes Brevini, ‘si trova di fronte un continente sommerso’, which entails that omissions are not only possible but unavoidable.¹ Brevini’s excusatio addresses a significant issue in studies on dialectal poetry in the Italian Novecento, which, among other things, is shown by the fact that the anthologies devoted to the subject often feature a very diverse range of authors. Some exceptions call for unanimous agreement: authors such as Salvatore Di Giacomo, Giacomo Noventa, and Franco Loi are almost invariably included in these collections, and have received notable scholarly attention. But, apart from these more popular poets, and given the aforementioned publishing situation, all critical anthologies and scholarly works addressing twentieth-century dialectal poetry in Italy run the risk of being incomplete and crippled by lacunae.²

This study aims to help redress such shortcomings, by focusing on a poet who has been unanimously dismissed by literary critics: Antonio De Curtis (1898–1967). Better known by the pseudonym Totò (his comedic mask), De Curtis belongs to Brevini’s ‘continente sommerso’, mostly due to the fact that his profile as a poet was completely overshadowed by his career as a comic performer. Such neglect is all the more striking in the light of De Curtis’s own attempts to draw attention to his poetic activity³ and, more significantly, the ongoing publishing attention to his collections of poems, which have been issued in several non-critical editions since his death, finding favour among the Italian non-academic public and even earning him a literary prize.⁴

Among the few critical contributions on De Curtis’s poetry are: Carlachiara Perrone’s ‘Totò e il linguaggio della poesia’, which focuses on the analysis of ‘’A livella’, his most renowned lyrical composition; Vittoriano Esposito’s ‘La poesia di Totò tra gioco e ironia’; and four articles — Michele Sovente’s ‘Tradizione e modernità nella poesia di Antonio De Curtis’, Vincenzo Dolla’s ‘Connotazioni metriche della poesia di De Curtis’, Pietro Maturi’s ‘Code-Switching in “’A livella”’, and Paola Cantoni’s ‘L’altro Totò: il dialetto e la “necessità” di scrivere versi’ — included in the volume Totò: parole di attore e di poeta edited by Patricia Bianchi and Nicola de Blasi, which is so far the only extensive scholarly attempt to reflect on the literary importance of De Curtis’s lyrical production along with his theatrical and filmic work.⁵ In addition to these five monographs, there is a brief paragraph on De Curtis’s poetic work in Annamaria Hernandez’s doctoral thesis, Rivalutazione storica e culturale di Napoli attraverso canzoni e poesie in dialetto napoletano.⁶ Finally, only two critical anthologies of dialectal poetry acknowledge De Curtis’s work as a poet:⁷ Herman Haller’s The Other Italy, which associates De Curtis with Eduardo De Filippo on the basis that they are ‘mostly known for their theatrical careers’ and both ‘wrote some memorable poems in the 1970s’;⁸ and Franco Brevini’s La poesia in dialetto, which includes De Curtis’s ‘’A livella’ among the 'Giocosi, satirici, “engagés”' works by Italian dialectal poets of the twentieth century.⁹ Outside Italy, De Curtis continues to wear the mask of Totò and to be exclusively associated with that character. De Curtis is included in the critical anthology The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature, edited by Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, but he is featured under the name of ‘Totò’ and there is no mention of his literary and/or poetic activity.¹⁰

Contributing to the substantial growth of interest among scholars in Neapolitan culture, and following the recent publication of De Curtis’s complete poems and songs, Il principe poeta: tutte le poesie e le liriche di Totò (2018),¹¹ based on the author’s original manuscripts and including five previously unpublished poems, this study intends to draw scholarly attention to De Curtis’s poetical work in dialect, finding a place for him within the existing canon of Italian poetry. Uncovering the poetic persona concealed beneath his comedic mask, it aims to place his poems within the wider context of Italian dialectal poetry. In particular, it sets out to reveal their proximity to, and anticipation of, the poeti neodialettali, as well as their intimate link to Naples and the Neapolitan dialect’s intrinsic poeticalness, on the one hand, and on the other the Neapolitan lyrical tradition of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, the article provides an overview of De Curtis’s canzoniere and a close reading of three of his poems, exploring the distinctive use of the theme of death through the lens of his Neapolitan popular cultural heritage.

The Poet and the Mask

In his introduction to De Curtis’s ‘A Livella: poesie napoletane, published by Gremese in 1992,¹² anticipating readers’ reactions to a collection of poems by an artist they only knew as a comedian, Luciano de Crescenzo warns: ‘E già, perché dovete sapere che di Totò che ne sono stati tre: il Comico, il Principe e il Poeta.’¹³ Far from being an arbitrary division, this multi-faceted image reflects the way De Curtis truly perceived his identity: not as a whole, but as a fragmentary self, whose components were utterly discordant.¹⁴ In fact, he insisted on his disjointed identity as one divided into two halves, rather than three, combining the princely and the poetic identities in Antonio De Curtis, as opposed to the comedic self, Totò. In Siamo uomini o caporali (1952), De Curtis argues: ‘Tra me come sono nella vita reale, e Totò, come appare in palcoscenico, c’è una differenza abissale. Io odio la mia maschera che uso solo per servire il pubblico. […] Totò […] mi è antipatico.’¹⁵ In a famous interview conducted by Lello Bersani for Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI) in 1963, De Curtis elaborates on this ‘differenza abissale’: ‘Lui fa il pagliaccio, il buffone. È un attore, io no, io sono una persona per bene […]. Io vivo alle spalle di Totò, lo sfrutto. Lui lavora e io mangio.’¹⁶ Totò is an ‘ingombrante marionetta’¹⁷ exploited by De Curtis in order to make a living. It is De Curtis, not Totò, who writes poems, expressing his more authentic feelings: ‘Nelle canzoni e nelle poesie metto tutto ciò che è più, e veramente, mio: i miei sentimenti, le vicende dell’anima e del cuore, la mia vita privata.’¹⁸

In direct contrast to his comedic mask, De Curtis’s poetic self reflects his authentic self, coinciding (by his own repeated account) with the image of a melancholic and lonely man, with a pessimistic view of life: ‘io sono triste. Pessimista. Pes-si-mi-stis-si-mo’; ‘Io sono in realtà triste, solitario. Lo sono sempre stato’; ‘Io mi sento comico sullo schermo, sulla scena, ma nella vita sono triste, sono un funerale di prima classe’;¹⁹ ‘Sono nato cinico e malinconico’;²⁰ ‘Sono pessimista, solitario, alieno dalla mondanità, odio i rumori, mi piace parlare poco.’²¹ Antonio De Curtis appears to be the opposite of Totò, the former being associated with an isolating and deeply felt melancholy, the latter with a tireless, performed cheerfulness. While Totò spends his mask-life laughing and making others laugh, De Curtis ‘[i]n privato non rid[e] mai’,²² perfectly embodying the stereotype of the sad comedian, according to which ‘per la legge di compensazione, è giusto che un comico nella vita privata sia malinconico’.²³ Far removed from the clown-like mask worn by Totò, the man who writes poetry reveals ‘un’imprevedibile natura crepuscolare’,²⁴ reflecting the ‘esigenza fondamentale […] di portare in superficie una sua profonda inquietudine, un suo complesso intreccio di emozioni, mostrandosi finalmente per quello che è’.²⁵ As Vittorio Gassman writes in his preface to the 1982 edition of De Curtis’s love poetry,²⁶ the poems of an actor are ‘il negativo del positivo che lui è stato per gli altri, per il pubblico’; hence De Curtis’s poems, which are the exact opposite of his histrionic performance as an actor, are ‘patetiche, crepuscolari, piene d’amore, di gesti e parole quotidiani’,²⁷ and are informed by ‘un’ispirazione fondamentalmente triste che si ripete come un leit-motiv’.²⁸

As Cantoni remarks, the dichotomy between Totò the actor and De Curtis the poet, corresponding to that between the mask and the authentic self, mirrors another fundamental dichotomy: that between the use of the standard language and that of dialect.²⁹ In this dichotomy, dialect emerges as the language through which the poet escapes the performed and levelling nature of everyday reality, which De Curtis largely experienced in the film industry: Neapolitan becomes for him a poetic language that is both means and end, allowing him to rediscover and reclaim a space of authenticity and genuineness significantly tied to his local Neapolitan roots. The longing for such an untainted, non-alienating, and performance-free habitat is a reaction to the sociohistorical changes marking the decades immediately following the Second World War, and brings De Curtis’s poetic activity close to that of the so-called poeti neodialettali.

Far from the Alienating Crowd, Close to the poeti neodialettali

The years in which De Curtis wrote the majority of his poems, the 1950s and 1960s,³⁰ coincide with the time when he was most active filming movies.³¹ In those years, he was drawn to poetry as a way of escaping the life he led as a performer and, more specifically, as a screen actor. He wrote verses out of his need — in his own words, a ‘necessità’, not a ‘hobby’³² — to react to the frenetic and alienating routine to which the film industry subjected him and, more broadly, to the levelling tendencies of the society which surrounded him, a society that was oblivious to cultural roots and local traditions that had survived throughout history for centuries. The modern world did not appeal to him:

Io sono un uomo all’antica. Io appartengo al secolo scorso, anzi che dico? Al secolo delle crociate. Il mondo moderno, il mondo d’oggi, per me non c’è, non esiste. Non lo vedo, non mi piace. Detesto tutto di esso: la fretta, il frastuono, l’ossessione, la volgarità, l’arrivismo, la frenesia, le brutte maniere, la mancanza di rispetto per le tradizioni, le stupide scoperte.³³

De Curtis’s experience as a screen actor who suffered from the alienation and sameness imposed by the mass film industry reflects the overall historical changes taking place in western culture and society in the aftermath of the Second World War — what Pasolini famously referred to as ‘mutazione antropologica’. These were extensively outlined by Adorno in his Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together.’³⁴ According to the German philosopher, there is no distinction between the monopolizing sameness which characterizes the automotive industry and that found in media culture, represented in particular by the movie industry.³⁵

De Curtis was aware of this, and denounced the changes ushered in by the advent of mass culture in Italy during the economic boom beginning in the 1950s. In one of his poems, ‘Nun so’ d’accordo’, he indulges in a personal analysis of the ‘mutamento dei linguaggi artistici e sociali’ in which he perceives ever more ‘il disfacimento dei costumi tradizionali, superati da nuove mode e abitudini che trova vuote e maleducate’:³⁶

J’ songo antico, songo ‘e ll’Ottuciento,

‘e cierti ccose nun ‘e concepisco.

Sarò cretino, ma nun ‘e capisco

‘sti ccose nove … ‘sti modernità.

E nun voglio parlà po’ d’ ‘e canzone.

So strille ca te fanno ascì a ‘nmpazzie.

Ma come s’adda fa, na melodia

Nun simmo cchiù capace d’ ‘a sentì.³⁷

Partly matching the concerns raised by Adorno about the standardization of popular music, expressed in his 1941 essay of that title, written with the assistance of George Simpson,³⁸ De Curtis complains about the standardization and commercialization of songs, and the resulting lack of proper and distinct melodies. His critique of new songs emerges also in the poem ‘Ma che dulore!’, where he directs his attention to lyrics, denouncing them for being devoid of meaning and poetry.³⁹A man of the ‘Ottuciento’, De Curtis concludes in a rather Leopardian manner, he is ‘appiccicato col progresso’.⁴⁰

De Curtis’s conflict with what mass culture considered to be progress — a huge and alienating standardization process affecting languages, cultures, and habits — reflects one of the leitmotivs of mid-twentieth-century dialectal poetry in Italy, the so-called ‘stagione neodialettale’, whose beginning, according to Brevini, coincides with the 1972 publication of Tonino Guerra’s collection I bu.⁴¹ As Emanuela Tandello remarks, poetry in dialect was searching ‘for a historical, as well as for an existential dimension’ which would ‘counteract the levelling process which appear[ed] to deny and destroy any expression of individuality or difference’.⁴² Having to choose between the Italian standard and the variety of local dialects,⁴³ many poets of the second half of the twentieth century found in the latter the best means to express and preserve their individuality and resist the overwhelming levelling process introduced by mass society. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, dialectal poetry developed as a ‘reazione alle tendenze universalistiche e spersonalizzanti diffuse dalla civiltà industriale’, giving rise to a ‘bisogno di appaesamento, di tornare a casa’.⁴⁴

When in his poem ‘Nun so’ d’accordo’ De Curtis conveys the feeling of loss, obsolescence, and alienation caused by cultural and linguistic standardization, he foreshadows an issue that the generation of the poeti neodialettali — particularly Ignazio Buttitta, Andrea Zanzotto, and Raffaello Baldini — would address as a central theme.⁴⁵ Just like the poeti neodialettali, when De Curtis composed verses, some 15 years before them, he adopted his mother tongue, the Neapolitan dialect, as a means of reaching a lost, authentic, and familiar world. Anticipating the ‘stagione neodialettale’, he resorted to dialect, in Perrone’s words, as ‘la lingua dantescamente materna il cui uso riporta il poeta allo stadio incontaminato dell’infanzia propria e dell’infanzia del mondo […], lo strumento per ritornare alla purezza dell’essere’.⁴⁶

Naples and the Neapolitan Dialect’s Intrinsic Poeticalness

The authenticity and innocence De Curtis sought to regain through his poetic activity in dialect were embodied, in his eyes, by the city which produced him: Naples. While the Roman metropolis, where he had worked and lived since the 1920s, represented the alienating movie industry which oppressed him, his beloved hometown, like poetry, gave him an opportunity to escape from such estranging reality. It is not by chance that De Curtis often asked his driver, Carlo Cafiero, to take him to Naples in the middle of the night — that is, during those very hours he devoted to writing poetry.⁴⁷ In De Curtis’s eyes, Naples continued to be the same city he knew as a child, a place that retained that local, even moral, authenticity which in other Italian cities had been swept away by the changes brought about by the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. ‘La Napoli di de Curtis’, Perrone remarks, ‘è […] la Napoli della povera gente, priva di cultura, ma custode dei beni morali autentici.’⁴⁸

The view of Naples as an oasis unaltered by progress was expressed by Pasolini — who worked with De Curtis in the films Uccellini e uccellacci (1966) and Le streghe (1967), and whose poetry De Curtis read⁴⁹ — in a sort of pedagogical treatise (‘trattatello’) he addressed to a fictional Neapolitan boy named Gennariello. Pasolini believed that ‘i napoletani in questi anni — e, per la precisione, in questo decennio — non sono molto cambiati. Sono rimasti gli stessi napoletani di tutta la storia.’⁵⁰ He was fascinated by Naples, which he regarded as ‘l’ultima metropoli plebea, l’ultimo grande villaggio’:⁵¹ a city that managed to protect itself against the levelling, neocapitalistic and neoliberal forces that were standardizing Italian society from the 1950s. At the same time, Pasolini was captivated by De Curtis — whom he considered to be ‘inconcepibile al di fuori di Napoli’⁵² — because he saw in him the personification of the city’s innocence and incorruptibility. It was precisely by means of this innocence that, according to Pasolini, De Curtis could become poetic: ‘Egli è un “innocente”; ed è come “innocente” che può divenire poetico’.⁵³ If in Pasolini’s view the city’s innocence was embodied by De Curtis, the Neapolitan dialect was the channel of expression of such innocence.⁵⁴ As pointed out by Perrone, this also applied to De Curtis’s poems: the Neapolitan dialect, Perrone writes, is the ‘strumento espressivo’ of the innocence belonging to the characters De Curtis portrayed in his verses.⁵⁵

The great literary and linguistic fortunes of Neapolitan dialect date back to the Carta di Capua (960), one of the earliest written documents employing an Italian vernacular, presenting ‘early Neapolitan traces’.⁵⁶ According to Haller, within the southern Italian regions, ‘the dialect literature of Campania — and more precisely that of Naples — is by far the most unitary through time and also the richest in texts, encompassing all genres of dialect literature’. ‘It is also’, Haller continues, ‘one of the earliest traditions with a conscious use of the literary dialect, considering that Boccaccio undertook such an experiment in his Epistola to Franceschino De’ Bardi (1339).’⁵⁷ Haller’s considerations on the exceptionality of the Neapolitan dialect’s literary fortunes in the South can be extended to the whole of Italy. In his study Salvatore Di Giacomo and Neapolitan Dialectal Literature, published in 1951, Ferdinando Maurino writes, ‘Neapolitan dialectal literature has already established itself as perhaps the best in Italy.’⁵⁸ It is no coincidence that when Pasolini finds himself assembling his critical anthology on the Novecento’s dialectal poetry, he decides to start with Naples, and focuses on Naples more than anywhere else.⁵⁹ The Neapolitan vernacular is not simply a dialect but (historically speaking) a literary and, more specifically, poetic language, whose ‘joyful resonance and musicality’⁶⁰ and ‘nativa propensione […] all’immaginoso’⁶¹ have been employed for centuries to produce not only lyrical but also musical compositions. De Curtis himself stressed the poetic essence inherent in the Neapolitan dialect and, more generally, belonging to the city of Naples and its people,⁶² declaring, on different occasions: ‘Sono orgoglioso e mi vanto di essere napoletano. È una bella città. Il popolo napoletano ha cuore, ha sentimento e poesia’;⁶³ ‘non sono uno scrittore, sono, sono napoletano. […] tutti i napoletani la poesia ce l’hanno un po’ dentro. […] sono poeti’.⁶⁴

De Curtis and the Neapolitan Lyrical Tradition

Although De Curtis insists on the originality of his poetry (‘Viviani? Veramente io non mi riallaccio a nessuno, la mia poesia è autonoma’),⁶⁵ his verses draw on the Neapolitan late nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetical tradition, and its most significant exponents.

In chronological order, De Curtis’s poems appear to be influenced by the work of Salvatore Di Giacomo and Ferdinando Russo, who provided a model for the subsequent generations of Neapolitan poets. According to Pasolini, Di Giacomo and Russo embodied two distinct and opposing poetical schools: ‘la linea veristica del Russo’, founded on a strong narrative tendency, and ‘quella romantico-decadente del Di Giacomo’, much more lyrical.⁶⁶ Like Raffaele Viviani,⁶⁷ De Curtis seems to reconcile the two schools, taking up on the one hand Di Giacomo’s melancholic sentimentality, musicality,⁶⁸ and recurring theme of love and, on the other, Russo’s capacity to portray lively and varied frescos of the Neapolitan modus vivendi.⁶⁹

Alongside these two traditions, De Curtis’s poetry can also be linked to the poetical experience of his contemporary Eduardo de Filippo in that they resort to similar themes addressed through a similar theatrical style,⁷⁰ and share the same desire for and need of an audience for their poems. As noted by Brevini, in his wish to establish a relation with the audience, De Filippo’s anthology of poems, which the poet himself edited,

non esita a sostituire all’ordinamento cronologico, un ordinamento più accattivante di tipo tematico: le diverse sezioni si intitolano Penzere pieje  … , ‘A vita, ‘A ggente, ‘O paese ‘e Pulicenella, ecc., alternando la scena popolare alla canzonetta amorosa, la descrizione di paesaggio alla meditazione sulle ragioni dell’umano.⁷¹

De Curtis’s poems present this same thematic alternation, and the recently edited collection of his poetical work is divided into similar thematic sections. As in de Filippo’s case, moreover, testifying to the importance attributed to the audience, De Curtis regarded the performative aspect of his poetry as an essential component of his poetic activity.⁷² Although his verses stem from an intimate need,⁷³ they require both a public (in settings such as interviews and TV programmes) and a private performance. As his daughter, Liliana De Curtis, recalls, after composing his poems, the Neapolitan artist used to recite them and ask for other people’s opinions on them, especially for those of his driver, Carlo Cafiero: ‘Ogni volta che scriveva una poesia, infatti’, recalls Liliana De Curtis, ‘papà gliela recitava per sentire il suo parere. […]. Quando otteneva la sua approvazione, si sentiva tranquillo.’⁷⁴ De Curtis not only sought an audience, but also relied on its approval.

To sum up the extent to which De Curtis’s poems were influenced by the Neapolitan lyrical tradition, one could turn to Adriano Tilgher’s summary of the principal features of dialectal Neapolitan poetry, coinciding with the ‘tendenze fontamentali dell’anima napoletana’:

il corpulento realismo e l’alata fantasticheria, l’accorata malinconia e la gaia spensieratezza, il profondo pessimismo e l’appassionata sentimentalità, la sapiente sentenziosità e la bruciante sensualità, l’ironico scetticismo e la soave ingenuità, l’insaziato amore della Vita e l’onnipresente pensiero della Morte.⁷⁵

De Curtis’s canzoniere

The most recent edition of De Curtis’s poems, by Elena Anticoli De Curtis and Viginia Falconetti, presents the reader with a division in thematic sections — ‘Napoli’, ‘Le donne’, ‘L’Amore’, ‘Gli animali’, ‘Uomini e caporali’ — which is immediately traceable to some of the major canzonieri of the Novecento, from Umberto Saba’s to Virgilio Giotti’s, Biagio Marin’s, and Giorgio Caproni’s.⁷⁶ The 82 poems included in De Curtis’s canzoniere address a variety of themes that originate from a constant observation of the world within and around him,⁷⁷ each composition tackling a different aspect of the human condition, coinciding with the condition of the Neapolitan people. With the exception of six compositions, all the poems are written in the Neapolitan dialect, reflecting, both phonetically and morphosyntactically, ‘l’essenza schiettamente parlata del dialetto nei suoi fenomeni più caratterizzanti’.⁷⁸ De Curtis’s metrically and prosodically controlled poetry⁷⁹ shows a strong preference for the hendecasyllabic line and the quatrain, and privileges alternate rhymes (ABAB).⁸⁰ At the level of content, his work appears to be in dialogue not only with the poeti neodialettali and late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Neapolitan lyrical production, but also with the overall Italian literary tradition, resonating with the work of diverse literary movements and authors, from the poets of the Dolce Stil Novo to Leopardi.

The first section, ‘Napoli’, is devoted to the celebration of his beloved hometown and its various and characteristic inhabitants, such as the ‘acquaiola’ (the woman water vendor) or the ‘schiattamuorto’ (the gravedigger), and comprises 12 poems. In ‘Napule, tu e io’, the city is referred to as ‘’a riggina’ (the queen).⁸¹ Following the Neapolitan composers who came before him, including Libero Bovio and Di Giacomo,⁸² De Curtis conveys the strong and visceral bond that binds the city and its people, to the extent that ‘chi è nato a Napule nce vo’ murì’ (those who are born in Naples wish to die there).⁸³ Through this last line, he also points to the distinctive link existing between his city and the experience of death, which (as I will point out) substantially informs his poetic engagement with the theme of death.

The second section, ‘Le donne’, comprises 25 poems and is dedicated both to the real female figures who have surrounded De Curtis’s life — his mother, Anna Clemente; his grandmother, Nonna Teresa; his lovers, Liliana Castagnola, Diana Bandini, and Franca Faldini; and his daughter, Liliana De Curtis — and to women as an abstract ideal.⁸⁴ In the majority of these poems De Curtis resorts to a Stilnovistic celebration of the female figure,⁸⁵ treating women as beings who transcend humanity, acquiring angelic and Marian features or coming to personify Love. In ‘Essa’ the woman is ‘’n’angelo’, in ‘Statuina a Francesca’ she is referred to as ‘Madonna’, in ‘’O saccio sultant’io’ she is ‘’n’Angelo terrestre’ with the face of a ‘Madunnella’, in ‘’A nnammurata mia’ she embodies love and is called ‘Ammore’.⁸⁶

In the following section, ‘L’Amore’, De Curtis proposes a series of love poems which, like those dedicated to Naples, can be placed, as remarked by Esposito, ‘nel solco della tradizione più scontata eppur più solida della poesia napoletana otto-novecentesca […] che può far capo, in qualche modo, a certo Di Giacomo’.⁸⁷ Together with this lyrical heritage, he once again resorts to the features of Stilnovistic poetry, addressing love as a ‘signore | travestuto ‘e gentilezze e poesia’, which can take on a variety of forms (‘L’ammore chi è’) and manifest in different ways, now appearing as a reinvigorating ‘jurnata e’ sole’ (‘All’intrasatta’),⁸⁸ now as an illness leaving one with nothing but bitterness in one’s heart (‘Ll’amore’, ‘L’ammore chi è’). In the nine poems making up this section, De Curtis insists on the suddenness with which love abruptly (‘all’intrasatta’) penetrates the lover’s heart.

The fourth section, ‘Gli animali’, a testimony to De Curtis’s unconditional and generous love for animals,⁸⁹ consists of only three poems. The section mirrors the recurrence in Italian twentieth-century literary production of the animal theme, which, as pointed out by Biagini and Nozzoli, permeates the Italian Novecento.⁹⁰

In ‘Uomini e caporali’, the last and largest section of the collection, featuring 23 poems, De Curtis sets out his philosophical and moral, rather Leopardian, worldview,⁹¹ addressing a variety of themes such as the transience of life, the levelling power of death, human hope, life’s misfortunes (wars, calamities, diseases), and the systemic inequality of the social system from which the section derives its name. According to De Curtis, the world is divided into two categories: men and corporals. The former are forced to work like beasts their entire life and doomed to lead a wretched existence, while the latter exploit the former like bullies, and abuse their position of authority.⁹² In the poems of this section, De Curtis articulates his concern for the poor, the wretched, and the excluded.

While De Curtis’s canzoniere dialogues with many different elements of Italian and Italian dialectal literary tradition, I believe that his handling of the theme of death distinguishes him in particular, allowing his poetry to find a distinctive place in the overall canon of Italian twentieth-century poetry.

The Theme of Death

The theme of death occupies a prominent place in De Curtis’s collection of poems.⁹³ The prominence De Curtis gave to this topic aligns him with the wider Neapolitan poetic tradition. As Consiglio notes, the latter is pervaded by the ‘coscienza cocente della morte’,⁹⁴ addressed with melancholic wisdom.⁹⁵ In De Curtis’s poems such melancholic wisdom meets a visionary, highly theatrical, and fable-like style, presenting the reader not only with human beings (‘’A livella’, ‘’O schiattamuorto’), but also animals (‘Bianchina’, ‘Sarchiapone e Ludovico’), and even tanks and cars (‘Il cimitero della civiltà’) as the characters of a humorous, puppet-like mise en scène. De Curtis stages such mises en scène through the use of irony, to which he frequently resorts as a strategy to smoothly disclose, and exorcise, the ineluctability and the necessary acceptance of death. The latter themes define De Curtis’s discourse on death, which is inspired by both the Neapolitan popular culture of death, to which he was exposed from an early age, and the many losses he suffered during his life. It is precisely this combination of cultural and personal heritage that allows De Curtis to address the theme of death so powerfully.

Born in an inner area of Naples, the Rione Sanità, where everything reminds people of the presence of death, De Curtis was immediately introduced to the Neapolitan popular world of death and caught by its distinctive rituals, cults, and beliefs. Paliotti highlights this fascination by recalling that during his childhood, not only did De Curtis entertain himself by pretending to be a priest and delivering extreme unction but, after his mother had forbidden him to waste any more time in such practices, he was ‘preso dalla manìa di organizzare funeralini agli animali’.⁹⁶ De Curtis could rekindle this fascination by visiting two of the most notable realms of death in Naples, which happened to be close to where he lived: the Cimitero delle Fontanelle, with its famous ‘capuzzelle’ (small heads/skulls), and the perhaps less famous but equally suggestive Catacombe di San Gaudioso, featuring fresco paintings dedicated to death, including one portraying all-conquering death which probably inspired his renowned poem ‘’A livella’. While the Neapolitan populace’s rituals of death caught De Curtis’s attention for their visionary, imaginative qualities, they also played a pivotal role in shaping his philosophical approach to death.

Italo Pardo has explored and analysed the social and cognitive dynamics underlying the distinctive relationship between the Neapolitan popolino, the lower strata of society living in the inner city, and death. Pardo points to the way the popolino has ‘included the dead in coping with daily problems of existence and understanding its obscurities’, resorting to a series of rules and operations resulting in ‘corollaries’ that define ‘the local idea of death as a transition’ and ‘belong to a frame of beliefs which allows cognitive control over the arbitrariness of death’.⁹⁷ Such control is achieved through a ‘lungo periodo rituale di “elaborazione” del lutto’, allowing for ‘una diluizione dell’evento numinoso nel tempo e quindi una sua risoluzione’.⁹⁸ The two main corollaries of these rituals are ‘the necessity of a “good death” and the practice of the double burial’,⁹⁹ which relate, respectively, to the need for acceptance of death and the need to certify the ‘good death’ by making sure that the departed has indeed left the living world. The first corollary, which especially resonates with De Curtis’s way of addressing the theme of death, prescribes that ‘the dying person […] does not refuse to acknowledge the coming death’, the ‘refusal to accept one’s own death […] jeopardiz[ing] or prevent[ing] the passage [to the other world]’ and ‘producing a spirit lying in between the two domains and hovering forever over that house [that of the departed]’.¹⁰⁰ Such spirits, ‘unsettled forever, in a grotesque condition of stable precariousness’,¹⁰¹ hinder the living on a daily basis, preventing them from carrying out normal tasks of life.¹⁰² The only way to ensure that neither the dead nor the living are disrupted in their mundane and supramundane lives is to accept death. Far from the conventions of the ‘società moderna e individualizzata’ — where ‘non vi è posto per una concezione della morte come fatto naturale e definitivo’ but there exists only the constant attempt to ‘control’ it and its ‘dirompenza sociale’ by ‘una tecnologia che permetta di rinviarla e di ritardarla’¹⁰³ — and resorting to its own ritual practices and strategies, the popolino accepts death and thus manages to understand and cope with it, further substantiating the ‘singolare contrasto tra la cultura tradizionale dei suoi abitanti e i contenuti culturali del processo di modernizzazione che riguarda il resto della città’.¹⁰⁴ In his poems, De Curtis’s acceptance of death is informed by the popolino’s singular way of handling death, through a set of ritual operations, which at the same time facilitates its understanding and exorcism and defends the distinctive Neapolitan popular culture against the processes of modernization and industrialization.

As I have already mentioned, De Curtis’s idea of death was shaped not only by the cultural world that produced him but also by a series of events that marked his life. When he reached adulthood, death revealed its tragic nature by taking his loved ones away from him: first his lover Liliana Castagnola, who committed suicide in 1930, allegedly because of her passionate and obsessive love for De Curtis; then his parents, his father, Giuseppe, in 1944 and his mother, Anna, in 1947; finally, his first and only son, Massenzio, born one month early, died a few hours after his birth. These events fostered De Curtis’s dramatic awareness of the ineluctability of death, an awareness he revived and indulged in daily, counting among his pastimes ‘la lettura della cronaca nera dei quotidiani’,¹⁰⁵ which led him to accept death as one accepts bad weather and other misfortunes, since nothing can be done to control it or avoid it. A selection of quotes confirms the relevance of this point:

Il maltempo, le infermità, la morte sono realtà che è vano contestare.¹⁰⁶

Sopporto le disgrazie facendomi guidare dal raziocinio. È certo, dico a me stesso, che esse fanno parte della condizione umana. E allora arrabbiarsi non serve. Sarebbe come inveire perché piove o c’è il sole o perché si muore. La morte esiste, come la pioggia, e quindi bisogna accettarla.¹⁰⁷

[…] la morte è un fatto inevitabile e averne paura è da fessi.¹⁰⁸

Both his exposure to Neapolitan popular culture — which, in contrast with the modern industrialized world, prescribed embracing death rather than fleeing from it — and his painful life experiences, the proof of the tragic inevitability of death, brought De Curtis to develop a rather ataraxic reflection on death, based on the lucid acceptance of it. To illustrate this and give instances of De Curtis’s way of dealing with the theme of death, I will provide a close reading of ‘’O schiattamuorto’, ‘Bianchina’, and ‘Riflessione’. ¹⁰⁹

Gravediggers, Predators and Prey, and the Transience of Human Life

Dedicated to one of the main protagonists of the Neapolitan popular world of death, the poem ‘’O schiattamuorto’ presents the reader with the figure of the schiattamuorto (gravedigger).¹¹⁰ The latter talks in the first person as the bearer of De Curtis’s reflections on death, pointing to the integration of the system of thoughts and beliefs underlying Neapolitan popular culture around death and De Curtis’s own views.

In the first stanza, the schiattamuorto introduces himself as a skilled specialist (‘’nu specialista ‘e qualità’, v. 5) in his field of work, known as such by all the houses in the ‘rione’ (v. 3), a term designating an Italian territorial subdivision corresponding to the word ‘neighbourhood’, which in the Neapolitan urban context also specifically indicates the neighbourhoods of inner-city Naples Pardo refers to. In accordance with the rituals of care characterizing the popolino’s way of handling death, the schiattamuorto reveals the extreme care he takes when handling corpses. He treats them with courtesy and politeness (‘I’ tengo mode, garbo e gentilezza’, v. 6), using gentle manners and going so far as coddling them as a father does when he puts his baby to sleep (‘Io ‘o tratto come fosse ‘nu criaturo | che dice a ‘o pate: “Me voglio ji’ a cuccà”’, vv. 9–10). After proposing the soothing notion of death as a peaceful and eternal slumber (‘’nu suonno doce pe’ ll’eternità’, v. 15), De Curtis, in the person of the schiattamuorto, addresses the ineluctability of death and thus, indirectly, one of the main corollaries of the Neapolitan popolino’s culture of death — prescribing the acceptance of death. Personified as a female figure (‘chella’), death never acts in vain and never leaves empty-handed (‘Chella nun fa ‘o viaggio inutilmente. | Chella nun se ne va maie avvacante’, vv. 21–22). Like a police officer making an arrest, she carries out her job and (De Curtis here widening his discourse on death by adding a social angle to it) does so regardless of the dead person’s social status (‘Si’ povero, si’ ricco, si’ putente, | in faccia a sti ccose chella fa ‘a gnurante’, vv. 23–24). The theme, dear to De Curtis, of the levelling power of death returns in the sixth stanza, where the rich people who request a grand funeral in their wills to distinguish themselves from the masses are reminded by the schiattamuorto that their money is worthless in the realm of the dead (‘Ma l’o ssape, o no, ca ‘e llire ‘e llasse ccà?!’, v. 45).¹¹¹ Death makes no distinction between rich and poor. More generally, it is pointless to cry for help: feigning ignorance, death turns a deaf ear to pleas (‘’A chesta recchia, dice, io nun ce sento; | e si nun sente, tu ch’allucche a ffa’?’, vv. 29–30). De Curtis’s suggestion is that one can do nothing but accept the fatality of death.

Reiterating its alignment with Neapolitan culture around death, the poem then refers to the many means which death, now referred to as a lady (‘’sta signora’, v. 47), employs in order to kill, pointing out that ‘la morte ambulante’ (v. 48) (‘the ambulant death’) is the saddest one, as it can strike at any moment. While the sadness that De Curtis/the schiattamuorto associates with the ‘morte ambulante’ lies in the suddenness with which it occurs, I suggest it is also related to the fact that the ‘morte ambulante’ in Neapolitan popular culture is considered to be among the ‘bad deaths (premature, violent)’¹¹² which, as noted earlier, produce liminal spirits that haunt the houses of the dead and the life of the living, and thus need to be avoided at all cost. Finally, De Curtis/the gravedigger conveys his opinion of death as nothing more than a ‘pazziella’ (v. 51),¹¹³ a transition from sound to silence. The meaning of death is melancholically disclosed in the last three verses of the poem, in which De Curtis resorts to a theatrical metaphor reminiscent of Shakespeare’s renowned lines in Macbeth:¹¹⁴ ‘E quanno s’è stutata ‘a lampetella | Significa ca ll’opera è fernuta | E ‘o primm’attore s’è ghiuto a cuccà’ (vv. 53–55). Once the lights are turned off, the show is over and the lead actor goes to sleep.

In ‘Bianchina’, death is seen through the eyes of the animal world — more precisely, those of a cat and a mouse.¹¹⁵ The lyrical ‘I’, a projection of De Curtis, tells of being taken by surprise in his home, located in ‘vico Paraviso’ (v. 1),¹¹⁶ by the noise of a stampede, a sort of chase (‘’nu fuja-fuja  …  ‘na specie ‘e secutata  … ’, v. 9). He eventually catches his cat, Bianchina, standing in the dark in front of a hole where a frightened little mouse (‘un suricillo | cu ll’uocchie ‘a fore  …  tutto spaventato’, vv. 22–23) is hiding from her. Aware of his imminent death, the poor ‘suricillo’ addresses Bianchina ‘in italiano puro’ (v. 27), begging her to desist from scaring him. The cat — who also speaks but, unlike the Italian-speaking little mouse, uses the Neapolitan dialect — replies that she has no intention of moving from her position (‘I’ nun mme movo ‘a ccà!’, v. 30), foretelling the mouse’s imminent death and saying he is a fool if he thinks he can escape (‘È inutile che staje dint’ ‘o pertuso, | […] Si cride ‘e te scanzà, povero illuso!’, vv. 45–47). Pitying the ‘[p]overo suricillo’ (v. 53) with no hope of being saved, the ‘padrone’ (v. 43) repeatedly asks Bianchina to let him go, pointing out to her that what she is doing is not right, since she is going after an inferior being (‘te miette ‘ncuollo a chi à cchiù piccerillo’, v. 58). Responding to her master’s reproach and following her own version of Darwinian logic, Bianchina claims that this has forever been the way of the world: the big fish eating the little fish (‘’O munno è ghiuto sempe ‘e sta manera: | ‘o pesce gruosso magna ‘o piccerillo’, vv. 60-61). She laughs in his face (‘’A gatta se facette na resata’, v. 75) and categorically reaffirms that it is her duty to kill the mouse in the house (‘[ … ] “Chisto è ‘o duvere mio  …  chesto aggia fa”!’, v. 79). Proposing an alternative version of the cat-and-mouse game, which is normally played out as a continual succession of pursuits and escapes but in this case ends with the definite capture of the mouse by the cat, the lyrical ‘I’ comes to appreciate and accept the truth revealed by the Neapolitan-speaking cat: the powerlessness of all living creatures in the face of death and the need to embrace one’s deathly nature.

What is at stake in this sort of Aesopian fable¹¹⁷ is, again, the inescapable truth of death. The Darwinian struggle for existence, which sees the ‘superior’ beings outliving and overcoming the ‘inferior’ ones (in this case, the cat and the mouse, respectively), discloses an even more troubling truth: the mortal destiny of all living creatures. I suggest that Bianchina can be read as an embodiment of death itself. Like death, Bianchina lurks in the dark until the moment arrives and she can perform her duty in a resolute and merciless way, utterly deaf to pleas, just like Death in ‘’O schiattamuorto’. It is her duty to kill: ‘[ … ] “Chisto è ‘o duvere mio  …  chesto aggia fa’!”’ (v. 79).¹¹⁸ If the mouse believes he can escape his fate, he is a fool like the rich nobleman in ‘’O schiattamuorto’, who deems his money to be worth something in the realm of the dead.

It is no coincidence that the false and distorted perspective around death embodied by the mouse and the nobleman is rendered in these two poems by standard Italian,¹¹⁹ while the Neapolitan dialect is associated with Bianchina and the gravedigger’s truthful (albeit bitter) view of the world. De Curtis suggests here that the Neapolitan popular way of approaching death is the right one because, unlike the Italian way, it has accepted death’s inescapability and levelling power, and does not attempt to find subterfuges to avoid it. Resorting to Pardo’s above-mentioned discussion on death in inner Naples, this opposition echoes the wider friction between the Neapolitan acceptance of death, inscribed in traditional ritual and beliefs untouched by progress and modernization, and the Italian, modernized, industrialized way of refusing death by delaying it at all costs.

Such friction can also be related to a more general, Leopardian philosophy of acceptance of the inescapable nature of death and of life’s struggle, with Bianchina embodying not only death but, more broadly, the natural course of events, in a way that is reminiscent of Leopardi’s Natura in the ‘Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese’ (1824).¹²⁰ Leopardi too resorts to examples from the animal kingdom to illustrate the dynamics of death/Nature, presenting the attempts of human beings (and, broadly, all living creatures) to escape death in the same way as an animal ‘fuga’: ‘Così fugge lo scoiattolo dal serpente a sonaglio, finché gli cade in gola da se medesimo. Io’, Nature tells the Islandese, ‘sono quella che tu fuggi’.¹²¹ Moreover, when Bianchina points out to her unaware and deluded master that the way of the world is the big fish eating the little fish and laughs at his plea to spare the mouse, the cat’s firm argument and ironic laugh resemble Nature’s response to the equally unaware and deluded Islandese, who believes that the world was made for him and those like him, that life is an unescapable and inevitable ‘perpetuo circuito di produzione e distruzione’.¹²²

The inescapability and inevitability of death returns in the poem ‘Riflessione’, one of De Curtis’s shortest compositions, consisting of a single quartet.¹²³ Compared to his other poems, the reader is presented here with a more melancholic, less ironic and theatrical, reflection on death. Here, De Curtis’s firm acceptance of death is matched by a questioning of the overall meaning of human life on earth, concealing a protest, albeit light, against the living condition. Echoing the existential questions raised by the pastore errante in Leopardi’s ‘Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia’, De Curtis asks: ‘’A verità vurria sapè che simme | ‘ncopp’ a ‘sta terra e che rappresentamme’ (vv. 1–2).¹²⁴ The answer to the poet’s interrogation/protest is that we are foreign and ephemeral beings, the earth does not belong to us, and when our time is up, we must go (‘gente e passaggio, furastiere simme; | quanno s’è fatta ll’ora che ne jammo!’, vv. 3–4). Keeping his distance from an anthropocentric vision of the world and returning to the final verses of ‘’O schiattamuorto’, De Curtis reminds his readers of the smallness and transience of human life.

Conclusion

De Curtis’s prolific production and success in the cinematographic and theatrical world have played a major role in overshadowing his poetic work, the poet outshone by the comical mask. A valuable witness to the crucial years of the Italian economic boom, marked by momentous historical, cultural, and social transformations, and to Neapolitan culture and its distinctive way of approaching life (and death), De Curtis’s lyrical work deserves a scholarly attention which has up to now been lacking. With the aim of redressing this lack, this article has attempted to provide an overview of the poetry of this multifaceted artist, by placing him within the broader canon of Italian and Italian dialectal poetry and concentrating on his distinctive treatment of the theme of death.

De Curtis’s poetic activity can be situated between the Neapolitan poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the poeti neodialettali of the 1970s. On the one hand, his poems are informed both by the poetry of his illustrious Neapolitan predecessors, from Di Giacomo to De Filippo, and by Neapolitan popular culture as a whole, favouring a spontaneity, simplicity, and musicality in expression and animated by the will to engage with themes such as love, Neapolitan miseria, and death, leading him to evoke the ‘figura grondante di nostalgia del napoletano assoluto, vivente nel cuore di Toledo o Forcella’.¹²⁵ On the other hand, his verses stem from the state of alienation brought about by the advent of mass culture and neocapitalism, and from the attempt by the poeti neodialettali of the 1970s to resist such a culture, which threatened to dissolve cultural identities and traditions. De Curtis’s poetry enriches the canon of Italian twentieth-century dialectal poetry through the distinctive combination of these two literary and cultural threads, as well as through his handling of the theme of death — a characteristic mark of his poetry, relying on his Neapolitan cultural heritage.

Acknowledgements

I thank Danielle Hipkins and, especially, Gigliola Sulis for their thorough and valuable assistance in the editing of this article, as well as Emanuela Tandello for having reviewed its first drafts.

Notes

1 Franco Brevini, ‘Introduzione’, in Le parole perdute (Turin: Einaudi, 1990), pp. 3–9 (p. 3).

2 The lack of comprehensive scholarly attention devoted to Italian twentieth-century dialectal poetry has been exposed by Gigliola Sulis, who has analysed some of the major critical anthologies of the Novecento in order to assess the modalities underlying the definition of the Italian twentieth-century dialectal poetic canon. Gigliola Sulis, ‘Ridefinire il canone: i dialettali e le antologie poetiche del Novecento’, The Italianist, 24 (2004), 77–106.

3 Though presenting himself as a ‘poetastro’ and a ‘dilettante’, De Curtis declares his attachment to his poetic activity: ‘Tengo, in pari misura, alla mia attività di compositore di canzoni e a quella di poeta “inedito”’. Antonio De Curtis, Totò si nasce (Milan: Mondadori, 2000), pp. 235–36. He also expresses the urge to talk about his activity as a composer: ‘adesso, se non vi dispiace, vogliamo parlare di Totò compositore?’. Antonio De Curtis, ‘Il complesso dei fratelli siamesi’, in Franca Faldini and Goffredo Fofi, Totò, l’uomo e la maschera (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977), pp. 146–52 (p. 150).

4 De Curtis recalls winning the prize for the poem ‘’A livella’ in Totò si nasce, but does not specify what prize it is. De Curtis, Totò si nasce, p. 237. The growing awareness of De Curtis as a poet within the wider Italian public is the result of the direct efforts to promote a comprehensive image of him made by De Curtis’s descendants and, more specifically, by RAI journalist Vincenzo Mollica, who was the first to consider De Curtis’s activity as a composer as one of the many aspects of his multifaceted artistic output. Vincenzo Mollica, Totò: parole e musica (Rome: Lato Side, 1983).

5 See Carlachiara Perrone, ‘Totò e il linguaggio della poesia’, in Lingua e dialetto nella tradizione letteraria italiana: Atti del Convegno di Salerno 5–6 novembre 1993, ed. by Centro Pio Rajna (Rome: Salerno, 1996), pp. 553–73; Vittoriano Esposito, ‘La poesia di Totò tra gioco e ironia’, in La lingua e il sogno: scrittori in dialetto nell’Italia del primo Novecento, ed. by Vito Moretti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992), pp. 335–48; Michele Sovente, ‘Tradizione e modernità nella poesia di Antonio De Curtis’, in Totò: parole di attore e di poeta, ed. by Patricia Bianchi and Nicola de Blasi (Naples: Libreria Dante & Descartes, 2007), pp. 115–23; Vincenzo Dolla, ‘Connotazioni metriche della poesia di De Curtis’, in Bianchi and de Blasi, pp. 123–34; Pietro Maturi, ‘Code-switching in “’A livella”, in Bianchi and de Blasi, pp. 135–44; Paola Cantoni, ‘L’altro Totò: il dialetto e la “necessità” di scrivere versi’, in Bianchi and de Blasi, pp. 145–76.

6 Annamaria Hernandez, Rivalutazione storica e culturale di Napoli attraverso canzoni e poesie in dialetto napoletano (unpublished doctoral thesis, Stony Brook University, August 2004).

7 Cantoni (p. 170, n. 9) points out ‘le numerose esclusioni dell’autore dalle antologie di poesia dialettale e persino da alcune antologie della letteratura o poesia dialettale napoletana’.

8 In the bibliographical compendium, Haller confuses Antonio De Curtis with another Neapolitan poet, G. B. De Curtis, and includes among the former’s works S’è scetate Surriento: versi (Naples: Gennaro Maria Priore, 1899), which Antonio De Curtis could not have possibly written, being only one year old in 1899. Herman W. Haller, The Other Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 265.

9 Franco Brevini, ‘Giocosi, satirici, “engagés”’, in La poesia in dialetto, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), iii, pp. 3687–88 (pp. 3707–10). In Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy, ed. by Luigi Bonaffini (New York: Legas, 1997), ‘Totò’ is mentioned en passant by Dante Maffia, but only as a song composer (p. 237).

10 Stephen Gundle, ‘Totò’, in The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature, ed. by Peter Hainsworth and David Robey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 591–92.

11 Antonio De Curtis, Il principe poeta: tutte le poesie e le liriche di Totò, ed. by Elena Anticoli De Curtis and Virginia Falconetti (Naples: Colonnese, 2018).

12 Luciano De Crescenzo, ‘Introduzione’, in Antonio De Curtis, ’A Livella: poesie napoletane [1992] (Rome: Gremese, 2000), pp. 5–7 (p. 6).

13 Ibid.

14 He even compares this sort of split personality to that of a Pirandellian character. De Curtis, Totò si nasce, p. 20.

15 Totò, Siamo uomini o caporali? Diario semiserio di Antonio De Curtis, ed. by Matilde Amorosi and Alessandro Ferraù (Rome: Newton Compton, 1993), p. 118.

16 Luisa Tammaro, Io sono Totò (Milan: Universal Edizioni, 1997), p. 82.

17 Faldini and Fofi, p. 55.

18 De Curtis, Totò si nasce, p. 236.

19 Ibid., pp. 24, 53, 263.

20 Gianpaolo Infusino, Totò: la maschera di un principe (Naples: Lito-Rama,1998), p. 99.

21 Faldini and Fofi, p. 134.

22 Tammaro, p. 102.

23 Totò, Siamo uomini o caporali?, p. 15.

24 Enzo Siciliano, ‘Poesie e canzoni del grande comico: quell’altro Totò che scriveva versi’, Corriere della Sera, 24 December 1991. In Cesare Zavattini’s words, De Curtis is a ‘scrittore traviato’. Cited by Tammaro, p. 115.

25 Sovente, p. 116. According to Di Meglio, for De Curtis, poetry is ‘il momento della verità’. Biagio Di Meglio, Totò Story (Ischia: Edizione Letteraria Accademia Giosuè Carducci, 1990), p. 68.

26 Vittorio Gassman, ‘Testimonianza’, in Totò, Dedicate all’amore: poesie napoletane (Naples: Colonnese, 1982), quoted by Di Meglio, p. 74.

27 Ibid.

28 Faldini and Fofi, p. 150.

29 Cantoni, p. 145.

30 Vittorio Paliotti, Totò: principe del sorriso (Naples: Fausto Fiorentino, 1972) p. 135.

31 Between 1948 and 1967, De Curtis acted in 91 movies.

32 De Curtis, ‘Il complesso dei fratelli siamesi’, p. 152.

33 Ibid., p. 134.

34 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 94–136 (p. 94).

35 Ibid., p. 97.

36 Anticoli De Curtis and Falconetti, ‘Il pensatoio’, in De Curtis, Il principe poeta, pp. 127–28 (p. 128).

37 De Curtis, ‘Nun so’ d’accordo’, ibid., pp. 152–53 (p. 152).

38 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Popular Music’, Studies in Philosophy of Social Science, 9 (1941), 17–48.

39 See De Curtis, Il principe poeta, pp. 129–30.

40 Ibid., pp. 152–53.

41 Franco Brevini, ‘Introduzione’, in Poeti dialettali del Novecento, ed. by Franco Brevini (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), pp. vii–xxii (p. viii).

42 Emanuela Tandello, ‘Language and Dialect in Franco Scataglini’, in Italian Dialects and Literature: From the Renaissance to the Present, ed. by Emanuela Tandello and Diego Zancani, Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, Supplement 1 (1996), 81–96 (p. 82).

43 On Italy’s unique ‘plurilingualism’ and ‘pervasive dual literary canon’, see Haller, p. 3.

44 Brevini, ‘Introduzione’, in Poeti dialettali del Novecento, pp. vii and ix. See also Pasolini’s notion of ‘regresso’, stressed as one of the main features of the dialectal poetry of Italian Novecento. Pierpaolo Pasolini, ‘Introduzione’, in Poesia dialettale del Novecento, ed. by Pierpaolo Pasolini and Mario Dell’Arco [1952] (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), pp. xxiii–cxxviii (p. xvii).

45 Examples of how Buttitta, Zanotto, and Baldini tackled such a theme are presented in Brevini, Le parole perdute, pp. 97 and 154.

46 Perrone, p. 562.

47 An ‘animale notturno’, De Curtis composed his verses at night-time, when, by his own account, ‘nell’oscurità non vedi tante cose e ognuno ha il fascino di un’ombra e la cadenza dei suoi rimuginamenti più veri’ (Faldini and Fofi, pp. 49–50).

48 Perrone, p. 564.

49 See the collection Poesie in forma di rosa, and in particular the poem ‘Supplica a una madre’, which he even knew by heart. Faldini and Fofi, pp. 77–78.

50 Pierpaolo Pasolini, ‘Gennariello’, in Lettere luterane, in Saggi sulla politica e sulla società (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), pp. 549–96 (p. 551).

51 Ibid., p. 553.

52 Faldini and Fofi, p. 232.

53 Pasolini, Uccellacci e uccellini (Milan: Garzanti, 1966), p. 55.

54 Pasolini, ‘Gennariello’, p. 563.

55 Perrone, p. 564.

56 Haller, p. 12.

57 Ibid., p. 244.

58 Ferdinando D. Maurino, Salvatore Di Giacomo and Neapolitan Dialectal Literature (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1951), p. 173. Maurino originally intended to focus exclusively on Di Giacomo and address Neapolitan dialectal literature as a ‘frame for a picture’. He soon found out, however, that ‘Neapolitan dialectal literature was vaster and more important than […] anticipated’, a discovery that resulted in replacing what was meant to be a ‘brief background’ with ‘a study of the evolution of Neapolitan literature’. Ferdinando D. Maurino, ‘Preface’, in Salvatore Di Giacomo and Neapolitan Dialectal Literature (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1951), pp. i–ii (p. i).

59 Giovanni Tesio, ‘Prefazione’, in Pasolini and Dell’Arco, pp. xiii–xix (p. xv).

60 Haller, p. 244.

61 Alberto Consiglio, ‘Introduzione’, in Antologia dei poeti napoletani, ed. by Alberto Consiglio (Milan: Mondadori, 1973), pp. 7–54 (p. 12).

62 Consiglio (ibid., p. 48) refers to the ‘senso poetico dei napoletani’, remarking how ‘non è fatto solamente d’amore; ma anche di profondi e complessi trasporti per il natio loco, di facile ed efficace eco del dolore, della miseria, della sofferenza della condizione umana’.

63 De Curtis, Totò si nasce, p. 31.

64 Taken from the confidential interview conducted by Luigi Silori for the programme Segnalibro (RAI) in 1965. ‘Totò intervistato da Luigi Silori’, Segnalibro, RAI, 1965. <https://www.raiplay.it/video/2017/03/Segnalibro-Toto-intervistato-da-Luigi-Silori-b3792d9a-f2a6-40b3-9449-479d9cf40d49.html> [consulted on 12 March 2022].

65 De Curtis, Totò si nasce, p. 235.

66 Pierpaolo Pasolini, ‘Pamphlet dialettale’, in Saggi giovanili, in Saggi sulla politica e sulla società (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), pp. 524–25. In Poesia dialettale del Novecento, Pasolini rephrased this opposition, distinguishing between the ‘realismo del Russo’ and the ‘lirismo del Di Giacomo’. Pasolini, ‘Introduzione’, p. xxv.

67 Pasolini, ‘Pamphlet dialettale’, pp. 524–25. De Curtis’s poetry distanced itself from that of Raffaele Viviani, since he never addressed strictly political issues. In general, he parts company with ‘the dialect poetry of the South […] produced through the 1960s’, which ‘tended to be political’ (Haller, p. 31).

68 In the preface to Il principe poeta, Mollica remarks on De Curtis’s ability to exalt the musicality of words. Vincenzo Mollica, ‘Prefazione’, in De Curtis, Il principe poeta, p. 5.

69 As Tammaro points out (p. 86), ‘nelle poesie si evidenzia l’aspetto fabulatorio dell’arte di Totò, la sua delicata capacità di raccontare piccole storie del nostro vivere quotidiano’.

70 See e.g. De Filippo’s poems ‘S’è araputa ’a fenesta’ and ‘Napule è ’nu paese curioso’, devoted, respectively, to the city of Naples and the theme of death.

71 Brevini, Le parole perdute, p. 272.

72 On this matter, Paliotti (p. 194) recounts that when his driver, Cafiero, gave De Curtis a 33 r.p.m disc containing two of his poems, the Neapolitan artist replied: ‘Lo regalo a te questo disco. A me non mi va di ascoltarlo. Manca la mimica, capisci, nei dischi, e se a me mi si toglie la mimica addio.’ Paliotti, p. 194.

73 Sovente (p. 118) talks about a ‘vena intimistica’ emerging from his dialectal poetry.

74 Liliana De Curtis, Totò, mio padre (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), quoted by Tammaro, p. 103.

75 Adriano Tilgher, La poesia dialettale napoletana, 1880–1930 (Rome: Libreria di Scienze e Lettere, 1930), pp. 104–05.

76 I thank Emanuela Tandello for having brought this to my attention.

77 Following what he himself called a ‘complesso dei fratelli siamesi’. De Curtis, ‘Il complesso dei fratelli siamesi’, p. 151.

78 Cantoni (pp. 152–53) also provides a lexical account of De Curtis’s use of the Neapolitan dialect, distinguishing between a more realistic Neapolitan lexical register, characterized by a ‘lessico della quotidianità e […] dialettismi bassi e comici’, and a more lyrical one, adhering to a literary use of the Neapolitan dialect going back to Di Giacomo.

79 Dolla (pp. 124 and 126) stresses the ‘assoluto rigore isosillabico’ and ‘assoluta regolarità versificatoria’ of his poetry.

80 Ibid., pp. 127–28.

81 De Curtis, Il principe poeta, p. 26.

82 In ‘Zuoccole, tammorre e femmene’, De Curtis (ibid., p. 31) refers to Bovio, Tagliaferri, Di Giacomo, and Valente as some of the many writers who ‘in prosa, vierze e musica’ have dedicated themselves to the ‘canzone appassiunate’ of Naples and have sung its beauty.

83 Ibid.

84 See ‘La donna’, ‘’A femmena’, ‘Esempio’. Ibid., pp. 42–44.

85 In De Curtis’s love poems, as Di Meglio has pointed out (p. 71), women are celebrated with a ‘particolare delicatezza da dugentesco “stil nuovo”’.

86 De Curtis, Il principe poeta, pp. 40, 46, 53, and 65. Sometimes, however, he gives in to a sexist and objectifying consideration of the female figure: in ‘Esempio’, she is compared to ‘’a mascatura’ (a keyhole), which needs ‘’o chiavino’ (the key) to function. Ibid., p. 44.

87 Esposito, p. 346.

88 De Curtis, Il principe poeta, p. 71.

89 In 1965, following a kennel fire in the outskirts of Rome, De Curtis helped to fund a new kennel for the stray dogs, thus giving a home to 250 animals, whom the artist frequently visited. Anticoli De Curtis and Falconetti, ‘Gli animali’, in De Curtis, Il principe poeta, pp. 83–84 (p. 83).

90 See Enza Biagini and Anna Nozzoli, Bestiari del Novecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001).

91 In particular, in his reading of ‘Sarchiapone e Ludovico’ and ‘’A speranza’ (pp. 341–42 and 344–45), Esposito brings De Curtis’s reflections on death and hope close to Leopardi’s meditations on such themes.

92 The mask Totò exposed this ‘men or corporals’ doctrine in the movie Siamo uomini o caporali?, dir. by Camillo Mastrocinque (Lux Film, 1955).

93 Perrone (p. 559) believes that ‘[n]ella raccolta decurtisiana la morte occupa un posto di primo piano’. Ghirelli argues that De Curtis’s poetry ‘attinge il massimo della tensione quando si confronta con la prospettiva della morte’. Antonio Ghirelli, ‘Introduzione’, in Antonio De Curtis, ’A Livella e poesie d’amore (Rome: Newton Compton, 1995), pp. 7–17 (p. 12).

94 Consiglio, p. 32.

95 See, in particular, Di Giacomo’s poetry.

96 Paliotti, p. 12.

97 Italo Pardo, ‘Life, Death and Ambiguity in the Social Dynamics of Inner Naples’, Man, 24.1 (1989), 103–23 (pp. 103, 105).

98 Italo Pardo, ‘L’esperienza popolare della morte: tradizione e modernizzazione in un quartiere di Napoli’, La Ricerca Folklorica, 7 (1983), 113–22 (p. 114).

99 Pardo, ‘Life, Death and Ambiguity’, p. 105.

100 Ibid., p. 107.

101 Ibid., p. 113.

102 ‘The randomness of death brings about randomness in life for the survivors’. Ibid., p. 114.

103 Pardo, ‘L’esperienza popolare della morte’, p. 117.

104 Paliotti, p. 113.

105 Ibid., pp. 156–57.

106 Faldini and Fofi, p. 83.

107 De Curtis, Totò si nasce, p. 258.

108 Ibid., p. 262.

109 I have not included the poem ‘’A livella’ as it has already been extensively analysed by Perrone.

110 De Curtis, Il principe poeta, pp. 21–22. The poem is made up of eight stanzas, six quintets broken up by a ten-line and a fifteen-line stanza. It consists of hendecasyllables except for the last verse of each strophe, a decasyllable. The stanzas follow the ABABC rhyme scheme, which is repeated twice and thrice in the longer ones; the final verses of each stanza correspond, always ending with the stress on the final ‘-à’.

111 On such a theme, see ‘’A livella’, in which, as Perrone aptly points out (p. 559), death is ‘la livella che annulla la dialettica della storia nell’atemporalità dell’eterno, riaffermando il valore dell’ànthropos in quanto tale’.

112 Pardo, ‘Life, Death and Ambiguity’, p. 103.

113 Untranslatable in English as well as in Italian, the Neapolitan word pazziella can perhaps be rendered as ‘whim’.

114 In Macbeth, Shakespeare wrote, ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, | And then is heard no more. ’ William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 969–93 (p. 992). De Curtis knew and loved Shakespeare; as his daughter Liliana recalls, ‘Totò ammirava molto Shakespeare, che chiamava confidenzialmente Guglielmo. Lo sentiva vicino alla sua vena artistica, in quanto lo considerava un degno esponente del teatro popolare, sulla scia della più pura tradizione partenopea.’ Liliana De Curtis, Totò a prescindere (Milan: Mondadori, 1992), p. 117.

115 De Curtis, Il principe poeta, pp. 90–92. For this poem, De Curtis partly reprises the metrical scheme of ‘’O schiattamuorto’: the former poem is made up of 17 quintets and consists of hendecasyllables except for the last verse of each stanza, which is a decasyllable. As in ‘’O schiattamuorto’, the strophes follow the ABABC rhyme scheme, with the final verses of each stanza always ending with the stress on the final ‘-à’.

116 The vico corresponds to one of the two real streets named ‘vico Paradiso’ situated in two of the most popular inner areas of Naples, the Quartieri Spagnoli and Materdei. The full name of the street in Materdei is ‘Vico Paradiso alla Salute’.

117 Antonio Napolitano, Totò, uno e centomila (Naples: Tempo Lungo, 2001), p. 98.

118 As rightly noted by Esposito (p. 440), in ‘Bianchina’ ‘v’è la legge del dovere, che contrasta con quella della pietà’.

119 In ‘Bianchina’, Cantoni (p. 151) points out ‘l’italiano è attribuito a chi crede di sfuggire una legge naturale cui tutti devono sottostare […]’.

120 Giacomo Leopardi, ‘Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese’, in Poesie e prose, ed. by Rolando Damiani and Mario Andrea Rigoni, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1987), ii, pp. 76–83.

121 Ibid., p. 76.

122 Ibid., p. 82.

123 De Curtis, Il principe poeta, p. 131. The quarter is made of hendecasyllables rhyming with the ABAB scheme.

124 The initial ‘’A verità’ indicates the urgency of an interrogation to which De Curtis yearns to know the answer (‘Vurria sapè’). It is noteworthy that in other poems De Curtis conveys this longing for a meaning he struggles to understand: ‘nun capisc […] | però vurria sapè’ (‘La società’, vv. 2–3), ‘Vurria sapè’ (‘’A cuscienza’, v. 1). Ibid., pp. 108 and 112.

125 Pasolini, ‘Pamphlet dialettale’, pp. 524–25. For Pasolini, this ‘figura’ coincides with the audience of Di Giacomo’s verses.