The volume reproduces the famous essay by Riccardo Bacchelli, one of the most prominent 20th-century Italian writers, in which he describes the salon of the celebrated \u2018humanist banker\u2019 Raffaele Mattioli: \u201cLe Notti di via Bigli\u201d was published privately in 1970 to mark the banker\u2019s 75th birthday and was unavailable to buy; as well as the main text, the book also features other writings on Raffaele Mattioli by the same author. Completing the edition are biographies and a photo gallery of the personalities described by Bachelli.<\/p>\n
The \u201cfriendly late-night gatherings\u201d at Mattioli\u2019s house in Via Bigli, Milan between the two wars were attended by leading figures of the day: intellectuals, politicians, writers, artists, bankers, philologists, professors and journalists. Describing the soir\u00e9es that took place between the publication of his \u201cIl Diavolo al Pontelungo\u201d in 1927 and the bombing of Milan in August 1943 is writer Riccardo Bacchelli.<\/p>\n
\u201cLe notti di Via Bigli\u201d is invaluable for the way it conjures up a crowd of unforgettable personalities: among them Antonello Gerbi, Giovanni Malagodi and Giorgio Di Veroli, engineer, bibliophile and devotee of the poetry of Torquato Tasso; Angelandrea Zottoli, government official and literary critic; Ugo La Malfa and Adolfo Tino, lawyer, \u201cactive and conspiring anti-Fascist\u201d, later head of Mediobanca; the historian Federico Chabod; Nino Levi, Piero Sraffa; architects Giuseppe de Finetti and Gigiotti Zanini; scholars Francesco Flora and Sergio Solmi.<\/p>\n
The anti-Fascism of the Via Bigli group, emphasised so extensively in literature, was not the ideological premise for the late-night meetings, but rather a consequence of the participants\u2019 profound, enlightened culture, one in which economics, literature, finance, painting and politics helped weave together an \u201cactive faith\u201d in the common good.<\/p>\n
A cultural and civic insight is what emerges from the texts in the book, honouring Italian culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":71858,"template":"","class_list":["post-186514","pubblication","type-pubblication","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","pubblication_category-other-publications"],"yoast_head":"\n