Camere separate by Pier Vittorio Tondelli

the responsibilities of an adulthood I wasn’t ready to face. By then I was just meeting the voice of my late teens, I was encountering the poet who sang my anguish and insecurity, I was finding the sound of my transition from a world I knew and the unknown. Pavia would have become the place of my heart and my most precious memories, but I didn’t know that yet.

It was on a Intercity train travelling from Sanremo, the tiny and boring city where I was born and Pavia, another tiny, cozy and foggy city in the north of Italy. Not even that, it wasn’t about the sight, it was about language, the words, the commas and the full stops. That day I was just a frightened little girl on a train, but I could feel it, marked into my bones, the foetus of a person, the person I wanted to release. I was nothing like that at the time again, the wild and true part of my identity was about to flourish. His first colletion was a chronicle of real life: drug addicts, dives, dirty toilets, train stations and people constantly living on the edge. I was 19 the first time I came through one of his works.Īltri Libertini, his first collection of short stories, published in the 70s, was a cult for generations of weird, lonely and brave travellers. Love, life, relationships were often excruciating for Tondelli, and his strong and immediately recognisable style returns to us all the rich and multifaceted spectrum of his perspective and emotions. He was also homosexual, and queer he embraced all the possible meanings of it, with pride, confusion, curiosity, desire, awkwardness, proximity and distance, sometimes joy, strenght and pain, unimaginable pain. He was honest, thorough, restless and deep. He was 36, he was a writer, a poet, a critic and essayist, an extraordinary human being. Paper/Workshop “Joining Linguistic Practice and Cultural Analysis through the Parallel Study of Literature and Film Texts”.25 years ago Pier Vittorio Tondelli died.Paper “An Analytic Approach to Culture through Interactive Web-Based Learning”, ACTFL Conference, November 2010.An analytic Approach to Culture through Interactive Web-Based learning”, LRC December workshop, Cornell University, December 2010 Paper “Distance Learning: If You Know It You Will Not Fear It”, ACTFL Conference, November 2014.

Speaker for roundtable for Italian AAUSC Session, ACTFL Conference, November 2014.AAUSC Round Table presentation: “How to Promote, Attract, And Retain Undergraduate Students in Italian Programs”, ACTFL Conference, November 2016.Center of Excellence of the French Embassy.

The College of Arts & Sciences Department of French and Italian

Camere separate by Pier Vittorio Tondelli