Translator John Satriano Publisher The Marlboro Press Originally published 1973 OCLC 27103684 | Publication date 1992 Preceded by Le ombre bianche | |
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Original title La solitudine del satiro Works by Ennio Flaiano A Time to Kill, Il gioco e il massacro, Diario degli errori | ||
The Via Veneto Papers is a memoir collection by Ennio Flaiano, originally published in Italian in 1973, with a new expanded edition by Rizzoli in 1989 and translated into English by John Satriano in 1992.
Contents
Synopsis & Narrative Style
Wrote critic Richard Eder in Newsday:
To read the late Ennio Flaiano is to imagine a bust of Ovid or Martial, placed in a piazza in Rome and smiling above a traffic jam. In his antic, melancholy irony, Flaiano wrote as if he were time itself, satirizing the present moment.This is the first English language edition of the Italian original La solitudine del satiro (lit. The Satyr’s Solitude) published in 1973, a year after Flaiano’s death.
The book is divided into three sections:
Excerpt
Incipit:
These notes were written at various moments and are not here in chronological order. What I wanted to recollect is a street, a film, and old poet: disparate things that are unclearly mixed up with one another, not only in memory, but also in a diary. The jumps from one time to another have, then, a reason of their own.June 1958 -- "I am working with Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, dusting off an old idea of ours for a film, the one about a young provincial who comes to Rome to become a journalist. Fellini wants to adapt the idea to the present day, to paint a picture of this “wog society” that frolics between eroticism, alienation, boredom and sudden affluence. It is a society which, the terrors of the cold war now past and perhaps even in reaction to them, flourishes a bit everywhere. But in Rome, through a mixing together of the sacred and the profane, of the old and the new, through the en masse arrival of foreigners, through the cinema, presents more aggressive, subtropical qualities. The film will have La dolce Vita as its title and we have yet to write a single line of it; we are vaguely taking notes and going to the different places around town to refresh our memories."
--The Via Veneto Papers, p.1.