Luciana Stegagno Picchio

Luciana Stegagno Picchio (26 April 1920 – 28 August 2008) was an Italian philologist, cultural historian and literary critic, an expert on medieval Portuguese literature and Portuguese theatre history, and a world-renowned scholar of Portuguese literature, Brazilian literature and Lusophone literature.

Biography

Luciana Picchio was born in Alessandria. After secondary school in her hometown, Picchio studied classical philology and archaeology at the University of Turin and Sapienza University, where she graduated in 1942 with a thesis on classical archaeology. In 1944, she married physician Giannantonio Stegagno. Her contact with the Portuguese intellectual community in Rome, to whom she gave Italian lessons, led her to study Portuguese (1943), and Picchio also began to publish articles on Spanish and Portuguese literature and translations (1951–56). In 1956 she became an assistant professor, teaching Portuguese from 1959 to 1968 at the University of Pisa and from 1969 at Sapienza University. Her house in Via Civitavecchia soon became a point of reference for intellectuals and artists from all over the world: her best-known friends include Roman Jakobson, Murilo Mendes, José Saramago and Jorge Amado.

During her teaching years in Pisa, she had Antonio Tabucchi as one of her students, with whom she always maintained a bond of profound esteem and friendship, and it was thanks to his teachings that the latter approached the work of Fernando Pessoa and began his literary and academic adventure in the Lusophone sphere, as he himself recalls in the article dedicated to her the day after her death in La Repubblica Cultura — the same newspaper to which Luciana Stegagno Picchio contributed for nearly two decades.

She founded and edited the journal Quaderni Portoghesi (between 1977 and 1984) and was co-editor of the journal Letteratura d'America.

Her bibliography from 1951 to 1999 counts over five hundred titles including books, essays and articles. In the mid-1970s (1974–1976) she wrote for Paese Sera in the Books column; from 1977 to 1987 he collaborated with the daily newspaper La Stampa for the cultural page All Books; while with the daily newspaper La Repubblica she had an almost twenty-year collaboration, from 1988 to 2006, and her articles constitute a sought-after anthology of criticism of Lusophone literature. Also with La Repubblica in 2004, the volume Poesia straniera Portoghese e Brasiliana (Portuguese and Brazilian Foreign Poetry) was published. Containing also texts by African authors of Portuguese expression, it constitutes a unicum in the sphere of anthologies of Portuguese language poetry, offering a summa and a very complete vision of the literary panorama in the different continents.

Among the many essays on literary criticism, a precious little book of poems La terra dei Lotofagi stands out, in which the critic becomes a poet and gives voice to her lyrical self with refined and skilful technique.

Luciana Stegagno-Picchio was a corresponding member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras (2000) and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lisbon (1997–1998). In 2004, she was honoured by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi with the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (Grand Officer).

In 2005, Passigli published her last book, the text-to-speech edition of Fernando Pessoa's Quartine; in 2018, ten years after her death, the Italian edition of Abbé Faria's Della causa del sonno lucido o studio sulla natura dell'uomo was published posthumously.

In 2015, the Luciana Stegagno Picchio Fund, consisting of the bequest of 14,000 volumes made by the scholar, was inaugurated at the Istituto Sant'Antonio dei Portoghesi in Rome.

On 26 January 2016, a street in Lisbon's São Domingos de Benfica district was named after her. A memento on the centenary of her birth can be found in the magazine Insula Europea.

The Slavicist Riccardo Picchio was her younger brother.

Works

• Storia del teatro portoghese (1964)
• Profilo storico della letteratura drammatica portoghese (1967)
• Ricerche sul teatro portoghese (1969)
• Storia della letteratura brasiliana (1997)
• A lição do texto. Filologia e literatura (1979)
• La littérature brésilienne (1981; 1996)
• La méthode philologique. Ecrits sur la littérature portugaise. I. La poésie. II. La prose et le théâtre (1982)
• Profilo della letteratura brasiliana (1992)
• La terra dei lotofagi. Poesie con note (1993)
• Mare aperto. Viaggio dei portoghesi (1999)
• José Saramago. Istantanee per un ritratto (2000)
• Prefazione al romanzo di Anna Luisa Pignatelli (2002)
• Nel segno di Orfeo. Fernando Pessoa e l'avanguardia portoghese (2004)
• Breve storia della letteratura brasiliana (2005)

References

• Aa.Vv. (1991). Estudos Portugues. Homenagem a Luciana Stegagno Picchio. Lisboa: Difel.
• Boni, Guia; Rita Desti (1994). Luciana Stegagno Picchio dal 1951 al 1993. Napoli.
• Boni, Guia; Rita Desti (1999). Luciana Stegagno Picchio dal 1951 al 1999. Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale.
• Lancastre, Maria José de; Silvano Peloso & Ugo Serani (1999). E Vós, Tágides minhas, Miscellanea in onore di Luciana Stegagno Picchio. Viareggio: Baroni.
• Mauro, Alessandra (2001). Luciana Stegagno Picchio, A Língua Outra, Uma Fotobiografia. Lisboa: Instituto Camões.
• Pizarro, Ana (2013). América Latina: palabra, literatura y cultura. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universidad Alberto Hurtado.

External links

• Luciana Stegagno Picchio
• Works by Luciana Stegagno Picchio at Gallica

Professional and academic associations
Preceded by Alberto Noguès	Corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters 2000–2008	Succeeded by Arnaldo Saraiva