Raboni was born in
Milan, Italy, the second son of Giuseppe, a clerk at Milan commune, and Matilde Sommariva. In October 1942, after the first bombings of Milan, the family moved to Sant'Ambrogio Olona, near
Varese, where Raboni concluded his primary and intermediate school. His father's love for French and Russian classics made him read and appreciate
Proust,
Dickens,
Dostoevskij and when his cousin Giandomenico Guarino, knowledgeable about contemporary literature and poetry, found shelter in Sant'Ambrogio too after
8 September 1943 armistice, Raboni met the works by
Piovene,
Buzzati,
Ungaretti,
Quasimodo,
Cardarelli, and
Montale about whom he said: "I know I owe much to Montale, I realise this upon rereading him, even if I did not love him as much as
Eliot and
Sereni, but he affected me a lot... especially his expression of the limits, of the fact that we cannot demand too much in 20th century of poetry as a source of truth." Having completed law studies, he was a lawyer for some years, but at the end of the 1950s, he felt more attracted to literature and poetry. He met in Milan
Vittorio Sereni,
Antonio Porta,
Giovanni Testori,
Giorgio Strehler and began working for periodicals and newspapers, at first in the editorial staff of
Aut Aut, a magazine edited by
Enzo Paci, then writing for
Piergiorgio Bellocchio's
Quaderni piacentini and
Roberto Longhi's
Paragone and finally for
Corriere della Sera for which worked several years. Raboni became was appreciated as both a literary critic and a translator of classic works: he translated in Italian some works by
Gustave Flaubert, and by
Guillaume Apollinaire,
Les Fleurs du mal by
Charles Baudelaire for
Einaudi publishing house,
Jean Racine and
Proust's
In Search of Lost Time in
Mondadori's "I Meridiani" collection. In 1961 he published two short poetry collections,
Il catalogo è questo and ''L'insalubrità dell'aria
, followed by Le case della Vetra
in 1966, Cadenza d'inganno
in 1975, Nel grave sogno
in 1982 and, in 1988, the anthology A tanto caro sangue''. In the 1970s he began editing the poetry series "I quaderni della Fenice" for
Guanda publishing house, acting as a kind of talent scout for new poets. Milan (especially the memory of the old city, before the recent town plannings) is at the heart of his matters: In June 1971 he was one of the 800 intellectuals who signed, in ''
L'Espresso magazine, a manifesto against Luigi Calabresi, a police officer falsely suspected of having killed the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli. In October he was among those who signed a "self-denunciation", to express solidarity with some journalists of Lotta Continua'' newspaper, defending their strong anti-government positions. Among his literary critic essays are
Poesia degli anni sessanta (Poetry of the 1960s) published in 1968,
Quaderno in prosa in 1981.
La fossa di Cherubino (1980) collects his proses. Raboni was interested in theater too: was in the directorial committee of
Piccolo Teatro di Milano and wrote several plays, such as ''Alcesti o la recita dell'esilio
and Rappresentazione della croce
(2000). His activity as a poet went on with Canzonette mortali
(1987), Versi guerrieri e amorosi
(1990), Ogni terzo pensiero
(1993, with which he won the Viareggio Prize for poetry), Quare tristis
(1998), and Barlumi di Storia'' (2002). Giovanni Raboni died of a heart attack in
Fontanellato in 2004. He is buried at the
Monumental Cemetery of Milan. His wife, poet
Patrizia Valduga, wrote the afterword to his last poetry collection
Ultimi versi, published posthumously in 2006; one of his last poems is "Canzone del danno e della beffa" ("Song of the harm and the hoax"), also published posthumously on
Corriere della Sera in 2004. Andrea Cortellessa, in an article of
Manifesto in the days after his death, remembers the poet's "obsessive mournful compulsion on his last poetic verses", with these significant lines from
Quare tristis: ''"Who dreams himself / alive with his own dead / maybe he doesn't live also there /in his dream,/ and you must let him lie – not still /wake up, not until // out, in the light, remains that squeaky / burden, that blinding plate…"''. ==Notes and references==