Francesco Permunian: Exhibition at Mantua's Teresiana

Manuscripts, drawings, photographs and notes reveal the sensibility and unease of the writer who made Lake Garda his home, with no intention of taking stock of a life, even past the age of 75

Writer Francesco Permunian with glasses in front of bookshelves at the Teresiana Library in Mantua

A noble palace of books and archives in the heart of Virgil’s city, the Biblioteca Teresiana was founded in 1780 by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and is today Mantua’s municipal library. Its director, Francesca Ferrari, promoted and curated the exhibition devoted to the books of Francesco Permunian, a decidedly contrarian writer, Venetian by birth and Lombard by choice, who moved from the Polesine to Lake Garda (Desenzano) more than forty years ago.

Publisher Giulio Girondi, Francesco Permunian and library director Francesca Ferrari among the Teresiana bookshelves

The exhibition closes on 1 November, but its original design lives on in a fine volume entitled Francesco Permunian. Camminando attraverso i campi bruciati dell’amore (Walking Through the Burnt Fields of Love; Oligo, 2026, €19). One might think that at seventy-five a writer, like anyone else, has reached the moment to take stock of a life. Not so. Ferrari herself stresses the point, preferring to speak of prospects rather than nostalgia. What has been assembled in Mantua is, true, a survey of everything Permunian has gathered over the years, but the time for summing up has not yet come. If memory plays a large part in an operation like this, it does so to open new paths. We might say we are at a crossroads that promises new directions and wider horizons. You sense it from the material on display and from the way it is presented: diary fragments alternate with drawings, mock interviews, digressions and photographs. The whole feels mobile and discontinuous, in no way fossilised or gathering dust.

Ferrari also sees in Permunian a “restless pleasure in looking back with irony”. Two places shape the writer’s gaze: the Polesine and Lake Garda, which he regards as “places of the soul”. Between them lie the “burnt fields of love: a landscape that bears the marks of what has passed… yet where the author’s wild flower still blossoms”.

Alice Pisu, Stefano Malosso, Francesco Permunian and Giulio Girondi at the exhibition presentation

The preface by Stefano Malosso and the afterword by Alice Pisu delve deeper into the writer’s life, revealing a complex world that has left its wounds. Malosso describes Permunian as an “Orpheus with a severed voice, keeper of the memory of the living and the dead”, portrayed through “access to a language kneaded with ghosts and visions”. He gives due weight to “the watery scar of the Po”, which marked him like an indelible, lasting stigma ever since he was a “child, frightened in the days of the great flood” of 1951. “His prose captures the inevitability of human tragedy, like a tragic carnival lullaby.” The “ferocious and the lyrical are clotted together in one great embrace”.

Audience at the presentation of the Permunian exhibition in the Teresiana Library reading room

Alice Pisu seems to extend to our whole world, to all of us, that “roaming wander of Permunian among the ruins of an era, tormented by undying memories and macabre visions… an alienated exile”. In the writer’s workshop, so well represented in both the exhibition and the book, everything reads like a commonplace book, home to the allegory of life and death. This is where “his perennial fascination with parody” takes shape, in the creation of masks that portray human misery.

Lake Garda seen from Supiane, a photograph by Pino Mongiello shown in the exhibition

Permunian’s life and writing are accompanied, in the exhibition and in the book, by works from Roberto Abbiati, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Renzo Bertasi, Luca del Baldo, Gianni Fucile, Mario Giacomelli, Piero Guccione, Lorenzo Mattotti, Pino Mongiello and Tullio Pericoli.

Article by Pino Mongiello for GN Magazine (November 2026).