Giovanni Comisso

Italian writer

Giovanni Comisso (3 October 1895 – 21 January 1969) was an important Italian writer of the twentieth century, appreciated by Eugenio Montale, Umberto Saba, Gianfranco Contini and many others.

Comisso was born in Treviso, where, during his adolescence, he met and got to know the sculptor Arturo Martini who introduced him to the writings of Arthur Rimbaud and Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1915, he enlisted in the Telegraph Corps of Engineers and participated in the Great War. Together with Gabriele d’Annunzio, he took part in the Fiume enterprise (1919–1920), an experience that would be fundamental to his development as a writer. The following years were years of travel, both along the Adriatic aboard a sailing ship with the sailors of Chioggia, and in Europe and North Africa on behalf of a number of important newspapers. He lived for long periods in Paris, between 1927 and 1928, with his friend the painter Filippo De Pisis. The following year, in 1929, as a special correspondent for the "Corriere della Sera", he completed the Grand Tour in the Far East visiting China, Japan and Russia from Siberia to Moscow. After much wandering he wanted to take root in the Veneto countryside and with the proceeds of the articles, on his return, he bought a house and fields in Zero Branco, a town in the Treviso area, while continuing to travel along Italy as a special correspondent for several newspapers. Here he experienced intense periods of writing and friendship and later learned of the bombing of Treviso, where the family home was destroyed. He closed the house in Zero Branco to return to live in Treviso only in 1954 after his mother's death. In his later years, he continued to write and publish short stories and novels, in which there are detailed descriptions of despair, disappointments, anxieties and dislikes together with many ironic and bitter descriptions of man’s failings. "Our life today is reduced to these extremes from which serenity, beauty and harmony are excluded.” He died in a hospital on 21 January 1969.