Adriano Spatola Biography
Adriano Spatola, born on 4 May 1941 in Sapjane, Istria, at the time Italian and currently in Croatian territory, was an Italian poet, essayist and publisher. After graduating from the Galvani classical high school in Bologna in 1959, he enrolled in the faculty of law, but then moved on to the faculty of literature and philosophy in 1960, attracted by the lessons of Luciano Anceschi, with whom he remained close both humanly and intellectually throughout his life. After graduating only in 1982, with a thesis on "Experimental poetry and Surrealism", he published his first theoretical writing in the magazine "Il Mulino" in 1960. It is a defense of the autonomous reasons of artistic expression against the claims of engagement represented by the surrealists and Pasolini's realism.
The criticism of Marxist dogmatism, based on an existentialist conception, was developed in "Responsibility and freedom" (Il Cenobio, March-April 1961), showing his early ability to deal with the philosophical implications of literary practice. He made his debut as a poet in 1961 with "Le pietra e gli dei" (Tamari, Bologna), where intimacy extends into a dramatic vision of human experience. In 1961 he came into contact with Nanni Balestrini and with the environment of the magazine "Il Verri", in which he published the essay "Inutility" by Lukacs (December 1961). In January 1962 the project developed to found a publication that would include study and research texts originating from Anceschi's seminars: Bab Ilu, of which two issues were released during that year.
This was the prelude to his most decisive turning point during 1963, when Anceschi entrusted him with the poetic reviews of "Il Verri", in which he had made his debut with the poem "Alamogordo 1945" (February 1962), and was involved in the work of the conference from Palermo of Gruppo 63, contributing with the reading of the poem "Il boomerang". After a bitter conflict with his father, he went to live alone and supported himself as a proofreader and layout designer at the publishing house "Il Mulino", an apprenticeship that was useful for his subsequent editorial commitments. In 1964 he collaborated in the founding of the magazine "Malebolge", entrusted to an editorial committee coordinated by Ennio Scolari, of which he was a member with Antonio Porta, Corrado Costa, Giorgio Celli and others. This group organized the second Gruppo 63 conference in Reggio Emilia in November 1964, during which an exhibition of visual poetry took place in which he exhibited alongside Villa, Balestrini, Antonio Bueno, Lamberto Pignotti, Eugenio Miccini and Porta.
From 1965 to 1968 he served as editorial director for Sampietro of Bologna, making it a point of reference for radical Italian avant-garde publishing and acting as a hub between the positions of Gruppo 70 and those of Gruppo 63. In 1967 he his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Alpha in Modena; always in the same year he organized with Arrigo Lora Totino and Franco Verdi the International Exhibition of experimental poetry in Castelfranco Veneto, in the wake of the one in Modena in June 1966, while one of his works was included in the "Anthology of concretism" of the "Chicago Review ". In June 1988 he married Bianca Maria Bonazzi for the second time. On November 23 of the same year, suffering from a heart attack, he died in his home in Sant'Ilario d'Enza.
