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Futuro Antico. Interview with Elisabetta Sgarbi
1 feb 2022
Ludovico Pratesi
Publishing plays a fundamental role in the career of Elisabetta Sgarbi, who founded the publishing house La Nave di Teseo in 2015. We invited her to reflect on the present time and, above all, on the future.
What are your inspirational references in art?
When I was a child, I experienced the trauma of my brother, who had fallen in love with the funeral monument of Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia in Lucca. He would make me play the part of Ilaria at home, lying on a chest. So, I was the dead one. I always wore a black turtleneck sweater, which made me a fitting representation.
What is the editorial work that represents you the most? Can you tell us about its genesis?
I feel represented by all the books I publish. There have been bolder endeavors: publishing the complete works of Carmelo Bene in a single volume for the Bompiani Classics, with Carmelo still alive. It was an exhilarating and very important experience for my life, not just professionally. Just like publishing Enrico Ghezzi, starting with Fear and Desire—that was a major research, curation, and listening process to the author and his brilliant capriciousness. Then there’s the founding of the magazine Panta, which later became Pantagruel, together with Pier Vittorio Tondelli.
How important is the Genius Loci in your work?
When I read passages by Ferrara authors, or sometimes by non-Ferrara writers about Ferrara (if the pages are good), I recognize much of my own personality. I wrote about this in the introduction to Memories of My Life by Giorgio De Chirico, in the edition we published with La nave di Teseo. I cite passages from De Pisis, De Brosses, De Chirico himself, and verses by D’Annunzio in which I see myself. Then there’s Ferrara’s painting and sculpture, up to Alfonso Filippini, a sculptor I recently discovered. Filippini also depicts the working-class and peasant world tied to Ferrara’s Genius Loci. Not to mention Ferrara’s cinema, which perhaps in the 20th century is the great translation of the Estense Genius Loci. But it’s important, I think, to recognize this value over time. At first, it might be healthy to deny its power.
How important is the past in imagining and building the future? Do you believe the future can have an ancient heart?
Augustine said that memory is the womb of thought. On the other hand, Borges’ Funes warns that forgetfulness is necessary for thought to function. The past is this flow of memory and oblivion into one another. So, it is always alive and fluid, often more so than the present, or what we define as such.
What advice would you give to a young person who wants to follow your path?ù
First and foremost, be radical. There’s a line from a poem by Kenneth Patchen that has always struck me, even when I was young: “We were never anything all the way, not even soldiers.” Try to be fully what you do.
In an era often defined as post-truth, does the concept of the sacred still have importance and strength?
I am a reader of Roberto Calasso. When the sacred is removed from life, it disguises itself as something else, but it is still present.
How do you imagine the future? Could you give us three ideas that you think will shape the coming years?
A long time ago, I published a book by Leonardo Sciascia. The title was The Future of Memory (If Memory Has a Future). In my life, I work with books and cinema, which have been, so far, the most effective (and unsurpassed) tools for transmitting knowledge, that is, memory. So, I hope that the phrase in parentheses by Sciascia was just his fear. And that instead, we focus on the first enormous issue: the future of memory.