Biografia dello scrittore Mario Biondi. Il vero Mario Biondi

MARIO BIONDI was born in 1939 in Milan and lived for many years in Como, the hometown of three of his grandparents. His father's mother, Maria Movio, was from London, the daughter of the renowned silver engraver Latino Movio (*), who had moved there in his youth. Biondi's paternal family lived in London until around 1925, when his grandfather Antonio decided to return to Italy with his three sons, including Spero Latino (1909–1999), later married to Anita Orsenigo Marzorati (1914–1988, originally from Cantù, Como) and father of Mario and Paolo (1944–1971, a brilliant textile designer, nicknamed Giottino (Little Giotto) by his classmates at the Liceo Artistico Statale in Firenze, who tragically died in a car crash).

After completing his classical studies at the Liceo Classico A. Volta in Como, Biondi graduated in Political Economy with Professor Giovanni Demaria at Bocconi University in Milan (March 1964), defending a thesis on "The Relationship between Civilization and Economic Progress". He then worked for five years in industry (Burroughs, Nestlé) and then for sixteen years in publishing (Einaudi, Sansoni, Longanesi), managing the press and PR office in the last two.

He has also always been actively involved in Anglo-American fiction, translating it, and has been a reviewer for several daily, weekly, and monthly publications. He is a professional writer since the 1980s and a freelance journalist since the 1970s.

In 1973 he published a small volume of poems, Per rompere qualcosa, which was followed by other poems appearing in the important "Almanacco dello Specchio Mondadori 1976" and in various literary publications and anthologies (Il Verri, Altri termini, Pianura, etc.).

In total he has published seventeen novels: Il lupo bambino (Marsilio, 1975), La sera del giorno (Bompiani, 1981), Il cielo della mezzaluna (Longanesi, 1982), Gli occhi di una donna (id. 1985), La civetta sul comò (id. 1986), Un amore innocente (Rizzoli, 1988), Crudele amore (id. 1990), Il destino di un uomo (id. 1992), Due bellissime signore (id. 1993), Un giorno e per tutta la vita (id. 1995), Una porta di luce (Longanesi, 1998), Codice Ombra (Longanesi, settembre 1999), Destino (TEA, settembre 2006), La Casa delle Mille e Una Notte (Barbera, ottobre 2012), Rosa d’Oriente (La Nave di Teseo, novembre 2021), Ombre della mente (id. 2026) and Il segreto dell'azteco (2015, electronic format only).

In 2020 he collected ten short stories under the title Sognando la vita (Oligo, Mantova).

His novel Gli occhi di una donna was awarded the 1985 Premio SuperCampiello. His novel La sera del giorno had already been awarded the Premio Calabria in 1981. In 1994 he received the Premio Coni for fiction.

In 2003 Biondi collected his travel memories in Güle güle. Parti con un sorriso, followed in 2005 by Strada bianca per i Monti del Cielo. Vagabondo sulla Via della Seta and in 2008 by Con il Buddha di Alessandro Magno. Dall'ellenismo sull'Indo ai misteri del Tibet.

He has translated seventy-two (72) works by English-language authors, including James Joyce, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Edith Wharton, Ann Tyler, Irvine Welsh, and Nobel Prize winners Isaac B. Singer, William Golding, Wole Soyinka, and Orhan Pamuk (from an American translation at the author’s personal request).

Interesting fact: In his early youth, he also wore the Italian national track and field jersey, being included in the "Probabili Olimpici 1960" team for the Rome Olympics, which he unfortunately missed due to a muscle injury.

In April 1995 (the dawn of the Web), he created this personal website, which has been regularly updated to these days.

In December 2000 he and the Longanesi Publishing Group (later GeMS, Gruppo editoriale MauriSpagnol) created the "Portale del Romanzo", InfiniteStorie.it, an information service on novels, which remained online until November 2014.

(*) Philippa Glanville (Assistant Keeper, Dept. of Metalwork, Victoria & Albert Museum), Silver in England, Routledge, 1987, pag. 136 e 362, ISBN 0-415-38215-7

(*) An Exhibition of 19th & 20th Century Decorative & Novelty Silver: Featuring Important Works by Gilbert Marks, Latino Movio, Elkington & A.E. Jones, 1984, Nicholas Harris, London

His first poems (naturally unpublished) date back to his high school years (1955-1956), as do some short stories, also unpublished. His "public" work began in 1973, a truly "literary" beginning with a handful of poems (Per rompere qualcosa, Ant Ed, 1973), followed by two novels with strong experimental and social commitment (Il lupo bambino, Marsilio, 1975 and La sera del giorno, Bompiani, 1981), which were moderately well-received by critics but barely noticed by the public. His first success (especially critical) came in 1982 with a substantial and cultured historical novel, Il cielo della mezzaluna (Longanesi, 1982), which centers on the adventures of a Venetian boy kidnapped by Turkish pirates in the 15th century and raised by an Ottoman vizier until the conquest of Constantinople, in which he participates on the side of the Turks.

Major success followed shortly thereafter with the novel Gli occhi di una donna (Longanesi, 1985; Nuova ed. La Nave di Teseo, 2024), a great saga of Lombard industrial family life from 1914 to 1982. It was awarded the important Italian Premio SuperCampiello. The adaptation of the 14-episode radio drama by the same author was broadcast twice by RAI, in 1986 and 1987.

His next novel, La civetta sul comò (1986, Longanesi), a brilliant spy story with comic overtones centered on the arms trade with the Middle East, also enjoyed considerable success. The rights were acquired by RAI (Rete Due), which commissioned the directors, the Frazzi brothers, and the author himself to write the screenplay for a two- or three-part film (which mysteriously was never made).

The two subsequent substantial novels, the so-called "Turkish" novels, enjoyed excellent success: Un amore innocente (Rizzoli, 1988) and Crudele amore (1990), which tell the complex love (amore) story in two parts (from 1935 to 1947) between a brilliant Italian writer and a young Parisian Jewish girl who is fifteen years old at the beginning. A colourful story, with settings ranging from Milan to the Aegean, from Constantinople to Paris, from wartime Warsaw to New York in the late 1940s, featuring Nazism, fascism, the war, the Jewish Holocaust, and the beginnings of reconstruction in Italy, which also coincide with the psychological reconstruction (each in their own way) of the devastated protagonist and the young woman. A swarm of characters, each with their own personal story, usually centered on the dual concept of innocent love - cruel (inescapable) love. Exoticism. Dreamlike escapes into the world of esotericism and magic. A work with a completely open ending, leaving the author free to explore further possibilities, focusing on the protagonist's son and other, younger, secondary characters already introduced in the first two parts.

This is followed by another "duology," consisting of the novels Il destino di un uomo (Rizzoli, 1992) and Due bellissima signore (id. 1993). The first novel is dominated by Lino Villard, a boy raised in a remote mountain orphanage who becomes an expert silk weaver in France, then a French maquisard and an Italian partisan, and finally a business partner with a down-on-his-luck silk industrialist from Como and Milan, whose failing company Villard inherits following the industrialist's suicide. The protagonist of the second novel is still Villard, in a deadly feud with the relatives-competitors of the suicidal industrialist, but the key character is one of the "two beautiful ladies," a brilliant young lawyer who assists Villard in his economic and financial battle, leading to a startling discovery regarding the former orphan's true identity.

The tenth novel is Un giorno e per tutta la vita (Rizzoli, 1995), which recounts in flashback the ill-fated love of a very young Italian wife, left alone in an isolated country farmhouse at the end of World War II, when her equally young husband, a veteran of the same war, seeks refuge in Switzerland to avoid having to fight with the fascist Republic of Salò. The love, made impossible by the death of her young lover in the partisan war, has apparently been chaste, but the protagonist (Amelia Rossi Conti), on her deathbed, leaves her son a collection of documents and objects that will lead him to a shocking discovery.

The eleventh novel is Una porta di luce (Longanesi, 1998), which recounts the arduous return to consciousness of a man who has fallen into a coma following a skiing accident. When conventional medicine proves ineffective, the young neurologist woman treating him — who has secretly loved her patient since they were in high school — decides to take the risk of taking him to a Romanian shaman-doctor who practices in the Tatra Mountains, applying a blend of cutting-edge computer techniques and quasi-magical elements. The driving force behind his recovery, within the treatment, is the love of the patient's thirteen-year-old son, subject to Out-of-Body Experiences, which transport him to a mysterious parallel reality where he senses a reunion between his consciousness and that of his father. The character Moiso Segre from the Destino-Due Bellissime duology reappears in the novel. The first part of the setting (a fictional location in the Maritime Alps) also derives from that duology. On the other hand Crudele amore is the origin of the character of the shaman doctor Dimitru Minea, grandson of the shaman Deodata from that novel.

The twelfth novel is Codice Ombra (Longanesi, 1999), in which Biondi definitively and thoroughly addresses the structure of the thriller, and in particular the techno-thriller. International mafias aim to create a secret structure called "Shadow" to control global communications. To this end, they kidnap a brilliant ex-Soviet mathematician, highly advanced in his research on biological memory (DNA computers), and force him to work for them. Fortunately, the good guys are watching. Among them, almost all the characters from the previous novel reappear, particularly the neurologist Cristina Donghi and the computer geek Tom Minea.

Beyond the penchant for consolidating events across multiple consecutive works, a constant feature of these novels (and even some short stories) is the reappearance of characters from previous works. For example, Emma Lucini Olgiati Drezzo, the heroine of Gli occhi di una donna, very often reappears. Her children or heirs often reappear. Other characters also reappear, such as the two protagonists of La civetta sul comò (the readers find them also in Ombre della mente, 2026) All this in a stylistic attempt to revisit certain structural elements of Balzac's "Human Comedy."

In 2003, Biondi collected his travel memories in Güle güle. Parti con un sorriso (Ponte alle Grazie, 2003). 35 years of travel from New York to Tehran, through Algeria, Albania, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt, always striving to keep a smile on one's face, "in the belief that 'smiling' is one of the most beneficial ways to interact with others".

After wandering extensively for the previous two years between Iran and the Central Asian republics, in 2004, Biondi realised that he had unknowingly traveled much of the Silk Road. The following year, he completed the journey, reaching China via the Tian Shan (Mountains of Heaven) and crossing the Taklamakan Desert. This led, in the same spirit, to a new book of travel memoirs: Strada bianca per i Monti del Cielo. Vagabondo sulla Via della Seta (Ponte alle Grazie, 2005).

In 2006, he decided to pursue his own original project, republishing under the title Destino (TEA, 2006) a completely revised and partially rewritten fusion of Il destino di un uomo and Due bellissima signore, which he had originally intended to be published in this guise, later dividing it into two parts at the request of the publisher (Rizzoli).

In 2008, with Il Buddha di Alessandro Magno, he has given form to a book compiling the experiences accumulated during a series of journeys undertaken between 2005 and 2007, ascending from the ruins of ancient Taxila (northwestern Pakistan) through the valleys of Swat, the Indus, Hunza, and the Khunjerab Pass, gradually into the heart of China and then into Tibet proper. He followed the trail of the so-called Gandharan culture and art, an extraordinary form of Hellenistic-Buddhist syncretism originating from the encounter between the Hellenistic culture brought by the court of Alexander the Great to the Indus and the Buddhist preaching which was migrating from inland India to Central Asia, and then to China and Tibet.

In 2012, Biondi returned to "fictional fiction": the "memories" and "lineages" of the two "Turkish" novels (which contain the word “amore (love)” in their titles) are consolidated in the novella La casa delle Mille e Una Notte, which can rightfully be considered the third part of that "duology" which becomes a "trilogy". For example, the readers find in it a niece of Theodora K, a key character in those two novels, who considers herself a spiritual heir of her great-aunt and therefore also of the famous "shaman woman of the mountains of Kaş"... The story of the heroine’s "rediscovered love" is set in a house called "Le Mille e Una Notte (One Thousand and One Nights - Arabian Nights)" because the guests feel compelled to contribute their own stories — human adventures, dreams, legends — to cheer up the company gathered there night after night by the hospitable owner.

In the fall of 2017, Biondi announced via social media his intention to complete a long-held project: a new translation of Joyce's Ulysses, an author to whom he has always felt a deep connection, as the Dizionario degli Bompiani rightly noted. Biondi himself has repeatedly explained that the title of his first novel, Il lupo bambino, descends directly from Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, via Il ritratto dell'artista da giovane cane (Biondi’s Italian translation of the original title by Dylan Thomas —The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog —, usually translated as Il ritratto dell'artista da cucciolo). Result: Il (ritratto dell'artista da) lupo bambino.

In the summer of 2019, Biondi announced through the same channels that he had completed the translation of Ulysses and was working on the publication process, which was completed in June 2020 by La Nave di Teseo.

In the meantime, in early 2020, he had collected 10 short stories into a volume published by Oligo (Mantova) under the title Sognando la vita.

Subsequently, in addition to a new edition of Gli occhi di una donna (2025), he published two more novels: Rosa d’Oriente (2021) and Ombre della mente (2026), both for La nave di Teseo.

My life, works and miracles(by Mario Biondi, Italian writer)

My life, works and miracles
(by Mario Biondi, Italian writer)