Signor Dido

October 21, 2013
This collection, the acclaimed Savinio’s last completed work before his death in 1954, places itself at a disadvantage by featuring the title character in most of the selections, making for a degree of monotony. Still, these low-key, subtly humorous stories manage to offer muted joys of their own. In “The Bearded Gentleman,” Rinaldo, the son of Signor Dido, has an adventure while skiing. In “The Little Plate,” Tresbisonda, the Dido family’s maid, oversees Signor Dido’s special diet—one about which he has strong reservations. In one of the stronger stories, “Five Trees,” Signor and Signora Dido are in their country house in the Apuan Alps and have to deal with the fondness some German soldiers have for a painting. The most fully realized story, in narrative terms, is “The Pizza,” which finds Signor Dido traveling from Syracuse to Rome by train on Christmas, with a particularly amusing scene in a dining car. There are no epiphanies here and we don’t know vastly more about Signor Dido at the end than at the beginning, but the feeling that one is actually sitting next to him on a train or across from him at dinner makes this a worthwhile read nonetheless.

November 1, 2013
Savinio--composer, journalist, playwright, painter and younger brother of Giorgio de Chirico--died in 1952, and this, his final book, wasn't published in Italian until 1978. The book is a collection of 28 brief newspaper bagatelles that the author composed under deadline in the final years of his life (the last was turned in to his editor a mere four days before he died). But these short pieces often transcend those origins. Wry, epigrammatic, and with a mordant and playful wit he doesn't hesitate to turn on himself, these pieces exemplify Savinio's sense that the mundane and the fantastic aren't separate spheres but that each is shot through with the other. Through the (largely sedentary and intellectual) misadventures of his alter ego Signor Dido, Savinio provides a series of gently comic, softly sardonic meditations on family life, art, class and the ravages of age. The pieces are urbane, allusive (especially to classical mythology), graced occasionally with divine nonsense and absurdity. Savinio deftly balances introspection and journalistic observation, and always behind them are a fierce intelligence and an awareness of vanity in all its guises. There's no overarching narrative here, certainly, and this may be more a cabinet of curiosities than a major work, but being in Savinio's company provides a series of small, persistent pleasures.

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