Goodbye to Stefano Benni, the writer who gave us our Sport Bar

He left as he lived: with discretion, but leaving behind a world populated with improbable bars, cellestini rebellious and visionary jumpers. Stefano Bennithe writer who transformed each page into a small universe of irony and fantasy, died at 78 years of age.

He was born in Bologna in 1947 and in more than forty years of career he gave birth to a very recognizable literary universe: satirical and poetic, cruel and tender at the same time. With Sport bar (1976), his first great success, had created a mythical place of Italian popular culture, where our collective manias were mirrored between improbable cappuccinos and characters from the province. That book immediately became a cult, the first step of a career that never stopped weaving social criticism and imagination.

An intense production followed: Earth! (1983), science fiction and grotesque novel that targeted our relationship with the planet; The Celestini Company (1992), parable of friendship and childhood rebellion; Baol (1990), History of a melancholy superhero; Jumper (2001), one of his most loved novels, capable of intertwining training and travel over time. Then again Margherita Dolcevita (2005), where a girl observes the consumption society with Candore and sarcasmo, e The trace of the angel (2011), which revealed the most intimate and painful side of his writing. Each book, although very different by setting and tone, brought the same imprint: that ability to mix political satire, linguistic invention and a poetic vein that made its characters more true than the truth.

Benni was not just a novelist. Poet, journalist, theater author and even screenwriter, has collaborated with magazines such as The espresso, The manifesto, Linus. His pen, wherever he landed, was unmistakable: extravagant neologisms, surreal humor, an eye always careful to unmask hypocrisy and contradictions. For readers it was “the wolf”, nickname that well suited his free spirit and his lateral gaze on the world.

In recent years he had retired from the public scene, marked by a disease that had made him fragile. Intellectuals and friends today remembered his ability to grasp “the comic side of many things, in particular of politics”, as Goffredo Fofi wrote. But readers, those who have laughed and dreamed with his books, will above all remember his lightness, that special combination of melancholy and joy, criticism and invention. And the surreal characters of the Sport barthe boys of the Celestini Companytravelers of Jumper.