Flavio Santi

Flavio Santi (born March 15, 1973) is an Italian writer, poet, and translator.

Life and career After earning his Master of Arts in Modern Literature at the University of Pavia, with a thesis on medieval and humanistic philology related to Giasone del Maino, he obtained a PhD in Modern Philology. His research focuses on religious metaphor and material existence in Italian literature from its beginnings through Dante. He continued his studies in Geneva under Guglielmo Gorni and collaborated with Maria Corti at the Centro per gli studi sulla tradizione manoscritta di autori moderni e contemporanei.

Santi, as a poet, writes in both Italian and the Friulian language, influenced by his family roots in Colloredo di Monte Albano. His Friulian collection, Rimis te sachete, is among his publications and has obtained positive reviews, including a mention in the Oxford Handbook of Italian Literature. His works in Italian include Mappe del genere umano and Quanti (2021 Viareggio Prize). His poetry has also been translated into English and other languages.

He made his fiction debut in 1999 with the novel Diario di bordo della rosa, which includes commentary by Michele Mari. An expanded edition appeared in 2014. His works examine themes such as vampirism from a historical perspective in L'eterna notte dei Bosconero and memoir in Il tai e l'arte di girovagare in motocicletta. The death of his poet friend, Simone Cattaneo, led him to create a modern reinterpretation of Luciano Bianciardi's La vita agra, titled Aspetta primavera, Lucky, which was nominated for the Strega Prize in 2011. Santi appears in two anthologies representing different generations of contemporary Italian literature: as a poet in Nuovissima Poesia Italiana (2004) and as a prose writer in A occhi aperti (2008). He has also written detective stories: novels featuring inspector Drago Furlan and a thriller, L'autunno del sultano, with architect Raimondo D'Aronco.

Santi has contributed to some Italian reference works, including the Grande Dizionario della lingua italiana and the Dizionario Biografico degli italiani. He has also been involved with magazines such as Paragone and Nuovi Argomenti, where he served on the editorial board, and has written for newspapers, including Il Riformista.

His translation portfolio includes classic authors—Honoré de Balzac, Jean Cocteau, Daniel Defoe, Ian Fleming, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Bram Stoker—and modern writers such as Wilbur Smith, Avalon Cycle, and Harold Brodkey. He has translated from German (Benn, Celan), Spanish (Lorca), Portuguese (Pessoa), and classical languages (Petrarch, Poliziano).

Italian broadcasters and international channels, including ARTE's Invitation au voyage - Culture et pop, have included contribution from Santi on Friuli and other topics. Since 2003, he has taught at various universities, including IULM and Insubria, where he helped establish the Master's program FILIS.

Santi also curated the texts for the Multimedia Museum of the Italian Language at the University of Pavia.

Works

Fiction

Novels

L'eterna notte dei Bosconero, Rizzoli, 2006. Aspetta primavera, Lucky, Socrates, 2011.

La primavera tarda ad arrivare. La prima indagine dell'ispettore Furlan, Mondadori, 2016. L'estate non perdona. La nuova indagine dell'ispettore Furlan, Mondadori, 2017. L'autunno del sultano, Solferino, 2024.

Short Stories

La guerra civile in Italia, Sartorio, 2008. Chê fricàte rognose de vie Merlanis. Un'indagine lampo di Drago Furlan, in Fricokiller, MorgantiEditori, 2021, pp. 187–214.

Poetry

Viticci, Stamperia dell'Arancio, 1998. Rimis te sachete, Marsilio, 2001. Mappe del genere umano, Scheiwiller, 2012. Quanti - Truciolature, scie, onde. 1999-2019 (prefazione di Niccolò Scaffai), Industria&Letteratura, 2020. Translated and published

In English: Italville. New Italian Writing, Exile Editions, Toronto 2005, pp. 161–171. In Indonesian: Poetry and Sincerity. International Poetry Festival Indonesia 2006, CIPTA, 2006, pp. 353–64. In German: Grand Tour. Reisen durch die junge Lyrik Europas, Hanser, 2019, p. 291. In English: "Journal of Italian Translation", XVI, 2021, pp. 276–79; Books and Librairies. Poems, Everyman Library Pocket Poets, 2021, p. 75.

Non-fiction

Il tai e l'arte di girovagare in motocicletta. Friuli on the road, Laterza, 2011. Essays

Aspettando Superman. Storia non convenzionale dei supereroi, Gaffi, 2013. Laboratorio di scrittura, Giunti, 2016. Figurando il Paradiso. Metafora religiosa e vita materiale nella letteratura italiana dalle origini a Dante, Mimesis, 2016. L'altro cielo di Lombardia. Per una storia alternativa del Rinascimento e del Barocco lombardo, Unicopli, 2022.