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There is a photo that marks Ernesto Ferrero’s entry into the literary world (born in Turin in 1938 and passed away yesterday, at the age of eighty-five) and it is the one that portrays him, summery and smiling, while being accompanied to Venice Primo Levi, who would win the Campiello Prize with the novel La tregua. We are in September 1963. Ferrero is taking the first steps of a very important career within Einaudi, where he joined as head of the press office but where he would soon hold the position of literary director and, from 1984 to 1989, that of editorial director.
Although he also worked for Garzanti and Mondadori, his name will forever remain linked to the publishing house in Via Biancamano, to the Wednesday meetings, to the austere rites of making books like pieces of a mosaic as large as the nation. Einaudi remains in its identity card and not only as one of the many places in which to produce covers and flaps, but as a pedagogical gym, a free university from which to exercise teaching by gaining strength with that feeling of completeness, with that air of happy conquest that can be felt in the more airy pages of The Best Years of Our Lives (2005) and Family Album (2022).
At such a distance in time, however, the photo together with Levi establishes a further key to interpretation, it expands in the imagination to the point of taking on the value of a predestination, so much so that often, recently, in remembering that trip to Venice , Ferrero attributed to it the meaning of an initiatory experience. Levi, in fact, would have been for him a master from whom he could draw secrets, a sort of guide to the exercise of writing never experienced as an exhibition, a paradigm of moral literature to be firmly fixed in the mind for his own future as a writer, it matters little if dedicated to historical fiction rather than scientific fiction.
Of that method, of that ethical rigor, of that internal discipline, Ferrero would in turn become an exemplary story for the entire generation that followed and anyone who wanted to set out on the path of books could not help but intercept his endless production: from the non-fiction one, dedicated not only to Levi, but also to Gadda and Calvino, to the narrative one, which would have aimed at eccentric and curious figures like Cervo Bianco or Emilio Salgari, cumbersome and contradictory ones like Napoleon Bonaparte, scrutinized however by the humble eyes of a servant (N., 2000, which won the Strega Prize), shocking and modern like Francis of Assisi (Francis and the Sultan, 2019).
Everything Ferrero attempted, even the translations of Louis-Ferdinand Céline or his long directorship of the Turin Book Fair, return a portrait of an intellectual and a man who, to question his own time and measure himself against it, preferred let yourself be guided by Manzoni’s lesson which brought together ethics and history, archival research and imagination. These four elements have become the compass of orientation for any of his cultural activities and thanks to them he has positioned himself towards the season he has gone through as the most accredited and authoritative interpreter, the last voice of a tradition that has believed in words as a suitable instrument for probing the mystery of what we are and what we build. In doing so, he wore the shoes of History, establishing himself as a noble father who was interested in defending an idea of writing based on the inviolability of documents without however being asphyxiated by them, without remaining prisoners of rigid rules devoid of creativity.