The writer and literary critic Piergiorgio Bellocchio, one of the best known militant intellectuals of the heterodox left, who with his magazine Piacenza notebooks he made a decisive contribution to the renewal of Italian culture, he died last night in his home in Piacenza at the age of 90. The news of his disappearance was confirmed to beraking latest news by his trusted doctor, Dr. Giorgio Gatti, and by his architect friend Romano Maffi. He leaves behind his wife Marisa, currently hospitalized with a fractured femur, and his daughter Letizia. Born in Piacenza on 15 December 1931, he was the elder brother of the director Marco and had recently participated together with his other brothers (Letizia, Alberto and Maria Luisa) in the film Marx can wait (2021), dedicated to the Bellocchio family.
On 27 December 1968 Camillo Bellocchio, twin brother of the director Marco, took his own life at the age of 29: the surviving brothers retrace that tragedy in the documentary without filters or modesty. In 1962 Piergiorgio Bellocchio founded the magazine Piacenza notebooks and directed it until its closure, in 1984. His companions in adventure were, in particular, Grazia Cherchi and Goffredo Fofi, who also supported him in the direction of the quarterly that appeared with the subtitle “by the youth of the left”, as extension of the activity of the “Incontri di cultura” club in Piacenza. It has been a central magazine as well as a point of attraction for the culture and evolution of leftist political thought in Italy since the second half of the 1960s.
He then published Newspaper (1985-1993), “personal” magazine entirely written with Alfonso Berardinelli (the complete reprint of Newspaper. 1985-1993 appeared by Quodlibet in 2010). Bellocchio collaborated with the publisher Garzanti writing entries for the Encyclopedia of Literature (1972) and for the European Encyclopedia (1976) and prefaces to Stendhal, Dickens and Casanova. From 1977 to 1980 he directed the small Gulliver publishing house in Milan and – among many other things – was the first director in charge of Fight continues in 1969, it appeared for the first time as a weekly on 1 November of that year as the official organ of the extra-parliamentary formation of the same name. As director he was denounced and served three months in prison before being released from prison. Announcing his release from prison, an unsigned editorial in the newspaper explained that the accusations against Bellocchio were due to the fact that he would have betrayed the “corporation of members of the Register of Journalists” by not checking who wanted to write in the newspaper and being an intellectual , meddled with a “revolutionary political action” that printed a newspaper that ended up in the hands of workers and proletarians.
With the stories collected in the volume The pleasant servants (Mondadori, 1966) Piergiorgio Bellocchio won the Pozzale di Empoli Prize. Critical prose of him are collected in On the wrong side (Einaudi, 1989), Possibly (Rizzoli, 1993), The cunning of the passions (Rizzoli, 1995), Lost items (Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 1996). In the book Below the fray. Satires and wise men (Scheiwiller, 2007) the author has collected articles and notes dedicated to the works and political and cultural activity of the Piacenza writer, Cherchi and Fofi and the history of Piacenza notebooksfrom Reasoning and other magazines of the heterodox left. Beyond the differences, what unites these militant intellectuals is mainly the critique of the institutional left, of power, of culture and of dominant values. As a lucid essayist, Bellocchio appears capable of seeing in the various and apparently heterogeneous changes in Italian society the constants of an “ugly power that dominates in common damage”. For Feltrinelli he wrote the introduction to Compartment for readers and taciturns by Grazia Cherchi (1997). With Gianni D’Amo he had promoted the Cittàcomune association in Piacenza in 2006. Bellocchio has collaborated on various periodicals (This and more, Reports, Shadow line, Panorama, Italian illustration, Time illustrated, the Unity, Parallel, King), he wrote prefaces, voices for miscellaneous works, costume notes.