Encounter
with Poetry

In the mid-1960s, he is invited to contribute to the figural interpretation of The Divine Comedy, three volumes edited by Fortunato Bellonzi and published, under the auspices of the Dante Alighieri Society and the Quadriennale di Roma, as part of the official celebrations of the seventh centenary of the poet’s birth (1965) by Aldo Martello Editore Milano. A rare edition of only 500 copies; fifty-two artists are involved, including Mirko Basaldella, Corrado Cagli, Massimo Campigli, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio De Chirico, Renato Guttuso, Carlo Levi, Carlo Mattioli, Francesco Messina, Luciano Minguzzi, Fausto Pirandello, Aligi Sassu, Gino Severini, Renzo Vespignani, Tono Zancanaro, Giuseppe Zigaina.

Tullio Vietri made a wax pastel on paper for The accidiosi (from Dante Alighieri’s XVIII Canto of Purgatory, terzine 33): «… correndo si movea tutta quella turba magna; e due dinnanzi gridavan piangendo.» («full soon they were upon us, because running moved onward all that mighty multitude, and two in the advance cried out, lamenting») a sorrowful but sublimated interpretation of guilt.

Many years later – thanks to his friend and artist Gianni Pignat – Vietri gets in touch with Gian Mario Villalta, one of the greatest contemporary Italian poets. The idea of collaborating together was born. The Plaquette “E adesso dove, spogliato delle ombre, dove?” (“And now where, stripped of shadows, where?”) was published in numbered copies in 2010 by the Liberinto publishing house in PN, with a poem by Gian Mario Villalta, four reproduced drawings and a lithography by Tullio Vietri.

In 2012, twenty poets interpreted 20 of Vietri’s paintings on display in the exhibition “Sono, persone e non cose” (“They are, people not things”), set up in the halls of the Civic Library as part of “Pordenone legge” (“Pordenone reads”): Antonella Anedda, Mario Benedetti, Alberto Bertoni, Massimo Bocchiola, Franco Buffoni, Antonella Bukovaz, Maria Grazia Calandrone, Pierluigi Cappello, Anna Maria Carpi, Maurizio Cucchi, Stefano Dal Bianco, Milo De Angelis, Umberto Fiori, Bianca Maria Frabotta, Silvio Ornella, Antonio Riccardi, Davide Rondoni, Mario Santagostini, Gian Mario Villalta, Giacomo Vit.