A great tradition that goes away, the verses of the province that remain

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The news, given by his friend the poet Giancarlo Sissa, bounced on social media in a matter of minutes: Stefano Simoncelli is no more . With him goes that great Romagna tradition of poets that made this strip of land, located between the coast and the Apennines, great.

Simoncelli had made his debut in poetry at a young age but often rejected those first attempts that he judged too sentimental or sentimental. Hailed by great critics of the caliber of Franco Fortini, Giovanni Raboni and Enzo Siciliano, the poet from Cesenatico used to move on. He would then make up for it starting from the 80s when he arrived at the Ancona-based publishing house PeQuod, whose founders Marco Monina and Antonio Rizzo would become his second family. With them he would reach the final of the Strega Poetry Prize in 2023 with the anthology Sotto falso nome, within which the themes of his poetry develop in a choral way, finally giving him the visibility and success that he had long deserved . Stefano was not a stage poet, but rather an everyday friend: with him you could talk about everything, and poetry took a back seat. Not that it wasn't important to him, but it was precisely by not talking about it that it took hold in conversations that ranged from sports to friendships, from food to the things in life to which Stefano was always attached despite the bereavements that had struck him and of which his poems continuously carried the inspiration.

In his youth, Simoncelli had been a cultural animator in his hometown of Cesenatico, together with other poets and writers, such as his close friend Ferruccio Benzoni. The magazine they had founded, “Sul porto”, was a true intellectual manifesto of the 70s, so much so that it attracted the curiosity of important figures on the Italian cultural scene, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vittorio Sereni, Franco Fortini, who contributed their signatures. In short, the poet from Romagna had brought prestige to the province, elevating it to the cultural epicentre of an otherwise forgotten world, a world in which ideas fermented and multiplied . A man of great personality and equally generous, Stefano Simoncelli had also built a network of friends as well as very important partnerships, even outside the region. It is therefore right to remember the visits he made in the summer to the French poet René Char, and the incursions in the Marche where his lifelong poet and literary critic friends, Francesco Scarabicchi and Massimo Raffaeli first and foremost, awaited him. The latter also edited the anthology Marcos y Marcos which collects all his works, the title of which was borrowed from those remote stations that dot his poetry, and where he used to spend time with his dead presences, the “invisible creatures” that he loved so much: “your wounded photographs / the armchair with leaves and ears of corn / where you read, the visits of no one, / behold, sweetness, what is moving over there, / the curtains / and you, beloved invisible creatures” .

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