Paolo Fossati

Paolo Fossati (1938 in Arezzo – 26 October 1998 in Turin) was an Italian scholar, author, professor and art historian of 20th-century Italian art, editor and later executive at the Einaudi publishing house.

Biography

He was born in Arezzo to Teresa Negro and Pietro Fossati. Due to his father's work as chief cashier at the Bank of Italy, the family moved first to Palermo, then to Naples where Paolo attended the classical high school Francesco Denza in Posillipo Capo Napoli, and then in 1954 to Turin, where he completed his secondary studies first at the Collegio San Giuseppe, then obtained his diploma at the Liceo Massimo D'Azeglio. After a brief start in 1957 at the Faculty of Law, while simultaneously working in a bank as a customer relations officer, he moved at the end of 1959 to the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at the University of Turin to attend lectures by Luigi Pareyson, Franco Venturi, Augusto Rostagni, and above all D'Arco Silvio Avalle, under whom he graduated and who, together with Corrado Grassi, served as supervisor of his thesis: Dialectal Parody and Multilingualism in Mimetic-Expressionist Function in the Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages, defended on 12 November 1965. Avalle himself appointed Fossati as a voluntary assistant to the chair of Romance philology (a role he held from July 1966 to November 1975) and also helped him enter Giulio Einaudi's publishing house.

Fossati had already begun writing for the newspaper L'Unità as an art critic before graduating, under the guidance of the painter Filippo Scroppo, and had then taken on independently – from 15 September 1965, a few months before his graduation – the coordination of the cultural page, the "third page" as it was called at the time, which had previously been managed by Luciano Pistoi. "He distinguished himself not only as an art critic, but also as a reviewer of books and cultural events, always engaged and never superficial."

For the twenty-seven-year-old, 1965 proved a decisive and eventful year: he married Eva Menzio, daughter of Ottavia Cabutti and the painter Francesco Menzio, and in September, his first son Filippo was born. He began collaborating, alongside Carla Lonzi, with the Notizie gallery run by Luciano Pistoi, and was hired at Einaudi. There, at that time, his mentor D'Arco Silvio Avalle was planning the journal Strumenti critici together with Maria Corti, Cesare Segre, and Dante Isella, with whom Fossati struck up a friendship and began to collaborate.

In January 1967 his daughter Caterina was born.