L’assessore e la biblioteca

Abstract

Luigi Reitani (Foggia 1957-Berlin 2021) was the greatest Italian Germanist of his generation, but he also had a significant political-administrative experience as councillor for culture and tourism of the Comune di Udine between 2008 and 2013. In the article, we do not want to recall his merits as a translator and scholar (of enormous commitment was his translation of the entire work of Hölderlin, which came out in two volumes in the Mondadori Meridians), as much as his activity as a municipal councillor and cultural organizer in direct contact with the Bibliotheca civica di Udine “Vincenzo Joppi”. His activity, both before and during his political interlude, was characterized by splendid results that saw the city Library often at the center of the cultural activities he promoted, as, for example, during the important celebrations linked to the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Claudio Magris’s essay Il mito absburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna in 2003. But, rereading today his whole activity, we cannot overlook the repeated difficulties Reitani encountered along this path: the role of the library and the resulting cultural policy strategies were repeatedly called into question by the city council, severely limiting innovative projects in this field. Luigi Reitani, partly because of this, did not want to repeat that political-administrative experience and devoted himself exclusively to study and literary research in academia, also trying himself again as a savvy cultural organizer as director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin between 2015 and 2019.