What few people remember about Burgess is that he was a great Italophile. His second marriage, to Liana Macellari, an Italian-English translator from a small coastal town on the Adriatic, near Macerata, helps to explain this. They married in 1968, fleeing the UK’s supertax immortalised by the Beatles song Taxman, first by settling in Malta and later the ultimate tax haven of Monaco. In between, however, Italy was their permanent home from 1970 to 1976, though they returned there frequently for many years afterwards. They settled first near Siena, before moving south towards the capital, where they alternated between a flat in Trastevere, a stone’s throw from Piazza G G Belli (see Burgess pictured in front of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, opposite his flat), and a house in Bracciano, about twenty miles north-west of Rome (see him pictured in the quaintly-named Piazza Padella, where his house was overlooked by the imposing Castello Orsini-Odescalchi). Burgess read widely in Italian literature during his years in the bel paese, and the result was his two Italian novels: Beard’s Roman Women (1976) and ABBA ABBA (1977).
Burgess died in 1993, but 2017 would have been his centenary year. Various initiatives were launched to mark this important literary date, including the commitment by Manchester University Press to publish a complete scholarly edition of his works. The Irwell edition had been envisaged by Burgess himself, and named at his suggestion after the ‘muddy, graveolent river that crosses Manchester’, his native city. Always a proud Mancunian, Burgess was first and foremost a citizen of the world. My hope in editing this text is to demystify his extensive engagement with Italian culture, which I’m also writing about more broadly in a forthcoming book. Once the extent of his transcultural engagement is known, I have no doubt that his work will come to be appreciated and celebrated by a much wider audience. Like Keats, Burgess was a prodigiously gifted writer. Even in death he seems to be rivalling Keats for literary creativity: the epitaph on his marble tombstone in Monaco reads ‘Anthony Burgess, 1917-1993, ABBA ABBA’.
arte e cultura