Biography

Cesare De Marchi was born in 1949 in Genoa where he spent his early childhood. He graduated in philosophy from Milan, the city where two of his four of his novels are set. In 1995 he left for Germany, where he still resides. Since 2003 he has been president of the Stuttgart Società Dante Alighieri. His first narrative attempts appeared in L'ora di memoria (1981). His short stories were published in «Nuova Prosa», a literary review that he had founded in 1987, and in other periodicals. His childhood autobiography Il bacio della maestra, 1992, reached a wider public and was followed by the pseudo-detective story La malattia del commissario, 1994, Il talento, 1997, for which he was awarded the literary prizes Campiello and Comisso in 1998, then Una crociera, 2000, and finally the three stories of Fuga a Sorrento, 2003. Apart from being a narrative author, De Marchi has also gained special acclaim as German studies and translations, ranging from his first essays on early Hegel and on Schiller's philosophy, to translations of and comments on Fontane (Amori, errori, 1982), Cardinal de Retz (La congiura del conte Fieschi, 1990), Grillparzer (Guai a dire bugie!, 1991), again Schiller (Kallias o della bellezza, 1993), then Schnitzler (Novelle, 2006), Thomas Mann (Tonio Kröger and Tristan, awaiting publication), contributions on German literature written for l'Enciclopedia della letteratura De Agostini (1997), Balzac (Il padre Goriot, 2004), and finally the chef d'oeuvre of German humanism, the Epistolae obscurorum virorum, whose humoristic dog Latin he rendered into an interesting pastiche mixing the archaic with the demotic. (Lettere d'uomini oscuri, 2004.) Among other critical works is his edition of Luigi Da Porto's La Giulietta (1994).