Abstract
Retired Harvard professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Franco Fido died in the early morning hours of June 23, 2020 at Longué-Jumelles, the Loire Valley village where he and his wife Josie had retired in 2009. Fido taught Italian and comparative literature for half a century in Italy, France, and the United States. Born in Venice, Italy on July 15, 1931, he was 89 years old when he died. A historian of the Italian theater, he was also a figlio d’arte, to the manner born. His mother, née Maria Baseggio, grew up in a family of performers—musicians, opera singers, and at least one outstanding stage and screen actor in the person of his uncle Francesco “Cesco” Baseggio (1897–1971). Baseggio was 20th-century Italy’s foremost interpreter of the plays of 18th-century Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni, Italy’s leading comic dramatist, credited with reforming the decadent commedia dell’arte tradition in Venice and later, on the invitation of French King Louis XVI, director of the Comédie-Italienne in Paris. Maria Baseggio married Franco’s father, Spiridione (shades of the eponymous novel by George Sand) Mario Fido. Franco had a brother, Carlo, who died 15 years ago.
After completing the liceo classico in Venice, Fido went on to earn his doctorate (in 1953) from the highly selective Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where his mentor was Luigi Russo (1892–1961), a brilliant and prolific disciple of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), the idealist philosopher who frequently pointed out his own debt to literary historian and fellow Neapolitan Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883). Fido’s doctoral thesis proposed a Gramscian interpretation of “Bourgeois spirit and Venetian reality in the theater of Carlo Goldoni.”
Franco Fido’s first teaching position was in the faculty of letters at the University of Dijon in the North-East of France (1954–1958). It was there in July 1958 that he met and married Marie-Josephe Rolin (known as Josie), mother to their two daughters Anne-Claire (or Minou) and Silvia. In 1958, the family came to the United States for the first time when Franco was offered an instructorship in Italian at the University of California at Berkeley. This first visit was followed by a brief return to France as a lecturer at the University of Grenoble (1961–1963). Between 1963 and 1969, he returned to UCLA where he was rapidly promoted from assistant to full professor and department chair.
Fido’s longest and most productive appointment, however, was his period of 21 years at Brown University between 1969 and 1990, punctuated in 1978–1979 by a stint as the Rosina Pierotti Chair of Italian Literature at Stanford University. While at Brown, he also taught for brief periods at McGill University in Montréal (1971 and 1976) and Middlebury College (1973 and 1974). He was visiting professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and Yale University in 1975. His last appointment was as Carl A. Pescosolido professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University from 1990 to 2005.
Wherever they lived, the Fidos were most hospitable. While living in Pratt Street in Providence, they bought a plot of land and built a house by the ocean in Little Compton, Rhode Island, where Franco donned snorkeling gear and hunted large fish such as striped bass, bluefish, or the fish the Narragansett people call tautog. Fortunate guests would be invited to regale themselves with the exquisite dishes conjured up from these raw materials by Josie, a world-class chef. It was to the Fidos in Pratt Street that visiting professor Maria Corti turned for assistance when she was mugged on Prospect Street, as she graphically recounts in her 1986 book Voci dal Nord Est, a ‘fictionalized’ account of her guest semester in the Italian Studies department at Brown.
Fido navigated his home territory of Venice with a brisk businesslike attack that often left his fellow travelers struggling to keep up. One eminent visitor, vainly attempting to keep pace as Fido trotted on board the departing vaporetto ahead of him, stepped off the gangplank and fell into the gap between the Grand Canal and the dock. Fished from the water relatively unscathed, he nevertheless spent several days confined to a hospital bed.
Fido’s professional relationships tended toward the formal. A doctoral candidate was addressed with the formal Italian pronoun lei until the day of the defense. Only when the defense was concluded with a congratulatory handshake did Professor Fido switch to the collegial tu. One time he approached a teller in the Citizens Bank on Thayer Street, Providence, and handed her a check. She looked at the check with the bearer’s name on it and ventured: “Yes, Franco, how can I help you?” Without missing a beat, Franco replied: “Do I know you, madam?” He did not suffer fools gladly. A favorite principle, based on his experience reading some of his fellow critics, went more or less as follows: “I read an essay and I don’t understand it and I say: ‘I must be dumb.’ I read it a second time and I still don’t understand it and I say: ‘One of us must be dumb.’ I read it a third time and I don’t understand it and I say: ‘It’s the other guy who’s dumb!’”
He was an energetic, acute, punctilious, prolific, and versatile scholar and a critic who shunned cant. While his field of unquestioned authority was 18th-century Venice (and his personal and intellectual qualities very much those of a man of the Enlightenment), his collected essays on Italian authors from other regions and periods, from medieval Tuscan Dante and Boccaccio to 20th-century Sicilian Pirandello and beyond, occupy several volumes in his pioneering production. He won a number of prizes and fellowships for his critical work: a Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation fellowship in 1977, the Luigi Russo prize in 1978, the Howard R. Marraro prize in 1978, an ACLS grant in 1978, and NEH fellowships in 1979 and 1986.
The reader seeking an overview of Fido’s development and principles as a literary critic could not do better than to read the five-page intellectual biography, Considerazioni sul mio mestiere (Reflections on My Profession), first published in 1999 in the periodical Il lettore di provincia and later included in his book Nell’alveare della memoria of 2012. Here are a few excerpts in translation:
I prefer to describe myself more as a literary historian than as a critic, bearing in mind of course that the empirical operation that enables us to recognize the literary object of which we are attempting to write the history by setting it apart from other contexts and materials, is an indispensable preliminary. The best I can do is to qualify the title of “historian” with additional attributes. “Eighteenth-century historian,” to begin with. […] Furthermore, especially in the case of the authors with whom I have been most concerned – Goldoni who spent the last thirty years of his life in France, Baretti who spent his last twenty-five years in London – I am practically obliged to be a comparatist. Without a sufficiently precise knowledge of the works and ideas of Molière or Voltaire or Doctor Johnson, how could I tell whether Goldoni and Baretti were saying something original or simply citing their foreign models and friends? […] I feel that I am above all a scholar, or, as I previously put it, a historian, at once both eclectic and an ‘artisan’. When I approach a text – and texts are the raw material of my work, just as the human body is the raw material of the medical practitioner – I try to learn as much as possible about that text, beginning with its textual history […] and concluding with its posthumous fortune.
From the great artisans whom I most admire – Leo Spitzer, Jean Starobinsky, Mario Praz, Carlo Dionisotti, Jean Rousset, and others whom contemporary estimation may classify as dinosaurs – I hope to have learned to respect our métier. This consists, as far as I am concerned, in transmitting to our students a taste for works of literature and the technical competence needed to handle with proper care those precious objects, at the same time indestructible and fragile, in order to describe them exhaustively for the benefit of that other broader category of users upon whom we depend economically – our audience of common readers. In fact, situating a text in its proper historical context, and proceeding to describe it as precisely as possible, applying the most appropriate critical categories, seems to me the quintessence of our work. At least this is the result that I strive to achieve.
Machiavelli, storia della critica. Palermo: Palumbo, 1965 (2nd ed. 2013).
Giuseppe Baretti, Opere. Edited by Fido, Milan: Classici Rizzoli, 1967.
Guida a Goldoni: Teatro e società nel Settecento. Turin: Einaudi, 1977 (Howard R. Marraro Prize).
Le metamorfosi del centauro: Studi e letture da Boccaccio a Pirandello. Rome: Bulzoni, 1977 (Luigi Russo Prize).
Da Venezia all’Europa: Prospettive sull’ultimo Goldoni. Rome: Bulzoni, 1984.
Il paradiso dei buoni compagni: Capitoli di storia letteraria veneta. Padua: Antenore, 1988.
Il regime delle simmetrie imperfette: Studi sul “Decameron”. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1988.
Carlo Goldoni, La guerra e Il quartiere fortunato. Edited by Fido. Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1988.
Le muse perdute e ritrovate: Il divenire dei generi letterari fra Sette e Ottocento. Florence: Vallecchi, 1989.
Introduction. Carlo Goldoni, The Holiday Trilogy. Trans. A Oldcorn. New York: Marsilio Classics, 1992.
Machiavelli, Guicciardini e storici minori del primo Cinquecento. Padua: Piccin Nuova Libraria, 1994.
Le inquietudini di Goldoni: saggi e letture. Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1995.
La serietà del gioco. Svaghi letterari e teatrali nel Settecento. Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1998.
Studies for Dante. Essays in Honor of Dante Della Terza. Edited by F Fido, RA Syska-Lamparska and PD Stewart. Florence: Cadmo, 1998.
Introduction. Carlo Goldoni, The Coffee-House. Trans. J Parzen. New York: Marsilio Classics, 1999.
Nuova guida a Goldoni. Turin: Einaudi, 2000.
Viaggi in Italia di don Chisciotte e Sancio e altri studi sul Settecento. Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2006.
I desideri e la morte. Studi di letteratura italiana. Pisa: Pacini Editore, 2007.
L’avvocato di buon gusto: nuovi studi goldoniani. Ravenna: Longo, 2008.
Nell’alveare della memoria: ultimi incontri letterari. Edited by B Anglani. Rome: Aracne, 2012.