It came out in Naples in june 1990, founded by Roberto Pasanisi in collaboration with one of his students, a new international poetry and literature review, Nuove Lettere (New Letters), sponsored by the Presidency of the District of Naples and published by the ITALIAN INSTITUTE OF CULTURE INNAPLES (prominent Organization in the Campania Region recognized by the Ministry of Culture). The prestigious editorial staff is composed of Roberto Pasanisi (also director), Alberto Bevilacqua, Constantin Frosin, Antonio Illiano, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Mario Susko, Násos Vaghenás, Nguyen Van Hoan; the editor in chief is Vittorio Lucariello; the secretarial office is managed by Maria Peruzzini. They had belonged to it since the beginning till the untimely passing away, Dario Bellezza, Franco Fortini and Giorgio Saviane.
“Nuove Lettere”, high number printed, delivered all over the world, is constantly growing and it has made its name known now as one of the most prestigious reviews in its specific area.
Divided into five sections (Poetry, Fiction, Essays, Reviews and News), it was born to bridge a gap: fearless standing on the ‘border area’ between ‘academic culture’ and ‘artists’ culture’, aims to build a kind of trait d’union between the “academic reviews” and the “militant reviews”, marked, as everybody knows, by a too much rigid separation.
Nuove Lettere refers, from the planning point of view, through its name, to the famous Hellenic review Tà néa grámmata, which has marked, not many years before, the renewal and rebirth of the neo-greek literature in the 20th century, starting some of the greatest Hellenic poets of the century. It means, in fact, to make space for, besides the institutionalized names of the European literary panorama, also new writers who, even if very talented, are still unknown, either because of their young age or because out of the cultural Establishment.
If, on the one hand, Universities, become pure places of bureaucratic and political power, have progressively been losing their institutional role as cultural working out and meditation on art fulcrum; if, on the other hand the ‘militant intellectuals’ let themselves be guiltily tamed by the power in the reassuring shadow of the Media Great Brother, Nuove Lettere – convinced of the rescueing role of art, a real ‘last shore’ for mankind – does not mean to forget the criticism task to the system and its institutions (especially if this is, like ours, ruined and corrupted): therefore, the Weltanschauung of the review is close, from the philosophical point of view, to that one of the Frankfurt School.
So, “Nuove Lettere”, the only one review in its kind, was born, it is no coincidence, in Naples: no man’s land, where, in the tragic coexistence of Eden and Hell, it is becoming more and more dramatic the gap between ‘intelligentsia’ and ‘common people’, while in the daily trench warfare for the ‘quality of life’, dirtiness, inefficiencies and crime (in its most varied expressions) are gaining day by day new ground, while the institutions are completely absent.
“Nuove Lettere” was introduced on the 14th of march 1991 at “Circolo della Stampa” in Naples, edited by the “Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici”, by Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, Alberto Mario Moriconi and Roberto Pasanisi.
Giorgio Barberi Squarotti – Alberto Mario Moriconi – Roberto Pasanisi, Presentazione di “Nuove Lettere”, I, 1, 1990 (Circolo della Stampa, Napoli, a cura dell’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici e dell’Associazione «Incontri con l’autore», 14/III/1991)