Lawrence Ferlighetti: starting from San Francisco
Performance in words, lights and music featuring poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, writer Fernanda Pivano, trumpeter Enrico Rava, pianist Dado Moroni, and actor Oreste Castagna

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is one of the most influential poets of our time. He is a revolutionary, lyrical and political poet. He makes constant efforts to bring poetry and its messages into the lives of ordinary people.
In 1958 he wrote in the Chicago Review: " Poetry which has been heard lately could be called street poetry. It involves getting poets to come out of their inner esthetic sanctuaries where they have remained too long contemplating their complicated bellybuttons. It involves bringing the poets back on the road where they once were, out of the classrooms, out of the universities and actually out of print. The printed word has always made poetry silent. But the poetry I'm talking about is spoken poetry, poetry conceived as an oral message. Sometimes read with jazz music sometimes not...what's important is that this poetry uses eyes and ears in a way they haven't been used for years."
This is not an abstract manifest; it is a way of life that Ferlinghetti applied to his existence and to his work. He manifested pacifist traits even in the Fifties, one of America's darkest periods during which discrimination and intolerance seemed to have replaced the ideals of liberty and democracy that had just been restored to the world by the World War. Ferlinghetti saw service in the U.S. Navy and took part in the bloody D-Day invasion of Normandy. Shortly thereafter he discovered, by chance, the jottings of Jacques Prévert on a paper napkin.
His life is made up of a series of prestigious encounters and recognitions. When City Lights, his famous publisher/bookstore in San Francisco, published Ginsberg's Howl, in 1956, he was arrested and tried. His trial was one of the most famous literary trials of all time. Hundreds of writers, poets, and men and women of culture wrote to express their solidarity. The following year, collection of his verses, A Coney Island of a Mind, was extraordinarily successful; it sold over one million copies and shot onto the poetry best-seller lists.
His fame increased further with the publication of Paroles, a collection of his translations of poems by Prévert. These are the years of San Francisco's so-called Renaissance. Dozens of poets, like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas, gather for public and private readings at coffee shops and bookstores (City Lights) for extraordinary multimedia performances with musicians and painters.
In the Sixties, the pacifist culture of the "flower children" was spreading around the world, and on the 11th of June 1965, at the Royal Albert Hall of London, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg and Corso read their poems to an audience of 7000, thus introducing the new beat scene to Europe.
By then Ferlinghetti had become an internationally renowned poet. The Mayor of San Francisco even declared a special Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day to honor his ongoing work in cultural education and awareness.
In 1980, he celebrated the 25th anniversary of City Lights at Paris' Polyphonix 2 Grand Festival International de Poésie organized by the American Center.

Fernanda Pivano, essayist, journalist and writer, is an acute interpreter of American culture. Her long and prestigious career has been dedicated to the tireless work of translating, researching and familiarizing readers with the literature and poetry of the United States of America. In July 1995, to recognize her efforts, The New Yorker ran an article entitled Thank You Fernanda. She has edited the works of major American authors like Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Anderson, and Gertrude Stein. She has followed the Beat Generation since its genesis. Her works have won numerous international awards and recognitions.

 Enrico Rava