A leading figure in the culture of tradition has disappeared. A reference that has always linked utopia to philosophy with philosophical elegance and this to a theology between eschatology, Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Piero Vassallo. He was born in Genoa in 1933.
In one of his latest books, which I had the honor of presenting at the headquarters of the Free Writers’ Union in Rome, the subtle scratch of the subsoil of is intertwined with that land of Thule so dear to a friend of ancient brotherhood.
Piero, Tommaso Romano and I have undertaken a project of existence and culture. The book in question was “A train in the philosophizing night. Chronicle of a journey between nightmare and theology “, Edizioni Solfanelli, with which the publisher has published several latest books that create a hereditary identity
The central point revolved around travel as a philosophy and thinking as creativity in the Idea. But his studies from Mignosi to Vico, from Solzhenicyn to Primo Siena are the historical and spiritual result of intertwining the time of cyclicality with the sacredness of the metaphysical. Studies published in the Thule editions of Palermo.
On that afternoon of Roman May 2013 we spoke, as often happened to us in our meetings, of intellectuals with whom we had shared values and heritage, always in the wake of tradition, Francesco Grisi had passed away for over a decade.
His delving into the models of initiatory spiritualism led us to a problematic discussion up to the point of touching Gentile’s philosophical anthropology, to whom he had dedicated a writing of considerable interest: “Gentile l’Italiano”, Bibliotheca edizioni, Rome 2005.
Already in 1963 he published “Girolamo Savonarola (biographical profile, unpublished)”. In 1965 “The spirit of the Risorgimento” and between 1972 and 1974 he wrote “New world and worldly apocalypse, an essay on the neognostic influence in political thought” and an essay “Su Teilhard de Chardin”. There was a second phase of his studies of him in which he intertwined traditionalism and the sacred as real and utopian realism. I refer to the years of Thule with Tommaso Romano.
He published “From the new world to freedom Solzhenitsyn prophet of the postmodern age”, 1976, “In hoc signo Orientations for a Christian militia in the civil order”, 1976, “Vico philosopher of the Counter-Reformation”, 1976, “Revolutionary nationalism and Christian nationalism” , 1977. The collaboration with Thule continued for years until it reached a composite and articulated research with texts on the monarchy, on Christianity, and a text with several voices, to which I, Tommaso, Pino Tosca, Isabella Rauti gave a contribution: “Beyond modernity. The Tradition ”, which constituted a true document on popular Traditionalism, was 1989.
The path touched other elements in the wake of a reflection that concerned “The gnosis of the subsoil”. His relations with Baget Bozzo and then his bond with Cardinal Siri were elements of an incisive reflection precisely on the theme of spirituality and literature.
The Syndicate was one of those fundamental voices and our conferences in Rome, Genoa, Palermo, Caserta and Taranto gave a tangible sign of a culture, at that time, in which the culture embodied by the right had become a phenomenological confrontation between spirituality, in fact, and literature. Works such as “Itineraries of the Catholic right”, Solfanelli, 2010, “Continuity of spurious gnosis in the Italian right of the twentieth century”, “Icons of the false right”, again with Solfanelli in 2010, date back to this phase.
With Solfanelli, in fact, he opened a further path whose contributions range from “Counter-poisons and antidotes to weak thinking
Short thoughts in the long night “,” Future and Tradition “,” Giuseppe Bottai “,” Icons of the false right “,” Itineraries of the Catholic right “,” A Fascism and the Italian Tradition “,” Reason and Faith “,” A train in the philosophical night, “The journey of the twentieth century”. A life spent to tell and make people understand what Piero himself called “atheistic delirium” and the nightmares that make this the failure of thought embedded in modernity, always reborn between translation and the future.
We must remain exhausted because exhaustion is already the crack in the dark. We must be aware of exhaustion but we must never consider ourselves finished. The man who traced Piero is beyond that Papinian vision, to which I remained tied, however, and remains in the Christ of the complete resurrection. Tradition has its sacredness precisely in the Christian journey which is a truth that overcomes every illusion, every catastrophe, every abyss. It is here that he read or even culturally glimpsed the Italian re-foundation.
In that “Philosophical train in the night”, published by Solfanelli, there is his testament.
The confession. In Vassallo as in Zambrano it became a literary genre. A testament of harmony, faith and culture but also a reading of the time of lightness in the confession of the itinerant irony between the page and life.
The port of call remains the presence of Francesco Grisi, teacher of all of us, who proposes a revolution of the spirit through questions and forms of enigmaticity. In fact, a comment on the text reads: “In the surprise ending, Christian hope is proposed through the sparkling paradoxes and the enigmatic and reckless expressions of the traditional-futurist poet Francesco Grisi”.
A revolutionary in a revolution where faith is tradition and tradition is silence in the search for a path between truth and dilemma. From Vico to De Maistre perhaps but the time of religion in Piero is the time of Christ. All in those “Short thoughts of the long night”, also published by Solfanelli in which a note underlines: “The aim pursued by Vassallo is to actualize the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas understood as an effective and insurmountable obstacle to the unpunished circulation of modern thought in ‘sapiential’ environments dedicated to the imaginary tradition “. In this tradition, the infinite needs the sacred to stand up.
Piero knew this well. As he well knew the link between memory and history defined in his latest text published by Solfanelli and written with Sergio Pessot: “The journey of the twentieth century. Intellectual and political influence
of the Italian revolution abroad “. Here he confesses therefore through some writers who basically accompanied all of us: Charles Maurras, the first Jacques Maritain, Henri Massis, Georges Valois, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound, Josef Tiso, Corneliu Codreanu, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Marcel de Corte, Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Maurice Bardèche. A spiritual geography in a time horizon. Cultural traditionalism in the metaphysical revolution between the crisis of modernity and phenomenology is a journey between rocks and descents of thoughts. High up the hearts we said to each other. Between spirituality and metaphysics this is what we live. An idea. A philosophy. Christ as the beginning and never the end.