ABSTRACT
My first encounter with Edoardo Sanguineti happened in a fatefully fortuitous way: taking the same elevator in Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, in a very distant November — 1976, I believe, when I was still a very young man. It was at the time of a momentous conference on Palazzeschi inaugurated by Montale, whom I met very fleetingly on that occasion. It was a conference, moreover, on which I reported (from perspectives that only a few years later I would judge questionable) for a commendable page in a weekly periodical, still splendidly edited today by my good friend Mariapia Bonanate. It was at the same time that Tommaso, the grandfather after whom I am named (and who bore my same surname), would unexpectedly pass away, while calling out for me — something which I found out only when it was too late. Something so shifting and crucial was happening around the words of the ‘man made of smoke’: everything converging and diverging, destinies and identities, the pulley of an elevator ride towards the unknown of a dimension on a different plane. Less than two years later, I would not be the same and even my name (or rather my surname) would be another; and all this right from the person of that ineffable encounter in the Palazzeschian elevator in an incendiary ascent.
