For the records, I am Luigi Di Mauro, born at Sutri, Viterbo, fifty years ago, but to my friends and acquaintances I am Lillo.
My schooling trained me to be a chemical engineer but that was not my real vocation. I was more attracted to poetry and literature than to chemical formulae. I read ""Boys of Life" and discovered through Pasolini the world around me.
The lesson of our great socialist intellectual constituted my scholastic background , the track upon which my existence unfolded..
My different sensibility grew within the new spaces opened up by the struggles for emancipation of the 70's.
The idea force of the struggle against social homologation in the capitalist consumer system, where everything is controlled by laws of the market, indicates the nature of my commitment in art and poetry circles and in society and politics.
I have written poetry, taken part in theatrical productions like "A dream taken by the tail" adapted from the novel of Garcia Lorca ,and directed by Dominot. This was described on the cultural page of "La Reubblica as "The little pearl of the Italian avante guarde" and "A gesture for P.P. Pasolini" dedicated to the death of the poet.
The meeting with Sandro Bartolucci and the poets of the avante guarde of Rieti, inspired the birth of my first cycle of poems "In silence . weaving thoughts"(1981)
I have set up theatre workshops for the Comune of Rome, and worked in the social sphere of co-operatives and the third sector, and have also been responsible for pepping up the Green Points of numerous co-operatives.
Feeling the need to participate as homosexual in the struggle for rights and the value of differences has meant meeting and collaborating with the leading intellectuals and artists who founded L'ARCI Gay in Rome in 1985.
I have lived through historic democratic struggles together with the Circolo Mario Mieli of Rome and Il Cassero di Bologna, together with companions and unforgettable friends including Marco Bisceglie, Francesco Gnerre, Marco Mattolini, Giovanni Forti, Sandro Bartolucci, Vanno Piccolo, Marco Sanna, Andrea Pini.
In the 80's I published three more collections of poetry, "Enchantment of wind", "Respect for Time" and "Like a puff"(1989), with the collaboration of Sandro Bartolucci and Corrado Levi.
Thanks to the foundamental ideas and humanity of Ledsa Colombini, I came to understand the importance of work in prisons, of contributing to the democratisation of penalties and the social and human rehabilitation of detainees.
I have designed and organized numerous projects aimed at social re-integration, and social-cultural projects for detainees, minors at risk, the old and those of different abilities. From 1987 I have been a member of the Cooperativa Cecilia, working as an assistant in the homes of the elderly and handicapped and with minors subject to court orders.
Currently I am responsible for the "Justice Area " and the "Centro Giovani La Bulla"(Youth Centre) of the Cooperativa Cecilia and President of the Permanent Citizens Council for Penitentiary Problems for the Comune of Rome.
They say of my poetry
"Poetry, it cannot be repeated too often, is a very rare bird, a mysterious gift that touches few and few times. It passes through complex instruments - the poetic word, the sentence, rhythm - but it arrives as poetry only if it gushes from necessity, from deep emotion, from feeling beyond compassion, exhaltation, gaiety, pain. It descends from interrrupted vigilance, from extreme knowledge of expressive means, but it must come to those who read, who listen, as spontaneouis, immediate. It repeats what exists in its fullness and truth.
Does this happen with poets present on the pages that follow? In each of them, it seems to me, the word comes to birth from long underground work, suffered, enjoyed. And each reflects passionately his own universe and the expectations and errors which belong to him.
In the verses of Lillo Di Mauro looms the threat of the poetic sought at all costs and Sandro Penna is the ghost that from time to time shows himself in gracefulness of a loved youth, in the delicateness of countryside evoked. Even in the feverish metre, in exact phonemes there is an intense need of love and abbandon to the dream as spell and reached desire. "
Elio Pecora - Note on the four poets - Sandro Bartolucci, Lillo Di Mauro, Saverio Maggio, Lucio Micheli - SODOMA homosexual magazine of culture - year II n°2 summer, autumn 1985.
"Lillo Di Mauro, his intense rhymes, like a sort of dripping, are loaded with the subtle eroticism of classical nitidness, so come between Saffo and Penna. The poet evokes "clean" images ironically from a classical and post-modern world at the same time, where even lavatories become sublime gardens of Eros."
Lucio Scardino, poet and writer
"Coming to you means always finding something which trembles, which gets lost also, at times it is even annihilated; but always with a shine, demonstrating facts and consequences, with a nitidness which takes from the truth of some things its weight, makes it suddenly aesthetic, carries it a little above the line (as musicians say), on to acute and moderate levels of pleasure.
What limits? Tart, of course, because you have to do with the things containing a kind of malice, any rate disrespect (and there must be in your memory, of spirit or body, something that justifies this). But also props, I believe, by the design of your figure, laminated and straight, like jambs to things which, if they have to travel, must take a downhill course, and without great noise.
So then I see the city that we are passing through together, the architecture and bodies. If you have Etruscan, in you, it remains very much alive, and dreaming memories of travels in Greece, and he knows more about vase paintings than marbles.
There is a your way, there is in your poetry, a connecting of the Mitreo with the villa Savorelli whic immediately links the geometric style with the visceral which is in rites and beyond the tomb. Emerged from the earth, a little like Proserpina".
Sandro Bartolucci , poet and writer
"Short poems, flashes, illuminations, these form the book of Lillo Di Mauro. Almost explosions of tenderness which change into words when the heart can no longer contain them.
It is still the enchantment of wind, and not only of wind but of the word that seeks to recreate and sublimate emotions and memories, enchantment and falling in love that induce the writer to deny values and wisdom that does not coincide with a gesture of love, that puts the poet beyond rewards of aesthetics or wealth, for a sad or happy fate".
Carmelo Pirrera, Publisher
