20th-century Italian male writers

Giovanni Testori (Novate Milanese, 12 May 1923 – Milan, 16 March 1993) was an Italian writer, journalist, poet, art and literary critic, dramatist, screenplay writer, theatrical director and painter.

Leonardo Sinisgalli (1908–1981) was an Italian poet and art critic active from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Sinisgalli was born in Montemurro, Basilicata. His early education and career led to him being called the "engineer poet".
In 1925, Sinisgalli moved to Rome where he studied engineering and mathematics. After completing his engineering degree in 1932, he moved to Milan where he worked as an architect and graphic artist. He was a close friend of the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti and painter Scipione. He worked at Milan for architecture and graphic design projects.
Sinisgalli's early collections such as Cuore (1927), 18 poesie (1936), Campi Elisi (1939) focused on themes from ancestral southern Italian myths. Later he explored a more relaxed style in I nuovi Campi Elisi (1947), La vigna vecchia (1952), L'età della luna (1962), Il passero e il lebbroso (1970), Mosche in bottiglia (1975) and Dimenticatoio (1978). He authored prose that analyzed the conflicts of existentialism and realism such as Fiori pari, fiori dispari (1945) and Belliboschi (1948). He also explored the scientific culture of the day in Furor mathematicus (1944) and Horror vacui (1945).
Sinisgalli founded and managed the magazine Civiltà delle Macchine (1953–1959), and was a member of the Scuola Romana. He also created two documentaries which consecutively won the Biennale di Venezia awards and edited radio broadcasting programmes.
He died in Rome in 1981.

Pier Maria (P.M.) Pasinetti (24 June 1913, Venice, Italy – 8 July 2006, Venice, Italy) was a novelist, professor and journalist.
P. M. Pasinetti went to the U.S. in 1935 to study literature and writing. He spent some time at the Louisiana State University and developed a friendship with "Southern Fellowship" poet and writer Robert Penn Warren.

Guido Morselli (August 15, 1912 – July 30, 1973) was an Italian novelist and essayist.

Luciano Bianciardi (Italian pronunciation: [luˈtʃaːno bjanˈtʃardi]; 14 December 1922 – 14 November 1971) was an Italian journalist, translator and writer of short stories and novels.
He contributed significantly to the cultural ferment in post-war Italy, working actively with various publishing houses, magazines and newspapers. His work is characterized by periods of rebellion against the cultural establishment, to which he also belonged, and by a careful analysis of social habits during Italian economic miracle.
He was the first Italian translator of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent and Travels with Charley, Jack London's John Barleycorn, J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man and William Faulkner's A Fable and The Mansion.
Among the others, he also translated: Stephen Crane's Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage, Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud, Osamu Dazai's The Setting Sun, Cyril Northcote Parkinson's Parkinson's Law, Mary Renault's The King Must Die, Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy, Irwin Shaw's Tip on a Dead Jockey, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited, Richard Brautigan's A Confederate General from Big Sur, Thomas Berger's Little Big Man and Killing Time.

Franco Lucentini (Italian pronunciation: [ˈfraŋko lutʃenˈtiːni]; 24 December 1920 – 5 August 2002) was an Italian writer, journalist, translator and editor of anthologies.

Marcello Marchesi (Italian pronunciation: [marˈtʃɛllo marˈkeːzi; -eːsi]; 4 April 1912 – 19 July 1978) was an Italian author, screenwriter and film director. He wrote more than 60 films between 1939 and 1977. He also directed six films between 1951 and 1952. He was born in Milan and died in San Giovanni di Sinis, Cabras, Italy.

Giuseppe Patroni Griffi (26 February 1921 – 15 December 2005) was an Italian playwright, screenwriter, director and author.He was born in Naples in an aristocratic family and moved to Rome immediately after the end of World War II and spent his professional life there. Patroni Griffi is considered one of the most prominent contributors to Italian theater and film in post-war Italy.
Roberto Rossellini made a film from his play Anima nera.
His first listed film writing credit was on the 1952 musical Canzoni di mezzo secolo. Patroni Griffi would later direct Charlotte Rampling, Elizabeth Taylor, Marcello Mastroianni, Laura Antonelli, Florinda Bolkan, Terence Stamp, Fabio Testi.
Patroni Griffi was also involved with numerous television productions of lyric opera, including Verdi's La Traviata. His many theatrical productions include works by Pirandello, Eduardo De Filippo, Jean Cocteau and Tennessee Williams. As a writer, he published a first collection of stories in 1955, Ragazzo di Trastevere. Later, he contributed significantly to the body of Italian gay literature with Scende giù per Toledo and La morte della bellezza, both set in Naples.
He died in Rome.

Giovanni Placido Agostino Pascoli (Italian: [dʒoˈvanni ˈpaskoli]; 31 December 1855 – 6 April 1912) was an Italian poet, classical scholar and an emblematic figure of Italian literature in the late nineteenth century. Alongside Gabriele D'Annunzio, he was one of the greatest Italian decadent poets.

Federico Zeri (12 August 1921 – 5 October 1998) was an Italian art historian specialised in Italian Renaissance painting. He wrote for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, and was a well known television-personality in Italy.Zeri was born in central Rome, and graduated from Sapienza University of Rome in 1945. Not wishing to enter the academic world, he worked in the Ministry of Public Education until 1952. In 1948 he was nominated director of Galleria Spada in Rome.In 1963 Zeri was among the founding members of the Getty Villa's board of trustees. He left in 1984, after his argument that the Getty kouros was a forgery and should not be bought, was rejected.Following this episode, Zeri became notorious for denouncing forgeries and misattributions. In 1984, when four students in Livorno hoaxed both the city and Modigliani experts into believing that a group of sculptures they have made were authentic, he was one of the few who called on their amateurish style. Zeri also argued that some of the frescoes in the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi, were made by Pietro Cavallini and not Giotto. Zeri's insistence that a painting can be attributed to an artist, by means of a careful examination or connoisseurship, without resort to external evidence such as documents or dates, met controversial responses.Zeri edited and researched catalogues of the collections of many institutions, including the Frederick Mason Perkins collection in the Sacro Convento in Assisi; Accademia Carrara; Museo Civico Amedeo Lia, La Spezia; Galleria Spada, Rome; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. and Narodna Galerija in Ljubljana (with Ksenija Rozman).
Zeri died at the age of 77, in his villa in Mentana on 5 October 1998. He bequeathed his estate to the University of Bologna, complete with his library and papers, a collection of about 400 ancient inscriptions and a grand collection of photographs. Most photographs documented artworks from Italy and elsewhere, some done by himself and some acquired from other collections, including part of the collection of Evelyn Sandberg-Vavalà. The collections and accompanying database are managed, partly digitized, by the Federico Zeri Foundation.All through his life, Zeri maintained close connections with Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi, and his teacher Pietro Toesca. He taught art history at the University of Rome, and had visiting positions at Harvard, where he delivered a series of lectures on Lauro De Bosis in 1962, and at the Columbia University in New York.