The Beginnings

I met poet, publisher, bookseller, artist, and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti in North Beach, San Francisco, on Monday, February 4, 2013. Our meeting happened by pure chance in one of those old Italian joints on Columbus Avenue. I had just moved from Italy to San Francisco via New York City — the cradle of my American upbringing after nearly a decade bouncing back and forth across the Atlantic.

Previously, I had asked a couple of friends involved in cultural organizations: “Is it possible to meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti?”

I knew very little about him. I owed that small knowledge — and big curiosity — to philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In his literary critique On the superiority of Anglo-American Literature, Deleuze depicted Ferlinghetti as “the poet who wrote in the fourth person singular.”

Deleuze meant Ferlinghetti’s distinct poetic voice, capable of dissolving boundaries of self, time, and ego.

While his writing appears simple and mimetically transparent, his words bear a poetic opacity, humorously pointing above and beyond matter and memory, art and life.

“Lawrence gets you laughing, then hits you with the truth.” That one-liner from his dear friend and sincere admirer Francis Ford Coppola encapsulates Ferlinghetti’s poetic essence — humor fused with depth.

Getting back to my tale, the answers to my question about meeting Ferlinghetti were more or less unanimous: “Ferlinghetti? Too old.” “Too frail.” “Rarely seen at City Lights.” “No longer available for interviews or meetings.” “Forget about it.”

I had a moon shot in mind, though: a video interview with San Francisco’s first Poet Laureate on the occasion of 2013’s Year of Italian Culture in the US. Appropriate at a time when Silicon Valley’s tech boom was exponentially threatening the old soul of the City by the Bay.

So, it felt like a moment of sheer fate when the man suddenly entered the restaurant where I was having lunch with one of my old Sicilian fishermen friends.

In a slow-motion blink, Ferlinghetti’s silhouette appeared from the sunlit sidewalk and stepped into the dim restaurant like an epiphany.

I stood instinctively and greeted the bard of San Francisco with joy. He responded without missing a beat: “Mi dispiace, io non parlo inglese; parlo solo nordbiccese.” (I’m sorry, I don’t speak English; only North-Beachian.) We exchanged a conspiratorial smile. 

Ferlinghetti was 94. I was 38.

That moment marked the beginning of our seminal friendship.

In The Middle — The Orchid And The Bee

We quickly became compagni intellettuali (intellectual companions). For the last seven years of his life, we collaborated in his home office — reading and writing emails; organizing interviews with journalists from around the world; translating from Sicilian, French, Italian, and English; curating exhibitions; filming; photographing; and writing and editing his final poem and novel. Beyond our working collaboration, we shared several intimate rituals around the table at my house. There, my wife, Eva, and our two little kids, Federico and Penelope, enjoyed readings of Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends and some of Lawrence’s own poems. 

Ferlinghetti became part of our family, savoring our Sicilian home cooking and the stories of the Old Continent. Eventually, I had to become his eyes — the poet was nearly blind from degenerative macular disease. I helped him finish his last novel, Little Boy, his final dream, published on the occasion of his 100th birthday. His New York publisher, Doubleday, presented it to the global press and overseas publishing houses as an “unapologetically unclassifiable work,” blending autobiographical elements with fractured, nocturnal, orphic narrative. And the houses promptly competed for the rights to translate and publish it into Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Czech, and British editions.

A metalinguistic and meta-existential testament, the novel is crafted with a quintessential love for literature. It unleashes “the cries of birds” as “not cries of ecstasy but cries of despair.” Cries for our planet and humankind, caught “in the Sixth Extinction of life on this earth.” This final statement made Lawrence, in his own terms, a “lyric poet,” unearthing his emblematic declaration from long before in Poetry as Insurgent Art.

Following in the footsteps of James Joyce’s Bloomsday, in celebration of Lawrence’s 100th birthday, we petitioned the City and County of San Francisco to proclaim March 24 as “Ferlinghetti Day.” This has blossomed into a feast of poetry in his name, with his words echoing through readers across the world. During that special week in March 2019, I was elated to shovel the first earth for a Mediterranean olive tree in his honor — a symbol of peace and a living sculpture blooming with hope and love — in front of Via Ferlinghetti in North Beach.

Light! More Light! Arrivederci!

On the afternoon of February 22, 2021, while I was walking along the Great Highway by Ocean Beach, bathing in one of those glorious winter sunsets, I found a poignant message on my answering machine from Ferlinghetti’s beloved son, Lorenzo: “Mauro, Dad is in the process of dying.”

Minutes later, I was at Ferlinghetti’s bedside with Lorenzo and a dear family friend, Kate, staying until just a few hours before his final moments. His breathing creaked like a small wooden boat drifting into darkness with a fishing lantern — signaling streams of unconsciousness fading into the “great sweet mother.” In those final moments, Ferlinghetti was perfectly framed before my eyes in a mise en abyme; his final painting — a white-and-gray scene of a man fishing alone in a boat — hung beside his bed. Ulysses was on his way back home.

A month later, on March 24 — the day that would have been his 102nd birthday — I created a Fluxus performance in his name, lighting up City Hall’s Rotunda at sunset in the colors of the Italian flag. The San Francisco Chronicle filmed the entire event. I told Ferlinghetti’s impossible underdog story. I spoke about San Francisco — “the city,” in Ferlinghetti’s words, “of the anarchist poet, Francis of Assisi, who also happened to be a saint.” It’s a city whose peculiar, ever-changing light, thanks to the Bay and the Pacific, bathes it in an island glow that has drawn visionaries, pioneers, and trailblazers in every field for nearly two centuries. The city with the highest percentage of skies per capita, where there is room for dreams and poetry. I read Ferlinghetti’s poems and conjugated the Italian verb fluxare — a word he invented to mean “fulfill your own dreams, live life to the fullest, make love without touching.”

Whenever Ferlinghetti was asked for his recipe for a healthy and meaningful life, he revealed his secret in Italian: “Mangia bene. Ridi . Ama molto.” (Eat well. Laugh often. Love much.) It was exactly the kind of feast of friends and family we used to share in my house, where he always added a ritornello for our kids, a magical spice, essential to lighting the sacred fire of life: “Tenderness. Live with tenderness.”