Brief notice in the Telegraph:
May 18, aged 79. Avant-garde Italian poet, novelist, critic and co-founder, in the early 1960s, of Gruppo 63, a group of experimental writers. Between 1979 and 1983 was a Communist Party deputy in the Italian parliament, and liked to describe himself as “the last Marxist”. An authority on Dante, he taught at universities in Turin, Salerno and Genoa. Translator of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. An unremitting pessimist, he recently complained that “the political situation is disastrous, with a mass of proletarians and underclass proletarians in extreme difficulty, and who no longer are aware that they are”.