Leading Neo-Hellenist Mario Viti passed away yesterday (February 14) at the age of 97 in Rome after a long journey of research and association with Neo-Greek writing and literature.

The Italian neo-Hellenist Mario Vitti was born in 1926 in Istanbul, where he lived for the first 20 years of his life. In 1946 he settled in Rome, where he studied philology and systematically developed his relationship with Greek literature, a relationship that began as early as his school days in his hometown.

He worked at Italian universities and taught for a long time as a visiting professor at the Universities of Thessaloniki, Paris and Geneva. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in Thessaloniki, Paris and Nicosia.

His catalytic contribution to Greek writing was made with the History of Modern Greek Literature, originally written in Italian (Storia della Leteratura Neogreca, Turin, 1971), which was published in 1978 in Greek and then updated and revised in 2003, again in Greek. .

In Italy, he published Greek texts, which he himself discovered as a result of persistent research, such as the work of T. Monzelese “Eugenia” (1965), the dialogue of N. Sofianos (1966), the collection of texts by A. Kalvos (A. Kalvos ei suoi scritti on Italian, 1960). He first introduced the poetry of Odysseus Elytis in Italy in 1952 and later published a collection of his poems and prose texts (Opere, Poesia, Prosa, 1982).

His anthology Poesia Greca del Novecento (1957) was the first attempt to translate into Italian as well as to evaluate Greek poetry of the 20th century from a historical and critical point of view, just as he later wrote A History of Modern Greek Literature.

In Greece, his books were published with the correspondence of A. Kalvos (“Sources of the biography of Kalvos”, 1963) and studies: “The ideological function of Greek ethnography” (1974), “Generation of thirty”, “Ideology and form” (1977). ), The Elytis, bibliography (1977), Wear and Word, an introduction to the poetry of Giorgos Seferis (1978), Elytis, a critical study (1974), Kalvos and its Age (1995), For Odysseus Elytis (1998). The volume Office with a View (2006) contains articles published in literary magazines and newspapers, speeches, and his extensive oeuvre.

In his last book, “The city where I was born, Istanbul, 1926-1946”, he describes the first 20 years of his life, the Italian, Greek, as well as multi-ethnic environment in which he grew up, before leaving the city and deciding to become an Italian neo-Hellenist, in Rome.

The departure ceremony will take place in Rome, in a close family circle, as he himself wanted. He will be greeted by his two sons, Massimo and Paolo, and five grandchildren, who will be by his side until the last moment. Without his beloved Alexandra, with whom he lived together for 70 years and lost her six months ago.

His work, intimately connected with his life, will remain a lasting testimony to the bridges he created between Italy, Greece and Turkey, the Italian neo-Hellenist Mario Vitti, born in Constantinople, Genoa, Cappadocia, with the second homeland of Greece, inhabitant of the world.