In the mid-1990s, news broke that poet Dario Bellezza - who was friends with Sandro Penna, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Anna Maria Ortese, and Pier Paolo Pasolini - had AIDS: this was the beginning of the end for him. Today, friends, poets and literary critics tell the story of the first openly gay writer of Italian literature, one of the symbols of a thriving cultural scene. They called him 'Italy's poète maudit', to which his snarky response would be: "If anything, I was blessed, blessed by the Muses".
A diplomatic incident threatens to break out a war inside Europe that only an unlikely couple of bickering lovers seems able to stop.
Barbara Alberti is a writer.