Tag: Moreno Giovannoni

A Short History Of My Sentimental Education

SoutherlyBlog

By Moreno Giovannoni A Sentimental Education My father who died a few weeks ago left me a legacy. He left me the Italian language and Italy and he left me a book. Working backwards through that list of three, the book he left buried inside me and I had to work hard to make it come out. The Italian language he left all around me although over time it became tarnished. But that’s OK. You can’t live in a foreign country like Australia all your life and not start to lose the pristine first language of your youth. Italy itself has…

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A Short History Of Writing (or I Am Not A Writer)

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by Moreno Giovannoni Dear Reader   There is a lot of writing about “the Writer’s Life”. This is not an example, except in  passing.   First of all, you must understand, I am not a writer.   Why I Wrote A Book   I just wanted to tell the story of the village in Italy where my mother and father were born, the village they left to come to Australia in the 1950s. The writing is fictional but some people tell me it reads like memoir. The working title for the book has been Tales From San Ginese, but may become…

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A Short History Of Reading

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by Moreno Giovannoni   John Clarke, who died a month ago, said it:   Our minds were on fire at that age.   He was talking about the creativity he discovered in himself when he went to university. In my late teens and early twenties which is more or less the age he was referring to, my mind was “on fire” too, except that I became hungry to absorb knowledge and ideas and if anything create a world view for myself.   When it came to reading fiction (and non) for me it had an unusual beginning and then continued…

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A Short History Of The Italian language

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by Moreno Giovannoni   Morè.   Morè.   Only an Italian can say that properly and there’s only one person left who calls me that. The rest are dead.   The first words I ever heard were Italian ones. The first word I ever spoke was an Italian word – papà. This was according to my poor mum who stopped speaking Italian when her vocal cords froze, together with the rest of her, in a nursing home bed, a few weeks before she died. We sat with her and exchanged the occasional Italian word. We spoke Italian words to her even…

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May Monthly Blogger – Moreno Giovannoni

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Moreno Giovannoni emigrated from Italy at the age of two. He grew up in north-east Victoria but left his heart in San Ginese where he was born. A translator and writer who has been published in The Age, Island and Southerly, he was the 2015 inaugural winner of the Deborah Cass Prize and is currently writing The Sweet Life set among the Italian Community in North-East Victoria in the 1960s. Black Inc will publish his Tales from San Ginese in 2018.