About Us

Writer, playwright, painter, art critic, poet, director, actor: difficult to define in one word Giovanni Testori, one of the most important Italian intellectuals of the 20th century. Born in Novate Milanese on May 12, 1923, he was already collaborating with some GUF magazines with articles on art criticism at the age of 17. From 1952 he became a favorite pupil of Roberto Longhi and published famous writings on the art of the sixteenth-sixteenth century Lombardy-Piedmont. Of 1954 is his first work of fiction, The God of Roserio.

This was followed by the cycle of “The Secrets of Milan” and his first debut as a playwright at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, with La Maria Brasca in 1960. The 1960s were marked by the association with Luchino Visconti and Testori achieved notoriety with the general public. With Franco Parenti, beginning in 1972, he brought to the stage the “Trilogy of the Scarrozzanti,” giving rise with Andrèe Ruth Shammah to the Pier Lombardo Show. In 1977, the death of his mother initiated a new phase in the writer’s life, marked by the monologue Conversation with Death and the collaboration with the Teatro dell’Arca in Forlì. The 1980s were instead in the sign of Franco Branciaroli and the Teatro degli Incamminati, which he founded with Emanuele Banterle. Those were the years in which his activity as a militant critic was intensifying, aimed at many young talents who owed him notoriety .

From the mid-1970s, Testori had taken Pasolini’s place as a commentator on the front page of the “Corriere” and from 1978 became head of the art page. After three years of illness, Testori died on March 16, 1993, when more than 800 articles had gone along with his famous plays, novels and critical studies.