Giovanni Testori and Alain Toubas met at the end of 1958 through mutual friends; the beginning of their love story has a precise date — February 24, 1959 — a date that, in the writer’s imagination, would remain for a long time as a fixed star. Alain was born in Paris in 1938, fifteen years younger than Testori, and at that time was enrolled at the École de médecine. By a strange twist of fate, his parents were named Edouard and Lyne — exactly like Testori’s, Edoardo and Lina. The distance between Paris and Milan in the early years of their relationship was bridged by an almost daily exchange of letters, sent to their respective poste restante addresses: Coubervoie Bacon, a Parisian suburb where Alain lived with his parents, and Novate Milanese, where Testori lived in his birthplace, also with his parents.
Their correspondence — more than 2,000 letters and postcards, all handwritten and in French — continued until 1962, when Alain, after completing his mandatory military service in Algeria (then a French colony), moved to Milan. Some years later, Testori gathered all the letters — without envelopes — arranging them in chronological order and dividing them into two sets: on one side those he received from Alain, and on the other those he sent. The letters, enclosed in several brown-paper bundles, some sealed with red wax, remained in his possession until his death. Inherited by Alain along with all the writer’s belongings, they were later acquired in 2022 by the Giovanni Testori Association. From an in-depth study of this material came the play Per sempre by Alessandro Bandini in collaboration with Ugo Fiore, set to premiere at the LAC in Lugano on October 22, and later in Milan from December 2 at the Piccolo Teatro.
Alain’s presence in Testori’s life also profoundly marked all his artistic production: he dedicated to him a long love poem of over 12,000 verses, I trionfi (1965); three poetry collections — L’amore (1968), Per sempre (1970), and Alain(1973), the latter featuring nine engravings by Paolo Vallorz; and transformed Shakespeare’s Horatio into a new character, “the Frenchman,” performed by Alain alongside Franco Parenti in L’Ambleto, staged in January 1973 at the newly founded Salone Pier Lombardo.
Their cohabitation ended in early 1971: Testori, following a depressive crisis, decided to return to live in his home in Novate with his elderly mother; Alain, instead, moved to Rome to pursue a career in cinema. After a few other attempts in the performing arts, in 1975 Alain became a partner in the Compagnia del Disegno, an art gallery founded by Max Rabino — a profession he would pursue for the rest of his life until his death in 2021.
Their love story never truly ended; their relationship changed and evolved over time, yet always within an emotional continuity that kept their bond strong.
Thanks to the letters and other documents and materials preserved in the Giovanni Testori Archive — such as books with dedications to Alain, manuscripts and typescripts from various stages of the poems’ composition, drawings, and photographs of the two together — it is possible to retrace the most significant moments of their relationship and to see what this bond inspired and created.
