Emilio Villa was born in 1914 in Àffori, now a neighborhood in Milan’s metropolitan area. He attended Seminary, and then the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, where he studied, in addition to classical and Semitic languages, Ugaritic and Assyro-Babylonian, embarking on a major project of annotated translation of the Bible in a strictly philological, non-confessional form, which would engage him until at least 1947, when he published the Italian version of Job and the Song of Songs. A philologist and scholar of Akkadian and the languages of the Semitic, Paleo-Greek and Greek areas, Villa translated in 1939 a part of the Akkadian poem Enuma eliš, then the Platonic dialogues Gorgias (1941) and Phaedo (1943); his version of the Odyssey would instead be published by Guanda in 1964. From the very beginning, his poems are printed in occasional publications that enjoyed a very limited circulation, such as his early collection Adolescenza, 1934. From the late 1930s to the late 1970s, newspapers, magazines, and small plaquettes are the sites that most often accommodate Villa’s verse; among his more substantial collections of the postwar period are Oramai: Pezzi, composizioni, antifone 1936-1945, published in 1947, and E ma dopo, nove composizioni, 1950, issued in 64 copies. 17 Variazioni su temi proposti per una pura ideologia fonetica, poems written to accompany a selection of drawings and paintings by Alberto Burri, was also first published in 1950.
During a stay in São Paulo, Brazil, in the early 1950s, Villa founded the magazines “O nivel” and “Habitat,” establishing a connection with the local literary avant-garde group “Noigandres”. Having returned permanently to Italy, he started, in Rome, the periodicals “Visual Arts” and “Appia,” that can be seen as evidence of his propensity for artistic experimentation and the study of figurative arts, which he successfully pursued alongside his philological and poetic interests. In fact, during the 1950s, Villa collaborated with an impressive number of artists, including Nuvolo, Mirko, Alberto Burri (who becoming a frequent partner and source of artistic inspiration), Giulio Turcato, and Claudio Parmiggiani. These collaborations gave him an opportunity to showcase his expertise as an essayist and art critic; for a sample of the remarkable results he achieved, see the volume Attributi dell’arte odierna (Feltrinelli, 1970) that collects a selection of his most representative texts on the subject. In 1959 Emilio Villa created “EX”, an avant-garde journal in which words and images were deployed as complementary, mutually enlivened elements. His poems in Portuguese and French, collectively titled Heurarium, composed between the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s (but published only in 1961), first appeared in this sporadic publication. Multilingualism is a recurring feature of Villa’s verse, and can be found also in Le mûra di t;éb;é (poems in Greek, with facing Italian translation) and in Verboracula (issued on “Tauma,” No. 7, poems in Latin), both published in 1981.
At the end of the 1980s, Aldo Tagliaferri edited, for publisher Coliseum, Opere poetiche I, an extensive survey of Villa’s dispersed verse. What was intended as the first installment in a series, however, was not followed by other volumes. Letania per Carmelo Bene was published in 1996, at the same time as a collection of essays on Alberto Burri, entitled Pittura dell’ultimo giorno. Zodiaco, edited by Cecilia Bello Minciacchi and Aldo Tagliaferri, was published in 2000. The series of Sybillae is a remarkable group of poems, likely composed at the beginning of the 1980s, but published in different venues between 1995 and 2014. Il clandestino, by Aldo Tagliaferri, is a first effort to provide a comprehensive biography of the author. The posthumous L’opera poetica, edited by Cecilia Bello Minciacchi, with an afterword by Aldo Tagliaferri, and published by Le Lettere in 2014, constitutes the most comprehensive collection of Villa’s verse, to date.
