Tommaso Lisi

Tommaso Lisi was born on 9 February 1935 in Coreno Ausonio, a small hill village in the province of Frosinone, in southern Lazio, near Cassino. The village, its stone houses and the farming life of the Ciociaria, together with the figures of his father and mother, became the lasting material of his writing.

He studied philosophy at the University of Rome, graduating with a thesis on the linguistic thought of Benedetto Croce. He was writing poetry from his teens, and by his early twenties he was corresponding with established poets such as Corrado Govoni and Carlo Betocchi.

After graduating Lisi became a teacher and spent nearly forty years teaching in primary and middle schools, while publishing steadily as a poet, novelist and critic.

His first collection, Parole, was published by Edizioni SIA of Bologna in the mid 1950s. In 1955, when Lisi was twenty, Govoni wrote a long letter of presentation for Ivana, a cantata of love poems published by the same house in 1956. Five years later Betocchi published Un mignolo d'aria in Vallecchi's grey poetry series in Florence (1961), which also contained the long poems I morti parlano, on the victims of war, and Ciociaria, in which the figure of his mother first appeared. Liturgia familiare followed in 1969, with Rebellato in Padua.

Lisi was an editor of the periodicals Stato Democratico and Il Cannocchiale, published poems in Cenobio, La Fiera Letteraria, Prove di letteratura e arte and Galleria, and wrote literary criticism for the culture pages of Paese Sera and La Voce Repubblicana, and later a column in verse for the weekly Avvenimenti. His review of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Le ceneri di Gramsci in Stato Democratico in June 1958 was recorded in Alberto Asor Rosa's Letteratura Italiana. In 1979 he edited a selection of Govoni's poetry, Il vino degli anni, for L'Officina Libri in Rome.

Over almost seventy years Lisi published more than twenty books of verse, among them Adolescenza (1972), Corrispondenza (1981), Fuorisacco (1982), In punta d'ago, presented by Oreste Macrì, Versi vaganti e stravaganti and Agosto con il padre (both 1997), La contigua stanza (1997), La parete sottile (1998) and La porta socchiusa (1999). From 2010 his poems to his parents were gathered in Nel nome del padre e della madre, Colloqui con il padre e la madre (2013) and Nuovi colloqui con il padre e la madre (2016). Liturgia familiare was reissued in 2014 with Mario Luzi's letter, and in 2015 in an Italian and English edition translated by Barbara Carle as Family Liturgy.

His prose works La vocazione (1969), Rodolfo and Pensieri cattivi (1995) together make up La memorabile età degli inganni; La vocazione won second prize for fiction at the Premio Il Ceppo in Pistoia in 1970. His poetry won the Val di Comino prize in 1981, the Venafro prize in 1997 and the Ciociaria prize in 2007.

Critics placed him in a line of quiet, exact lyric writing. Luigi Baldacci saw in his short later poems something of Giorgio Caproni's epigrams, with less mechanism and more anguish, and the poet Domenico Adriano, also from Coreno, wrote of his severe simplicity. A retrospective anthology, Il viaggio che dura, covering 1955 to 2023 and presented by Adriano, was published by Marcianum Press in 2024.

Lisi lived in Coreno Ausonio and was closely tied to its community. His poetry returned again and again to his parents after their deaths, in what the critic Silverio Novelli called a private threnody, and to the people, houses and landscapes of his childhood.

On 28 June 2025 the Pro Loco of Coreno Ausonio marked his ninetieth birthday with an evening in the village gardens, with Marco Vitale and Domenico Adriano taking part, an exhibition of his poems in the square and the presentation of a new collection, Al padre alla madre (1982 to 2013), published by Il Labirinto.

Tommaso Lisi died in Formia, in the province of Latina, on 11 October 2026, aged 91. The cause of death was not made public. His funeral was held in Coreno Ausonio on 12 October 2026.

Local outlets including FrosinoneToday and Frosinone News reported his death, describing him as the poet who had told the soul of Coreno Ausonio and one of the village's most significant cultural voices.

Lisi is remembered as a poet of memory and family whose plain, carefully worked verse won the respect of leading figures of twentieth century Italian poetry, from Govoni and Betocchi to Luzi, Macrì and Luigi Baldacci. The typescripts of several of his collections and some of his letters are held in the archive of the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence, and in Coreno Ausonio his poetry has become part of the village's own sense of identity.