(Turin, 1903 – Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1933), narrator, poet and playwright, nephew of Cesare Lombroso, in the second half of the 20s he composed his first works which culminated in 1923 in the prose drama “La chioma di Berenice”. In 1924, thanks to Pirandello and D'Amico, he joined the Teatro dei Dieci, a group of young playwrights committed to the renewal of Italian theatre. The drama “Le campagne senza Madonna” (1924) falls within this context and, performed at the Teatro Moderno in Rome, received good reviews. In the same year he published “La palingenesi di Roma” in Milan and began his poetic production which would flow into the posthumously published volume “La catena degli anni. Poesie e pensieri fra i venti ei ventinove anni” (1929). A contributor to "Solaria" from its inception, he began "Diary of a Privileged Person under Fascism" in late 1926, also published posthumously. In 1926, he graduated from Florence with a degree in Art History, with a thesis on Leonardo da Vinci, which was published in Paris with a preface by Paul Valéry and then in Turin in 1929. In 1928, he left Italy for London, which would inspire his essay "The Secret from Angleterre." He then moved to Paris in self-imposed exile, where he wrote the essay "Meditations on Italy" and the play "Angelica." In 1931, he began contributing to the New York Times Magazine, and in 1932, he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Yale University. Here he wrote essays on America ("Amerique, miroir grossisant de l'Europe") and composed a series of prose poems, philosophical thoughts, notes, and reflections that would later become part of the collection "Désespoirs." He also began a novel, "Espoirs," the first chapter of a future great portrait of national life before and after the world war, but on the eve of leaving for a trip to Japan, he died in a car accident.
The Leo Ferrero Fund is composed of two separate and distinct collections of documents, which arrived at the Foundation Archives at different times: the first donated in 1983, the second in 2005.
The first is divided into the following sections: Correspondence, addressed to Ferrero and in his own hand, which includes numerous and important senders such as Aleramo, Alvaro, D'Amico, Bonsanti, Cecchi, Conti, Gide, Grasset, Prezzolini, Saba, Stuparich, Venturi, Vittorini, Zavattini and, among the recipients, Tilgher and Valery and the playwright Jean Jacques Bernard whose correspondence with the letters of both writers is preserved; Manuscripts, which contains various drafts of Ferrero's theatrical, essayistic and poetic works, numerous pages of notes, reflections, drafts of works still unpublished today, the notebooks he wrote between 1921 and 1923 and the translations of the theatrical texts; Press Clippings, divided into articles by and about Leo Ferrero; Various, which collects material relating to the “Society of Friends of Leo Ferrero” (conferences, invitations, commemorations); Library, which collects some of Ferrero's titles and Gina Lombroso's work “L'éclosion d'un vie”, dedicated to her son.
The second nucleus of documents is composed mostly of typescripts relating to Ferrero's theatrical and essay production, correspondence addressed to him and his family, articles, translations, notes, scattered autographed and typewritten pages, a diary divided into 12 files dating from the 20s to 1933, typescripts probably written after his death, a collection of press cuttings on his work and in commemoration after his death, a series of volumes that integrate the section Library The first core of documents includes works by Ferrero, often in both Italian and French editions, some titles of works dedicated to him by his mother, and Anne Kornfeld's volume, "The Figure and Work of Leo Ferrero." This material, of which only a simple inventory exists to date, must be organized and described analytically so as to proceed with a comprehensive computerized cataloguing that will standardize all the documentation on Ferrero held by the Foundation.
