Mario Vitti

Mario Vitti was born in 1926 in Istanbul and moved to Italy after the end of World War II. There, he studied and pursued a career as a professor of Modern Greek Philology. For his contributions to Modern Greek studies, he was awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Thessaloniki, Paris, and Nicosia. He concluded his academic teaching in the medieval town of Viterbo, on the northern outskirts of Rome, where he now spends most of his time engaged, as he says, with the bounties of the earth and letters. Mario Vitti discovered and utilized latent works, such as the Montese drama "Eugena" (1965) or precious relics of Kalvos (two volumes in 1960 and 1963); he directed attention to overlooked masterpieces by reissuing "Military Life in Greece" (1977) and "The Results of Love" (1993); he analyzed works of decisive importance for the course of literature, particularly in ethnography ("The Ideological Function of Greek Ethnography," 1974) and modernism ("The Generation of the Thirties: Ideology and Form," 1977).