"Toni Acciani: only amazement knows!" by Carlo Coppola

Carlo e Francesco accolgono Toni nell'Empireo 
(Carlo Coppola con Ai)

Una versione italiana del presente articolo è apparsa su "La Fiaccola" periodico diretto dall'avv. Paolo Scagliarini al seguente link: 

https://www.lafiaccola.it/wp/si-e-spenta-a-bari-antonia-acciani/

She passed away on 20 July, in Bari, at the age of 83. To everyone she was simply Toni — a short, almost intimate name that already said something about how this woman chose to move through the world: without noise, without any need to be noticed, and yet leaving a mark that, in this moment of farewell, reveals itself as profound.

Antonia Acciani taught Comparative Literature and was among the first in Italy to take gender studies seriously, at a time when the field was still uncertain ground, often eyed with suspicion by a more traditional academy. She never treated it as an ideological banner, but as an exercise in plurality — a way of restoring complexity to the reading of texts, and, ultimately, to life itself. This was her most recognizable trait: the ability to inhabit ideas without being possessed by them, to study with rigor without ever hardening into dogma.

She was a student, and later an assistant, of Arcangelo Leone de Castris, the great scholar from Salento who for years held the chair of Italian Literature in Bari. From him she inherited method, philological precision, an attentiveness to detail that never lost sight of the whole. But she also knew how to step away just enough to build a voice of her own, one capable of moving across eras and cultures — from Petrarch to Michelstaedter, from Adriatic culture to Dino Campana — without ever losing the thread that mattered most to her: the search for an authentic relationship between an author and their own truth.

At her side for a lifetime was Franco De Felice, a historian and one of Italy's sharpest scholars of Gramsci, an analyst of the labor movement. Together, each in their own field, they were protagonists of that season of university life and culture in Bari that some, not without a touch of local pride, have called the école barisienne — a moment when Bari, through its libraries and seminars, could hold its own alongside Italy's major centers of learning.

Her body of work mirrors a curiosity that never settled: Dalla rendita al lavoro, published in the Einaudi Letteratura italiana series in 1984; her studies on Adriatic culture; a long, patient engagement with Francesco Petrarch that culminated in Petrarca e Montaigne. L'arte imperfetta dell'io (Progedit, 2006); and a passion — almost an elective affinity — for Carlo Michelstaedter, to whom she dedicated Il Maestro del deserto (2005). Pages written not to accumulate titles, but because each author placed before her a question she still felt was her own.

And yet, if one had to point to where Toni Acciani left her truest mark, it would not be in the books, but in the classroom. To her students she passed on not just knowledge, but a way of looking: the taste for inquiry, the courage to let oneself be surprised before rushing to understand. Those who worked alongside her recall a teaching style that always began with a question, never with a ready-made answer — a way of teaching that respected the intelligence of whoever was listening.

In the later years of her life she also came to a Christian sensibility, lived, like everything else, with extreme discretion: never a banner, never a subject for persuasion, but an intimate dimension of a search for meaning that had always accompanied her relationship with literature and with thought. Those who spent time with her in that final season say the questions in her never went quiet — they simply changed horizon.

What remains of Toni Acciani is a lesson that goes beyond the written page: proof that one can be authoritative without being overbearing, that intellectual rigor needs no noise to make itself felt. What remains are her books, her lectures, and above all the questions she planted in those who listened to her — to the very end — in that constant search for what she herself liked to call the "Desiata Forma Vera" (the "Desired True Form").

Our heartfelt condolences go to her family, in particular to her son Giuliano De Felice, professor of Digital Archaeology. A moved thought also goes to Stefania Rutigliano, for many years her longtime assistant and today professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bari, who ideally carries forward her legacy of scholarship and teaching.

by Carlo Coppola