Carlo Prosperi

Born in Solignano (PR) 1st December 1948, he taught literary subjects and Latin for many years in Secondary schools, and published various collections of poems. He translated and commentated the Psychomachia by Prudenzio (Acqui Terme 2000), as well as the Statuti del feudo imperiale di Roccaverano (Acqui Terme 2009). He‘s written many articles and essays which have been featured in magazines and collective volumes of history and local art. He has written various biographies on religious people such as: Madre Leonarda di Gesù Crocifisso, Grugliasco 2003; Il teologo Adolfo Garbarino canonico e prevosto di Rivalta Bormida (1879-1950), Acqui Terme 2011. He also wrote biographies on artists active in the Monferrato and Alessandrino areas between the 16th and 17th centuries. He personally edited the volumes Giuseppe Baretti .  Rivalta Bormida, le radici familiari, l’opera, “Atti del convegno nazionale - Rivalta Bormida, 6th September 1997”, Alessandria 1999; Letteratura e Terme, Ovada 2005, “ Conference acts held in Acqui Terme 8th May 2004”; and with S. Arditi, Tra romanico e gotico. Percorsi di arte medievale nel millenario di San Guido (1004-2004) vescovo di Acqui, Acqui Terme 2004. He cooperated with two essays, Philosophy and Economy and Ethical and Economy – for an Economy politics manual published by Pavia Studi University (2011). Pioneer, among philosophy and artistic, on the iconographic theme regarding “the Calvacata dei Vizi”.  Together with S. Arditi and A. Vercellino he published the monograph “A due passi dal paradiso: Giovanni Monevi e la sua bottega (Visone, sec. XVII- XVIII), whereas with his friend G. L. Rapetti Bovio della Torre he wrote Rivalta Bormida.  Vita e  vicende villanova dalle sue origini fino alla fine del 1900, Acqui Terme 2004 and Rivalta Bormida: l’antica chiesa conventuale di Santo Spirito.  Vicende storiche e recente restauro  Acqui Terme 2011.

Date City Interventions Summary Media
2014-10-17 Acqui Terme Carlo Prosperi - “Literature and thermal towns”

In 1585, a nobleman from Casale Orazio Navazzotti, exalts in a mythological- metamorphic way the origins of the Acquese thermal springs in an aetiological short-poem Idralea, dedicated to Federico Sangiorgio, the Commendatore from Jerusalem.  It’s an encomiastic opera that in its own way retraces Ninfale fiesolano del Boccaccio and the tradition of the pastoral drama.  Whereas the Renaissance privileges mythological explanations of a natural phenomenon, Enlightenment investigates them using a scientific approach. The meaning of things and their symbolic or moral foundations is no longer looked for, rather a lifeless and perspective over-excited virtuosity prevails that from the “carità del nation loco” draws reason for emphatic events of local wonders.  Just as an 18th century sonnet by the Mantovano Gianmaria Galeotti and in a sonnet by the Doctor from Novara Filippo Zaffiri.  More interesting is the short poem La Bojenta or rather the Bollente spring from Acqui by the abbot don Luigi Lingeri (1816), exemplar in the Cicerone by Passeroni. The Bollente becomes an occasion for an excursion, in a witty and continuous style, among the “wonders” of the city, described in the glorious story as a paradisum delitiarum.   Anecdotes and scenes from everyday life, embellish the amiable causerie.

A different, almost romantic setting is felt in the notes by Jules Michelet.  Whereas Martin Piaggio narrates his Viaggio ai bagni di Acqui in rhymed ottonari full of verve and vis comica, aware of his diminished social consideration (of his loss of his aureole) , the poet portrays the Thermae among lively grotesque and carnival-like descriptions.

In 1870 the canonical Jacopo Canepa takes part in an exhibition of a monorhyme sonnet on Acqui’s mud baths. Two extemporary sonnets are from 1913 that combine the Bollente with Barbera – by Gaudenzio Miglio and a laudatio temporis acti in verses most certain Eda, not deprived of unstated polemics.

Of delayed or late romanticism we must mention the song by Francesco Bisio dedicated to the Bollente in 1930. More amusing a pomposity of the mud, all played on the ambiguity of the phàrmacon, written in 1913 by the parish priest from Orsara don Pietro Gaino.