By Giulia
There are publications that immediately convey the flavor of an era. This is the case with a historic Italian magazine, L’EROICA, which released its first issue on July 30, 1911, with the subtitle Rassegna d’ogni poesia (Review of All Poetry) and with the declared program to “announce, propagate, and exalt poetry, wherever and however nobly it manifests itself: in every art and in life,” giving space to new voices in literature and art.
Founded by writer Ettore Cozzani and architect Franco Oliva, the magazine is part of the late-symbolist atmosphere of the time, combining woodcut illustrations with original prose and poetry texts.
It is precisely the graphic aspect that made L’Eroica famous, thanks to its formal choices of excellence.
It was printed on handmade paper, with elegant and carefully crafted typography; but most notably, it was the decision to revive woodcut printing through original woodblocks that made this magazine unique in Italy.
In Northern Europe, by the end of the 1800s, a movement had begun to rediscover the artistic gesture of woodcut in contrast to industrial woodcut printing. The revaluation of this artistic practice, long considered worthy only of master craftsmen and distant from its own independent dignity as ‘art’, through L’Eroica found its space in Italy as a form of national and modern art.
Crucial to this was the collaboration of Adolfo De Carolis, who gathered around the magazine a large group of artists that presented themselves to the art world as early as 1912 by organizing the First International Woodcut Exhibition in Levanto. Significant space was given to new young Italian talents: in one of the issues from 1936, two works by the twenty-one-year-old Salvatore Fiume, “a student of the Royal Institute of Art in Urbino,” are featured. On the literary side, in September 1932, a poem by the twenty-year-old Elsa Morante was published.
In our catalog, we offer an exceptional collection of 10 complete bound volumes that include everything published from September 1926 to December 1936 (issues from 97 to 220).
These volumes feature works by some of the most interesting graphic artists of the time: among others, Arturo Martini, Francesco Nonni, Mario Delitalia, Edoardo Del Neri, Stanis Dessì, Antonio Discovolo, Benvenuto Disertori, Francesco Gamba, Publio Morbiducci, Aldo Patocchi, Primo Sinopico, Armando Spadini, Adolfo Wildt, Leonardo Bistolfi.
The magazine ceased its publication in 1944, devastated by the bombings that destroyed its headquarters in Milan.
