On the occasion of the inauguration of the John Freccero Lecture Series at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at New York University, Stefano Albertini, a student of Prof. Freccero and Director of Casa Italiana, recalls his mentor here.
I always addressed him formally and called him “Professor,” even though he had invited me countless times to call him by his first name and to use the informal “tu.” I tried—I would start with “John,” but by the second sentence, I was back to “Professore” We laughed and continued our conversation, and no matter what the topic, it was never a banal or boring discussion with him. From American to Italian politics, from medieval theology to liberation theology, from Ferragamo ties to our beloved Florence, from his childhood memories as an Italian-American boy in Queens to the memorable sayings of his sharp-witted Sicilian mother, to the accomplishments of Francesca, Carla, Stephen, and Paola, his children, of whom he was immensely proud.
John Freccero’s story is an epic American tale and a romantic Italian story, a quintessential New York story. It is the story of a Maestro whose teaching legacy lives on through the dozens of his students who followed in his footsteps and continue to echo, without imitating him, his teaching style from the lecterns of the most prestigious Italian and American universities.
An Italian-American boy
His mother, Concetta, a Sicilian seamstress and member of the Ladies Garment Union, and his father, a Genoese barber, met in the shadow of the arch at Washington Square and were married at Our Lady of Pompeii Church, where he was baptized with the name Giovanni by Father Demo. In his later years in New York, from the windows of his apartment, he could gaze upon the arch under which his story began. Then came the move to Queens, public school because Concetta said the Irish nuns mistreated Italian children, and then Brooklyn Tech, the public high school for the brightest students. John was unique but also consciously part of a generation that included Bob Giamatti (his friend at Yale), Mario Cuomo, the Scorseses, the Faucis, the Coppolas, and Geraldine Ferraro—Italian-American boys and girls who were the first in their families to enter the most prestigious colleges and universities. Families of hard-working people who saw in their children’s education a path to redemption and a chance to assert their dignity. Families that celebrated their children’s successes without exaggeration. John’s mother, at the party for his PhD, whispered to him: “Ah, if only you were a real doctor…” And Mario Cuomo’s mother, at his swearing-in ceremony as governor of New York, said to him, “Ah, if only you had become a judge.”
American and Italian, New Yorker and Florentine
These were just some of John Freccero’s identities, and he was perfectly comfortable with each of them. His innate elegance came from his ability to always be himself: at Stanford with his friends, the ‘immortal’ French académiciens René Girard and Michel Serres, in New York with his Sicilian barber Franco here in the Village, in Florence with the artisans in Piazza Santo Spirito. And John knew Florence like few others and loved it passionately. He loved its millennial history, its widespread beauty, its popular and even vulgar soul. I share with you this short paragraph from one of his messages from Florence. I believe it captures his entire way of seeing the world: high culture and popular culture, wit, wisdom, and irony.
“I have become such a habitue of I Quattro Leoni (Piazza della Passera) that they now give me the “Artigiano” menu. It is prix fixe, 16,000 lire. I feel very much like one of the popolo minuto. The artisans around here work very hard. I never realized how hard: there is a man who (I swear) polishes and restores silver for 14 hours a day. They are good, decent, skillful people, who I thought were supposed no longer to exist. Maybe the Japanese make the troiai in the mercato and the artisans export directly to Japan.”
Scholar and teacher
Many colleagues celebrated Freccero as a profound and original scholar after his death, and there’s no need for me to add anything to the intellectual biographies written by David Quint, Danielle Callegari, and Eileen Reeves for the Dante Society of America. In summary, it can be said that Freccero opened new frontiers in the study of Dante with the precision of a philologist and the intellectual freedom of a philosopher. Without detracting from Dante’s Thomism, he reassessed and exalted the role of St. Augustine in Dante’s poetics and made conversion the key to interpreting the Divine Comedy. He didn’t write thousands of pages—he himself joked that, with today’s quantitative publication criteria in American academia, he would have struggled to get a professorship. But each of his essays, on the most diverse subjects of Italian culture, from Petrarch’s fig tree and laurel to Antonioni’s Blow-Up, from Machiavelli’s Caterina da Forlì to Svevo’s last cigarette, have become reference points, stumbling blocks that generations of scholars will continue to engage with. But above all, Freccero was and remains a teacher in the definition given by the most revolutionary teacher of 20th-century Italy, the Florentine priest Lorenzo Milani. A Maestro, Don Milani said, is someone who studies in order to teach, not for himself.
Freccero loved teaching and generously shared what he knew with his students. The dozens of research ideas he offered in every lesson, the references ranging from the Church Fathers to American popular culture, the daring and improbable connections between authors and texts that, by the end of the lesson, seemed so obvious and logical, and his legendary ‘negative reading list’—the books you could do without reading—were some of the ingredients that made him a unique Professor. These, plus many others, plus something undefinable, something close to the sublime, the Peri Hypsous of the Pseudo-Longinus, the ability, through feelings and words, to transcend the human condition and approach greater mystery.
We will be eternally grateful to our Maestro, John Freccero, for having opened cracks of light into that mystery and for having made us glimpse that
intellectual light, full of love;
love of true good, full of joy;
joy that transcends all sweetness.
(Dante’s Paradiso XXX)
John Freccero (1931-2021) the son of Italian immigrants, born and raised in New York City, and proud graduate of Brooklyn Tech, was widely considered one of the world’s preeminent Dante scholars and the singularly most influential American expert on The Divine Comedy.
New York University Professor Emeritus John Freccero’s parents did not know each other before they emigrated from Italy, in the early part of the 20th century, for a better life in the United States. In fact, they met in New York’s Washington Square. Decades later, the birth country of Freccero’s parents conferred upon their son one of its most prestigious titles — Cavaliere Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (Knight Commander to the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic) for his scholarship on Italy’s most eminent poet: Dante Alighieri.
Freccero, regarded as one of the world’s top Dante scholars, has also received the Fiorino d’Oro from the City of Florence for his scholarship as well as The Premio della Presidenza della Repubblica for Italian Studies and the lifetime achievement award from the Dante Society of America. A recipient of two Fulbright Scholarships and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.
After graduating from New York’s Brooklyn Tech, Freccero received his bachelor’s (1952, English), masters (1953, French), and doctoral degrees (1958, Romance Languages) from Johns Hopkins University. A long-time professor at Johns Hopkins (1959-1963), Cornell (1963-1969), Yale (1969-1979) and Stanford Universities (1979-1992), Freccero returned to his roots in 1992 as a member of the NYU faculty where he remained until his retirement in 2015.
His essay collections, In Dante’s Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition (Fordham, 2015), Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Harvard, 1986) and Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1965) cemented his legacy as a leading authority on Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Freccero also wrote the introduction to former U.S. Poet
Laureate Robert Pinsky’s Inferno of Dante (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994) as well as essays on Petrarch, Svevo and Antonioni.
