Life and literature are reflected in Piero Scanziani, a giant adored by a small circle of devotees

In the literary sticker album, no one knew which role or team to place Piero Scanziani in. An Italian-speaking Swiss, a versatile but inconsistent journalist, a novelist out of fashion, an essayist more interested in the evolution of the human spirit than in current affairs, an author of practical guides on longevity and talismans, and above all an expert on and writer about dogs: he owned around two hundred of them and was at times better known for this than for anything else. Yet from all the rest emerge two nominations for the Nobel Prize championed by Mircea Eliade; an honorary degree from the University of L’Aquila; the refuge he offered to Indro Montanelli during the war, who wrote "Qui non riposano" in Bern, in Scanziani’s flat on Gutenbergstrasse. Furthermore, there was his correspondence with the Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo; a cameo appearance in Roman Holiday, in which he played himself; and a radio play, Alessandro, which earned him a joint Ugo Betti Prize in 1967.

It is thus understandable why it proved so difficult for a man who lived through the entire 20th century – born in 1908 and died in 2003 – to break into the so-called mainstream: fame is wary of complex individuals and instead favours the falsehood through which any insipid mythomaniac can transform themselves into a celebrity. It was difficult to give a simple answer to the question ‘Who is Scanziani?’: writer or journalist, dog expert or science communicator. Moreover, apart from an unfortunate spell of a few months working for the fascist press in the 1930s – for which he paid the price with the hostility of his Swiss colleagues in the post-war period – Scanziani described himself as ‘apolitical, indeed a Greek-style idiot, that is to say, one who leads a life outside social conformity and far removed from public office’. ‘If I ever had to choose a role model,’ he mused, ‘it would be Diogenes, the anarchist: I admire his natural affection, his civitas mundi, his profound wisdom and his canine audacity’. Strip that little figure of ‘civic commitment’ too – or at least the pretence of it – add to that his detachment from publishing intrigues, and you will understand why it was easier to shrug one’s shoulders at the mention of Scanziani’s name. The exceptions were sporadic yet precious: he was admired by Vittorio Vettori, Élemire Zolla, Cristina Campo, Giorgio Albertazzi, Anna Proclemer and Alberto Savinio; but when the latter – an avid reader of his novel Felix – took him to a gathering at the Bellonci household, Scanziani ended up withdrawn and silent in a corner, perhaps longing for his dogs.

He would never again have knocked on that sort of door, nor would his absence have been noticed in the salons where there is a keen nose for sniffing out intruders who fall outside the norm. Woe betide, for example, anyone who moves on tiptoe. Had he, on the other hand, happened upon a gathering of Neapolitan Mastiff breeders, it would have been those rough-and-ready gentlemen who would have sprung to their feet at his presence. To this day, Scanziani’s name lingers like a legend – with commemorative periodicals named after him – amongst breeders of the Neapolitan Mastiff, as he saved the breed from extinction and established its standard after coming across, in 1946, a splendid seventy-kilo blue specimen named Guaglione. He purchased the dog from its owner, Don Ciccio, and bred him with Pacchiana, who had been rescued from a dire fate: in her zealous defence of her master, a night watchman, she had bitten a criminal in the throat and killed him while he was stabbing the watchman. The ungrateful owner, traumatised by the tragedy, had her canines removed and put her on a chain. For years, Scanziani travelled back and forth along the Appian Way between Naples and Rome’s zoo, where he devoted himself to this genetic selection programme and where he had found a sort of spiritual refuge after the war, even setting up a school for guard dogs. The Valle Giulia Zoo, as he would recall in his autobiography, represented “an Eden far removed from Rome’s frantic traffic, the tumultuous crowds, the black market, the pro- and anti-demonstrations, and the police vans pushing back demonstrators by running them over, beating them with truncheons, and dispersing them with water cannons and tear gas”.

It may well be true that a dog is man’s best friend; it certainly was for Scanziani. In 1945, having left his post as head of the Italian news desk at the Swiss Telegraph Agency – where his father Antonio also worked – he sought an alternative in Rome, but neither his journalistic work nor the proceeds from two novels were enough to make ends meet for himself, his wife and their three children. He was saved from his predicament by ‘a little book of no great consequence’, written in a week, which went on to become a bestseller: "Training the Guard Dog". The idea of writing about dog breeding and opening that kennel at the zoo had been inspired by a Boxer with the grand name Arno von Turnellen, whom he had brought with him from Switzerland and had begun to train for pleasure. Even before the war, he had supplemented his income by running a small-scale breeding operation for French Bulldogs at home (he was even forced to sell his favourite, Conte): “We ought to attach greater importance to encounters, for our entire existence depends on them,” he reflected in Viaggio intorno al molosso: he was referring to dogs, people and books. During that period, as before and after, he was plagued by serious health problems: A duodenal ulcer, internal haemorrhages and delicate surgical procedures left little hope for a long life; yet he went on to enjoy a peaceful maturity and an almost youthful old age, savouring successes that were welcome but not sought after, without ever achieving financial comfort, even when, in 1985, his "Encyclopaedia of the Dog" was translated in Great Britain, the home of modern dog breeding.

Whilst time has consigned many important names to oblivion, Scanziani’s name has endured even after his death amongst a small but devoted circle of admirers. Since 2022, publisher Gerardo Masuccio, under the imprint Utopia, has been passionately reissuing his books, the most famous of which is "Entronauti" – a neologism coined by the writer to describe those who devote themselves to the search for the transcendent meaning of life. First published in 1969, it brings together travel accounts from India to California, from London to Persia, from Japan to Mount Athos – places where Scanziani encountered ascetics, scientists, seers, Sufis and hermits. The project was enabled by Arturo Tofanelli, a cultivated editor and long-standing editor-in-chief of the weekly Tempo, who was mindful of the acclaim garnered in 1957 with the serialisation of Avventura dell’uomo, an essay on the stages of life from conception to death that boosted circulation figures and allowed Scanziani to buy a second-hand small car. This work has also returned to bookshops alongside "Libro bianco" and "Il fiume dalla foce alla fonte", whilst the latest reissue, last September, was "Felix", which was a finalist for the 1952 Viareggio Prize. These books had long been out of print; they were originally published by Elvetica Edizioni, founded by Scanziani himself in his hometown of Chiasso in 1967, because “Chiasso has more banks than cafés and not a single publishing house”. But in the venture, which also included a series featuring writers from Ticino, he ended up losing even his own royalties.

In 1970, following the death of his wife Luisa, he decided to return permanently to his homeland and settled in Sagno, a tiny village on the slopes of Monte Generoso: “Here, my only possession is a family grave in Balerna. Thus dispossessed, I have the light-heartedness of one who is free to bring his life to a close or, miraculously, to begin a new one”. This time, he was kept company by an Appenzell Mountain Dog and two cats, in an old vicarage abandoned by the priest because it leaked when it rained. In the small hall of the village’s only bar-restaurant, he held seven talks on ‘the inner man’ for the small groups of readers who made the climb up there. He wrote about Christ, Aurobindo and Buddha, and translated Romain Rolland’s The Life of Ramakrishna into Italian. In 1974, he finally accepted an invitation to return to Naples as a judge at a mastiff show: he found himself faced with seventy of them and was astonished that there were so many. At the thought of ‘having invented them’, he was moved to tears.

It all seemed to be heading towards a quiet, perhaps tedious biographical conclusion, when the unexpected happened: her name was Maria Giuseppina Grosso, known as Magì, a languages graduate from Bocconi University, thirty-nine years his junior. They met in Milan. They fell in love. They married in Lugano on 6 December 1977 and subsequently travelled to India. The couple then moved to Morbio Inferiore, also in the Canton of Ticino, and Magì became pregnant: Gabriele was born in May 1980, but on 26 January of that year, once again, Piero’s life hung in the balance. While he was undergoing emergency surgery in Mendrisio, one of his closest friends, the esotericist Massimo Scaligero—an anthroposophist and editor-in-chief of the magazine East and West—died in Rome. For Scanziani, however, it was a turning point. The ailments that had plagued him disappear, and he devotes himself to a trilogy that will prove popular with the public: *The Art of Longevity*, *The Art of Youth* and *The Art of Healing*. To those who turn up their noses at this foray into self-help literature, he retorts: “No, I’m delighted. Think of all the illustrious manuals, from Epictetus to Gracián!” He works with the renewed enthusiasm of someone who rejects pessimism because ‘it is a worm in the fruit: it devours it, causing it to rot’; he emphasises the drive towards a ‘path of abundance’ that must be sought ‘within ourselves, where the control centre lies’. ‘Once healed of fear, life is marvellous’.

Serena Zoli, who interviewed him for Corriere della Sera in January 1987, provides an effective summary: “Take a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature in both 1985 and 1986; the creator of a new breed of dog (the Neapolitan Mastiff); a father at 72; and now the author of a handbook who teaches, through simple rules, the art of youth, longevity and health (including happiness): the result is Piero Scanziani, a man from Ticino who claims to be 78 but does not look it”. Regarding his age, this is how he explained it in Avventura dell’uomo: “The newborn is very old: he has nothing but atavistic impulses; he is nothing but a mixture of past lives that beat anew within him”; “the twenty-year-old is old: family, school, social class and society have crammed him full of their old concepts, old learning, old feelings – none of which are his own… Young people are old, discontented and rebellious’; ‘the seventy-year-old and the eighty-year-old have a soul of their own, entirely the fruit of their own experiences’. Conclusion: ‘At birth one is ancient; at twenty one is old; at seventy one is contemporary’.

In Scanziani’s case, literature and life do not diverge but are reflected in one another, even posthumously; thus, his legacy owes much to that autumnal love for Magì, who later became his biographer under the pen name Gaia Grimani, as well as the organiser of regular conferences: the most recent of which, focusing on Entronauti, was held in Lugano on 17 October.

As devoted as they are, Scanziani’s readers are glad not to see his works lumped in with the millionth crime novel and the millionth noir in chain bookshops: better to take pleasure in the words of the critic Mario Sansone, who recognised in the Ticino-born author a ‘renewed culture of the soul no longer subservient to ideology and privilege’. We must confess that we were glad to have discovered him, first as a creator of Molossus dogs rather than as a writer. It is better that his voice – broadcast on the 10.00 pm news during the war and heard on shortwave radio around the world – faded into the ether of that era, along with the challenge he set for the Bernese editors: to include an unusual word in a news item every day, because even in wartime it is essential not to be banal (and then, on a more serious note, we whisper that Scanziani tipped off the New York Times about Mussolini’s possible downfall during the Grand Council session of 24–25 July 1943).

It was at that time, whilst returning home tired after a night shift, that he discovered ‘the secret contained within time’. As he crossed the bridge over the River Aar, he watched the raging floodwaters carry away all manner of debris, the carcasses of animals, an uprooted tree: ‘Everything was sadness, nothing but a rush of water and days that could not be grasped’. ‘How much life do I have left?’, he wondered. Disgusted, he moved to the railing opposite ‘to wait for at least one bar to open’ whilst the dawn turned pink. “And finally, a flicker of joy touches my soul: I realise that from the opposite railing the current isn’t flowing away; instead, it’s coming towards me, it’s coming, it’s coming.” All it took was a change of perspective: “Until now I’d had my back to the source, gazing in horror at the mouth of the river. I tell myself: my time, too, is coming and coming. Nothing flows; everything is here now. I realise that I have always lived solely in the present: to bring memories to life, I must bring them into the present; to foresee the future, I must bring it into the present. If everything lies in the present, where is time? The truth flashes before me: the present lasts for nothing, yet it never ends.”