‘The whole world in one square metre’: the House of Giovanni Comisso

Giovanni Comisso was an Italian writer born in Treviso on 3/10/1895, known for his literary works, memoirs and reflections on his life and the Italian society of his time. In 1919, he took part in the Fiume enterprise alongside Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose influence he was to undergo especially in his debut novel ‘Il porto dell’amore’.

Comisso travelled a great deal, from North Africa to the Far East, but the concept of the House is fundamental to him and his thinking: within it he finds summed up and merged many landscapes he encountered on his travels, so much so that he believes he can perhaps read the world even by observing it from within the small enclosure of that house and consider it an extension of his own interiority: “As I grew older, that whole house was conforming to me like another body of mine. Every room, every corner corresponded to a particular feeling of mine. The spaciousness of the room shaped my dreams and awakenings, the tall windows when they were opened, in the morning, created my gaze. Every corner of that room bound itself to a fact for me.”

He had three houses in Treviso: his father’s house in Piazza Fiumicelli (now Piazza Borsa), described in ‘La mia casa‘ (My House), was wiped out along with part of the historic centre of Treviso by the American bombing on Good Friday 1944 and the architects of the time decided to build the large building that would have housed the Chamber of Commerce’s Commodities Exchange there.

Giovanni and his mother took refuge in the country house in Zero Branco, a modest peasant house with a stable, courtyard and fruit trees that for Comisso represented for more than twenty years a principle of existential and literary identity in which to recognise himself and mature. The house in Zero Branco, which Comisso defined as “the whole world in a square metre‘, where ‘all my greed to know and see, until then dispersed in my travels around the world, was now directed, rooted in that house of mine, towards the surrounding land and the people who inhabited it”, gave him a muffled life immersed in nature.

When he turned 20, he sold it and returned to live in Treviso, in the house in Santa Maria del Rovere that he had designed together with the builders, expressly wanting a vegetable garden in front of the house where he could cultivate. “Turn in where the Esso petrol station is in Via Avogadro degli Azzoni“, was the instruction given to his many visitors.
Now the Buranelli house remains to symbolically fix Comisso’s belonging to the city of Treviso.

Comisso described his home as a quiet refuge, an oasis of calm in which he could immerse himself in writing and reading. “That house lived in us not only because of its space and our habits, always in relation to the passing of the years, but also because of the noises and resonances. The river that flowed beside the square gave movement to a mill and for all the years up to the war, the roar of those waters that flowed out of the sluice reached our rooms perennially and one could say that in the evening it induced us to sleep like a chant. Then the mill was pulled down and even in the silence of the waters, we always seemed to hear their old voice again. (…)

Comisso’s house was also a meeting place for many intellectuals and artists of the time, creating a stimulating environment for discussions and the exchange of ideas. In fact, the poet Eugenio Montale dictated in his memory what was to become the Trevisan writer’s marble epigraph, which continues to be reflected in the water of the canal: ‘Amor vitae di Giovanni Comisso trovò tra queste mura per lunghi anni sempre rinnovati motivi di esaltazione e di pace’ (‘Giovanni Comisso found within these walls for many years ever renewed reasons of exaltation and peace’).

The Giovanni Comisso Literary Prize was established in his honour. (Find out more about the 2023 edition).

Translated by Dr Giada Gubert
Intern at the Chamber of Commerce of Treviso – Belluno |Dolomites