Dizionario delle Combinazioni Lessicali

Dictionaries are a disease I contracted at university after realizing (rather late, of course) that literature was what I really wanted to study and know. I remember that the Italian dictionary I loved most was the Garzanti: I also started keeping a list of Italian words that didn’t appear there. Then, for myself, I compiled a dictionary of bad words, in the wake of La mala lingua by Augusta Forconi: very funny, but it has always lain in a drawer.

In Italian, in short, “I mixed things up and recognized myself”, as Ungaretti said. (And I owe all this mainly to the great masters that I had the good fortune to have then, first of all Richard Massano – who really taught me how to write - and Guido Davico Bonino – who held lessons for audiences of students /viewers that were essentially shows. Pavese, then, completed all this.)

By chance, I came across this Dizionario delle Combinazioni Lessicali a few weeks ago. Since I’m proud of my writing (perhaps the only activity in which I really don’t fear any comparison), it's a tool that immediately intrigued me.

I bought and started to browse it, then I met the author. I asked him some questions to understand more deeply the nature of this work. Here are his thoughts.