Born to Tuscan parents, Fausto Cercignani studied in Milan, where he graduated in foreign languages and literatures with a dissertation dealing with English at Shakespeare’s time.

«Der geteilte Himmel» and «Kassandra», Würzburg, 1988) and subsequent essays on her later works have contributed to promote an awareness of the true essence of the narrative production of the East German writer, irrespective of her political and personal ups and downs.

Hoffmann, Robert Musil, Novalis, Joseph Roth, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, August Stramm, Gerhart Hauptmann, Reinhard Jirgl, Friedrich Schiller.

Since 1992 Cercignani has been editor of the international periodical “Studia austriaca” (ISSN 1593-2508), a publication devoted to the culture and to the literature of Austria, past and present.

Discussing his production, one critic speaks of orphic poetry, but «hard and shiny like steel»[9] and another remarks that Cercignani’s poems «achieve a maximum of concentration thanks to an acceleration of the thought or feeling which reconstructs physicality by means of abstraction».