Sandro Penna

Openly gay,[1] his works were largely marked by his melancholic view of homosexuality as imagination.

Penna's economic conditions were often poor, and in his late years a group of intellectuals signed a manifesto in the newspaper Paese Sera to help him.

[2] According to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Penna's poetry was made of "an extremely delicate material of city places, with asphalt and grass, whitewashed walls of poor houses, white marbles of the bridges, and everywhere the sea's breath, the murmur of the river in which the trembling night lights reflect".

His controversial erotic love poems can be found in English translations in This Strange Joy (Ohio State University Press, 1982) and Remember me, God of Love (Carcanet, 1993).

An epigram of Penna's about the dark-skinned, dark-eyed, dark-haired Raffaele, scribbled on the back of his portrait by Tano Festa, reads: Ho visto il mio moretto seduto giù in platea fumava un sigaretto e gli occhi lustri avea.