He also, in 1925, launched La Fiera Letteraria, a broadly-based literary magazine which he ran successfully for a couple of years with a skeleton staff consisting principally of himself and his wife.
Exhausted by the intensity of the work and the political pressure to which magazine publishers were subjected at the time, in 1928 he transferred management of the publication to Giovanni Battista Angioletti and Curzio Malaparte while, at this stage, retaining his financial interest in it.
After his sudden death from heart disease at the end of 1930, Fracchia's work remained widely read in and beyond Italy for a number of years.
[1] When it comes to the spirit of place, his identified most closely with Bargone, a small village in the low hills some ten kilometers inland to the east of Sestri Levante, where his maternal grandmother, Carlotta Laborio, still had a home, and where he spent long summer holidays as a child.
[1] During the war he also found time to produce "Venizeloscontro lo Stato di Atene", a two hundred page book published in 1917 and identified by one Italian commentator as a tract against Greek neutrality.
Colleagues at the publication brought together by editor-in-chief Luigi Federzoni at this time included several whose names would become prominent in Italy's literary-journalistic universe over the next couple of decades.
[1][11] It was also towards the end of 1918 that, as part of a small group of writers and journalists including Mario Corsi, Fracchia took over responsibility for "artistic direction" at the well-regarded Rome-based "Tespi" Film production company.
[c][1][13][14] In 1922 The "Tespi" Film production company collapsed, in the context of a wider financial crisis that had hit the Italian movie industry the previous year.
Admirers insist that Fracchia's brief switch into the movie industry should not be dismissed as an eccentric and insignificant wasted interlude in an already all too brief (if stellar) career.
[3] The highpoint of his career as a magazine publisher came with the launch in December 1925 of La Fiera Letteraria, a literary magazine produced in Milan according to its proprietor's own vision, which consciously drew much inspiration from an earlier model, "Frusta letteraria", a literary periodical founded by Giuseppe Marc'Antonio Baretti (Joseph Baretti) and produced by him in Venice, seemingly single-handedly, between 1763 and 1765.
The management of the magazine launched in 1925 seems to have been a similarly lonely job, but Fracchia succeeded in recruiting several top journalists as contributors, including Giovanni Battista Angioletti and Arnaldo Frateili who later became a co-director.
The times were not propitious and after two or three years during which Fracchia struggled to preserve the magazine's independence of government interference it was renamed "L'Italia letteraria" in 1927, while production was transferred to Rome.
[1][4] In 1928, exhausted by the events of recent years, Fracchia fulfilled a longstanding ambition and settled in Bargone, his mother's family homebase which he had come to love as a child on frequent holiday visits to his grandmother.
Emilio Cecchi acknowledged "Angela" as signalling [Fracchia's] arrival among the Mondatori authors, observing that its remarkable success was confirmed by its having been translated into several languages.
[1][22][23][24] Fracchia's novels and short stories are peopled by marginalised and disappointed characters, destined to plunge back into tragedy after ephemeral experiences based on illusory affections.
It is hard to pin down an emerging Fracchia narrative style, but it is possible to identify a traditional attention to content which does not, however, override the qualities of a writing technique that makes few concessions to aesthetic frippery.
Arnaldo Frateili wrote of "an unctuous yet free-flowing prose style, structured and regulated both in its larger direction and in terms of a constant rhythm of indefinable but recognisable internal harmony".
[25][26][d][e] The diversity of his work, the brevity of his own life, and the shadow of the Fascist state under which he spent his most productive – and final – decade all make it hard to find a settled assessment of the career of Umberto Fracchia.