L’originale itinerario di Giovanni Colombo nel mondo della letteratura

Abstract

Giovanni Colombo had the innate ability to approach literary texts to understand through them the mind of those who wrote them, especially from the point of view of the religious quest; he also had the ability to express his thought in a high-level literary form. The first two paragraphs of this article are dedicated to the origins and treatment of this ability, the third paragraph reconstructs the choice, commissioned by Archbishop Schuster and the rector of the major seminary, Petazzi, to distract Giovanni Colombo from the study and teaching of literature so that he became the educational rector of the “Seminario liceale”. As rector, and then, as a bishop, the literary and poetic ability of Colombo had the opportunity to develop in an original way, to be explicitly valued again in the last phase of his life, once the mission of the archbishop of Milan was over. Special attention is paid both to the relationship he had with important poets and writers of the Lombardy area, both to the original theological perspective gained in Giovanni Colombo, thanks to the decisive literary and poetic equipment owned by him.