A gift of poetry to Ferrara’s readers from a youthful nonagenarian. As his friends know all too well, Gaetano Tumiati, a journalist and writer born in...

A gift of poetry to Ferrara’s readers from a youthful nonagenarian.

As his friends know all too well, Gaetano Tumiati, a journalist and writer born in Ferrara, but resident for sixty years in Milan, likes to boast not of his journalistic and literary fame but of the long walks he still takes, despite his great age, in the hills around Piacenza, near his second home in Valtidone; or of the carefree way he drives his now elderly car (all alone, because no one will risk getting into a car when he’s at the wheel); or, lastly, of the fact that he can still – or so he claims – head a ball. Given all this, it’s inevitable and certain that he will boast even more of the audacity he showed at his ninetieth birthday in summer 2007, when he tackled – for the very first time – the rhythm of verse in a series of poems about Ferrara and its people. “Five meetings on the Po”, dedicated to readers of this magazine, is one of them.