The three names of Oreste Del Buono, one of the fathers of Linus and a talented diviner

If it is true that the monthly comic strip Linus, directed first by Giovanni Gandini (1965-1971) and then by Oreste Del Buono (1971-1981) and then again by Fulvia Serra (1981-1995), was the most beautiful comics in the world, it is equally true that the current monthly Linus, edited by Elisabetta Sgarbi and directed by the formidable storyteller through images named Igort, is the most beautiful magazine (especially graphically) of Italian culture at a time when no one broods and reads culture magazines anymore. Dazzling is this very recent issue, number 03 of the fifty-ninth year of edition, dedicated to the irreproducible character that was Del Buono, who died on 30 September 2003 and whose 100th anniversary on 8 March 2023 takes place since he was born in Poggio on the island of Elba.

There is that when you get hold of Del Buono, two hands are not enough for you, given how varied and succulent the biographical and cultural traits that marked his path in post-war Italian publishing are. What Del Buono was not and what he did not do in his sixty-year wanderings among publishers and newspaper editors of all sorts, from which he abruptly dismissed himself at the first opportunity. His record of a hundred or so “resignations” that rightfully belongs to him. Del Buono was so elusive of classifications that when the great little publisher Vanni Scheiwiller on March 9, 1993 wanted to dedicate a booklet to him commemorating his 70th birthday, failing to get him to write something, he ended up publishing Il meglio dei mia pensi under Oreste Del Buono , a tiny booklet in the thirty-second format whose few pages were entirely blank, and not that for this reason they were less radiant for the many of us who loved Del Buono. And anyway he was the type that when he received the relay copy of one of his novels from 1978, Einaudi’s A shadow behind the heart, the wrong book appeared to him and he set fire to the point of paying him six million lire as long as the Turin publisher sent all printed copies to pulping paper. I went to see if in the nine pages of Del Buono books offered by Amazon there was by any chance a surviving copy. There was not.

But let’s go back to the special issue of Linus that has just hit the newsstands to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Del Buono’s birth, and it does so starting with the perfectly fitting opening title, “The man who loved talent”. Because unlike too many who care only about their own talent – ​​be it real or imagined – and strive to promote it from morning to night, Del Buono was a dowser in seeking the talent of others and enhancing it. As a journalist and translator and editorial consultant he has done it all his life. Giorgio Scerbanenco confided in him when he started writing the magnificent novels of the cycle dominated by the character of Duke Lamberti, the doctor disbarred for euthanasia, those novels which constitute the very first Italian detective novels. When you met Del Buono he always looked at you and listened to you in the way of someone who wanted to find something in you. Once in Rome I glimpsed them walking down the street, he and his partner, the journalist Lietta Tornabuoni, I told them aloud that they seemed to me to be the most beautiful couple in the world. In one of the most effective writings among those that appeared in the Linus issue, the writer and journalist Antonio D’Orrico, who had worked side by side with del Buono at the Baldini and Castoldi publishing house, tells it like this: “He explained to me that he signed Oreste Del Buono when he wrote journalistic articles, Oreste Del Buono when he wrote novels and odb in italics, in small comments. I don’t want to pose as a Lacanian (in the sense of the psychoanalyst Jacques), but those three names corresponded to three very different people”. The time when a student of the Dams of Bologna, in his early twenties named Andrea Pazienza, presented himself to Del Buono at Linus’s Milanese editorial office, someone who submitted the pages of one of his comic strips to his judgment, which was nothing else if not amazing The Extraordinary Adventures of Pentothal, the one that came out in 1977 in installments on Alter Alter – Linus’s cousin magazine, intended for the most innovative comics – and which in making Bologna the capital city of the entire 1977 changed course in the history of Italian comics. Del Buono denied the rumor that Pazienza had come to him on the strength of a sort of written recommendation from Umberto Eco. Who in turn denied Del Buono by saying that he had actually made a phone call to tell him how good and original Pazienza was.

There is a memorable piece by Del Buono among those collected by Igort for his magazine. It dates back to a day in the spring of 1989, when Del Buono entered 18 Via Palladio in Milan. Where was a famous studio where Giorgio Armani was preparing his autumn-winter 1989-1990 collection at that moment. Well that year and the next time, the spring-summer 1990 collection, Del Buono brings his signature to the Armani fashion catalogs in the sense of writing accurate captions to fascinating black and white photos that highlight male and female characters wrapped in Armani clothes. Of a photo where there is a he and a she who seem to be very happy to meet each other, Del Buono writes as follows: “Paige, young star […] Ostentatiously, tenderly artificial, posed like a mime actress: to please him, above all to please her (herself), to feel certain that she is, certain that she is desirable, reassured that she is the most”. To ennoble her fashion in her own way, a further touch compared to the many to which the unstoppable Del Buono had dedicated his life.