Claudio Peri is the founder and the inspiration for this Newsletter.  A former Professor of Food Technology at the University of Milan, he is now an 85-year-old in fine physical and mental shape, and a writer, speaker and podcaster on Jacopone da Todi.  Although he was born and grew up in Todi, he only really discovered Jacopone recently in – of all places – California.  Here is his story. 

I was born in Pantalla, a hamlet in the Municipality of Todi, in 1938, a year before the start of World War II.  Those were dramatic years for Italy and for my family: my father away at war, my mother’s brother a prisoner in Russia, and our family dispersed between my grandparents’ homes and various other places in Umbria and Tuscany.  My only happy memory of that period was the time, on May 8, 1945, when my grandparents started screaming and opening all the windows of their house in Boneggio, near Perugia.  They could hear bells ringing throughout the valley: the war was over! 

After the war our life was slowly and painstakingly reconstructed.  My two brothers, Massimo and Tommaso, were born in Perugia.  My father, Dante, was appointed as administrator of the farms of the Opera Pia Veralli Cortesi, in the countryside around Todi, which led to our family being moved periodically to extraordinary medieval castles.  We spent unforgettable years in the castles of Torregentile, Montenero and Torrepiera, mysterious places where time had stopped and where electric light had not yet arrived.  I remember being terrified in the dark when someone from the village told me stories of witches and the evil eye ... My mother Antonietta, an elementary school teacher and a woman of great humanity and faith, was my refuge from nightmares and she was also the first to tell me about Jacopone and to involve me in reading the ‘lament of the Madonna’, the laude entitled Donna de Paradiso.

My first real contact with Jacopone’s poetry dates to 1948, when we were living in Torrepiera and I was in the fifth grade in school at Pian di San Martino.  The parish priest there, Don Elvio Pallotta, gave me a small book entitled Jacopone da Todi by Domenico Giugliotti, a Tuscan writer in love with Jacopone’s poetry and spirituality.  Observing today the elegant calligraphy of the dedication in that book (which I still possess), it strikes me that Don Elvio must have been a very special priest, to give this book to a child attending his catechism class at a time when the Church in Todi generally presented Jacopone as a marginal figure, both in poetry and in faith.  Our family moved into Todi in 1949 and as an adolescent I attended the Liceo Classico ‘Jacopone da Todi’, where I was taught nothing about Jacopone, apart from the old legendary stories.

Graduating in 1956, I enrolled in the University of Perugia.  For the next 62 years my family and professional life unfolded far from Todi:  the degree in Agricultural Sciences at Perugia, followed by 18 months of compulsory military service;  four years’ study in Brussels, qualifying as a Biochemical Engineer;  a return for one year to Perugia, just long enough to marry my sweetheart from Todi, Teresa;  two years of study and research at the University of California, where our first child was born in San Francisco and, of course, was named Francesco;  back again to the University of Perugia for one year, during which our second son, Giovanni, was born.  Finally, at the age of 35, I was offered the chair of Food Science and Technology at the University of Milan, where we would live for more than 40 years and where our daughter Adele was born. 

My life was filled with work and family: teaching, research, conferences, travel, international consultancies and official assignments.  But Todi, where my parents lived until their deaths, always kept a special place in my heart and in Teresa's: nostalgia for our youth, perhaps, and also the indestructible friendships of our adolescence.  In 2018 we decided to return to Todi as retirees, following our daughter Adele, who with her family had already decided to move there to live. 

Jacopone, however, was only a distant thought, an automatic association with the name of Todi but nothing more – until something happened that I still remember with incredulity and amazement.  It was March 2017 and I remember it like it was yesterday.  

I was in the magnificent bookstore of the University of California at Davis, where I would speak at a seminar on the quality and health properties of olive oil and also present my Extra-Virgin Olive Oil Handbook, published in England by John Wiley & Sons and still considered to be the fundamental reference work on quality olive oil.  This involvement with the University had become a happy family tradition since our son, Giovanni, had become a professor of Economics at the University in Davis, where Teresa and I had been 25 years earlier.  My collaboration with the University gave us with regular opportunities to visit Giovanni and his family.

As I wandered among the shelves of the bookstore, to see if there was anything else of interest to me, my eyes fell on a shelf marked “Historically Important Readings”.  Among the books, one stood out:  a book by Evelyn Underhill entitled Jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic: A Spiritual Biography, originally published in London in 1919.  I felt as if I was dreaming.  It seemed incredible that in a bookshop on the other side of the world a person from Todi (actually two, as Teresa was with me and was equally amazed), who was only there for a few weeks, could encounter a book on Jacopone that was only on display on that shelf for a week.  It was much less likely (and much more interesting) than winning the lottery.  And it was an incredible 60-year bypass that connected my childhood in Pian di San Martino to my life as a pensioner in Milan and then in Todi.

I immediately bought and read that book, which began to reveal to me, for the first time, Jacopone's personality, poetry and spirituality.  I was first amazed, then fascinated and then overwhelmed and from that moment, I have wanted to do nothing but read and study Jacopone and talk about him to anyone I happen to meet.  The first project inspired by this discovery was the translation into Italian of Underhill 's book, with the help of my brother Massimo.  The passion for research, which had engaged me all my life (albeit in a completely different field) had returned to the fore in my heart and mind.  Since then I have given dozens of lectures, organized conferences, edited a complete text of the Laudi with parallel Italian translation in 2020 and published a book on Jacopone's mysticism in 2022 that is just beginning to become known.  Above all, I have involved many enthusiastic friends in research and the dissemination of Jacopone’s spiritual heritage.  This Newsletter aims to continue this work and to share it around the world as much as possible.

When anyone asks me about the reasons for my commitment and my enthusiasm for Jacopone, my answer is, firstly, that after reading Underhill's book I started looking for other signs of interest in Jacopone in countries outside Italy and was hit by a tsunami of texts, commentaries and translations of Jacopone in many languages, but particularly in English and French.  These highly authoritative texts have been published in the USA, France, Ireland, and other countries in the last century and with increasing frequency in this century.  I have to admit that my first reaction to them was bewilderment.  I then progressed from dismay to anger, when I considered how little-known and how misunderstood Jacopone has been in his own city and his own homeland.  

These uncomfortable sentiments have now been replaced by another:  a passion for the poetic beauty of Jacopone’s Laudi and for the discovery of his Christianity, which involves a spirituality for the future much more than of the past.  When I consider the interest in Jacopone outside of Italy, and the involvement of so many friends in what I am doing, I am convinced that the future can only bring new discoveries and new joys and that love and appreciation for Jacopone will surely spread and grow.