Informazioni
- Luogo di nascita: Murlo
- Note biografiche:
The moment you walk into the dining room of his central Mountain home, you can’t help but be amazed at the scores of trophies, plaques, certificates and medals that grace the walls and shelves.
Franco De Santis has been collecting the awards since 1990, when he won a poetry contest in Italy and published Sotto Vento (Under the Wind), a 32-page book of 50 of his poems.
“I started writing when I was 14 or 15,” said De Santis.
Born in Murlo, in northwest Italy, De Santis was a young boy during the fascist Mussolini regime. He came to Hamilton in 1966, working first as a bricklayer, then as a caretaker with the Hamilton Catholic school board.
As the oldest child of five from a single mother, he was sent off to work in his early teens to help the family after the Second World War.
He had enough elementary school education to be able to read and spent much of his spare time reading everything he could get his hands on.
De Santis said he was 35 by the time he got his Grade 8 education by going to night school.
While learning the bricklaying trade, he began scribbling down poems on pieces of paper torn from bags of cement. Many of his early writings were lost on his travels from Murlo to Rome to Canada.
His 1990 success spurred more Italian poetry, and it wasn’t long before more awards and accolades starting pouring in, including honours from Festitalia in Hamilton.
Most of his poems are about birds and nature, and are no more than five or six lines in length.
“That’s my style,” said De Santis, who noted he wrote out each poem by hand and then pounded out his work on a manual typewriter before it was mailed to publishers in Italy.
“I do not know about computers,” he said.
Over the years, he has published 11 books of Italian poetry — mostly for family and friends — and has paid about $5,000 to get them published.
His last book was published in 2014, and he would like to find a publisher who would publish his best poems in English.
While he is still an avid reader of books in Italian and English, De Santis said his health has prevented him from writing much poetry in recent months. The father of two and grandfather of four admits to being bothered by not being able to sit down and write like he used to.
