GIUSEPPE PELLITTERI
Giuseppe Pellitteri was considered a living encyclopedia, an outstandingly talented person, a great professional, with special talents for character training and innovation. People consulted him and followed his example. He was respected both inside and outside Salesian circles.
From Sicily, where he was born in 1920 and professed in 1938 , to Piedmont, from Colle Don Bosco to the Vatican Polyglot Press (1945 – 1949), then to Milan, again at Colle Don Bosco, lastly to Valdocco (from 1972 to his death in 1992) were the stages in an incredible life, which was lived with excessive hard work work, always ahead of his times, never losing a beat.
Professor Pellitteri, Salesian Brother, had a curriculum which showed his genius in the art of typography. He was an unparalled organizer (he organized the Vatican printing works), he made a critical-historical study of typography, he was a man of culture and activity, he wrote books, taught at the University, invented new expressions, he was a piblisher…. and so one can go on.
In 1963 he published his Typological Atlas, a work unique in its subject, in which he examined the 500 years of printing. It has become the Bible for editorial activities. In 1969 he wrote his Encyclopedia of Printing, a monumental work in nine volumes of fundamental importance to the art of printing. Then there followed countless other publications. He was the founder of CITS, the international union for technical instruction in social communications. Due to his work, graphic arts have become a university subject.
TALENTS AT THE SERVICE.
Brother Pellitteri was one of those rare men where in the one person there functioned, in perfect balance, an analytical ability and a synthetic capacity, a frantic laboriousness and a blissful calm, theoretical competence and a practical attitude, a superior professionalism and a colloquial simplicity. He taught printing typology and the technique of composition in the university school of graphics in the Polytechnic in Turin. He also taught in the Catholic University of Milan.
He made his own the saying of Don Bosco: “I want to be in the vanguard of progress”. There is no doubt he always was in the vanguard even if in certain periods of his life he forced himself to work for up to 14 to 20 hours per day, a Guinness Book record perhaps. After he finished work in the office or in class he would often say to his collaborators: “Now I am going to have a little rest”, and then he would go off and do some printing. His last effort was the production of his series “Editorial Expressiveness” in which he divulged his theory of ‘Graphinformatics’, an expression which combined the progress of graphics with the introduction of information science.
Pellitteri was a courageous person. He did not consider that the past was necessarily better than the present. He had hardly arrived in Milan when he told his provincial: “Father, please give me an excavator and a truck for all of this has to go: it is all rubbish .” At Valdocco he started in a cubby-hole and finished in a large building.
GIFTS.
The secret of his success, apart from his personal genius, came from his ability to involve even the smallest ones in his projects: his collaborators, the experts, the organizations in his field, and especially his students. He made them feel that they were the central characters. One said: “I was one of his many students. I thought that I was his favourite, until I discovered that my fellow students were all saying the same about themselves. When he asked you to help with one of his groundbreaking projects, he made you feel you were an indispensable part of it”. Another student tried to sum up his achievements: “In 1975 he had obtained his university teacher’s registration, in 1989 his Honours Degree in Graphic Design, in … No, I do not think that I can sum up everything he said and did, unless you have the patience to listen to my talking about him for several days.”
In view of his frantic activity every day it was asked of Don Bosco when did he ever pray. A Salesian who lived with Brother Pellitteri was asked the same question. He replied: “You know, he was always most punctual at community prayers, at meetings, at retreats. I would give you the same reply as the one given about Don Bosco: when did he not pray? I am convinced that he made his work his prayer.” Another Salesian saying ran through the life of Professor Pelliteri: “Work as if you had to live for ever and live as if you had to die every day”.
THEY SAID OF HIM …
Brother Pellitteri was known in Italy and abroad, yet he remained a humble man thinking much about others and little about himself. He lived a poor life without yielding to any comfort whatsoever. A newspaper wrote about him: “Pellitteri shows few signs of his age, he overcomes his age by his enthusiasm.” This was true because up to the end he kept working. The sickness that attacked him carried him off at the age of 72 on 28 May 1992.
Here are some judgments gathered from those who lived at his side: “If you were to place all the pencils he has used in his life in one line, it would be as long as the river Po”. “He was overweight because he was overburdened with so much energy”. Pellitteri said of himself that he was happy because modern technology had not killed his art of being a printer but had sublimated it: “Today a man can be at the same time author, typographer and his own publisher”; or, as we say in English, “a man can be his own desk top publisher”.
(Giancarlo Manieri in Bollettino Salesiano - July-August 2003. Translated by Fr. Tony Moester .)
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