Giulio Angioni

Giulio Angioni (28 October 1939 – 12 January 2017) was an Italian writer and anthropologist.

Angioni was a leading Italian anthropologist, professor at the University of Cagliari and fellow of St Antony's College of the University of Oxford.

He is the author of about twenty books of fiction and a dozen volumes of essays in anthropology.

His poetic works (Tempus in 2008, Oremari in 2011) in Sardinian language and Italian came later in his career.

In his anthropological essays (especially in Fare, dire, sentire: l’identico e il diverso nelle culture, 2011), Angioni places the variety of forms of the human life in a dimension of maximum amplitude of time and space, starting from the anthropopoietic value of doing, saying, thinking and feeling as interrelated dimensions (although usually separate and hierarchical) of human 'nature', which here is understood as characterized by culture, i. e. the human ability of continuous learning.

In particular Angioni criticizes two western clichés: the superiority of speech as a solely human feature, and the separateness of the aesthetic dimension from the rest of life.

Best known as a writer, Angioni is considered, along with Sergio Atzeni and Salvatore Mannuzzu, to have been one of the initiators of a so-called Sardinian Literary Spring, the Sardinian narrative of today in the European arena (with the work of authors such as Salvatore Niffoi, Alberto Capitta, Giorgio Todde, Michela Murgia and many others), which followed the works of individual prominent figures such as Grazia Deledda, Emilio Lussu, Giuseppe Dessì, Gavino Ledda, Salvatore Satta.

The best novels of Angioni are considered to be Le fiamme di Toledo (Flames of Toledo), Assandira, Doppio cielo (Double sky), L'oro di Fraus (The gold of Fraus).