More about Agostino Fasciati

1. Agostino Fasciati: The Teacher

Agostino Fasciati taught in various towns, including in Italy and German-speaking Switzerland, almost always for just one school year: Ponte di Cene (Bergamo), Vicosoprano, Casaccia, Poschiavo, Legnano, Zug, St. Gallen and Medel. Before he started teaching at the Swiss school in Bergamo, where he remained for ten years until 1908, he studied in Florence and Zurich. Although continuing his education was extremely important to him, he was forced to give it up due to financial hardship. In 1912, he accepted a post at the secondary school in Soglio, which had been founded in 1903. Agostino devoted himself to teaching at the school until the school board decided, with the agreement of the town council, to close it in 1922. Not because there were not enough students or because Agostino was not fulfilling his role with the necessary diligence, but simply because they wanted to rid themselves of the controversial teacher, who was a socialist and active in local and regional politics. Although he fervently protested the decision, it was all in vain. Agostino taught for another two years in Ausserferrera, and then his career as a teacher ended for good.

2. Agostino Fasciati: The Socialist

In one of his autobiographies, Agostino Fasciati wrote that he became a socialist in Ponte di Cene (Bergamo), where he had been working as a private tutor for the Swiss owners of the Tobler, Widmer and Saxer factories. He explained: ‘That was where I had my first encounter with a factory, and I became a socialist’. His decision was reinforced during his stay in Florence, when he became aware of the ‘social question’ debated at the end of the nineteenth century by Filippo Turati and Camillo Prampolini, among others. The young Agostino was excited by the cause of the workers and farmers, cooperatives and public housing and schools. He must have been profoundly disappointed that his exhortations and especially his hopes that the mountain people would improve their economic and social situation by learning from the struggle of the working class were to no avail. For him, however, it was always about fighting for the principles of dignity, justice and equality.

3. Agostino Fasciati: The Journalist

Agostino Fasciati’s first experience in journalism dates to the last decade of the nineteenth century, when he published articles, translations and poetry in Il Mera, a bi-monthly founded and edited by the Bondo parish priest Gabriello Martinelli and published from 1889 to 1894. He also partnered with his friend Gaudenzio Giovanoli (1893-1977), one of the few other professed socialists in Val Bregaglia, working together in various areas. They especially favoured the press for circulating their ideas, publishing in the socialist periodicals Libera Stampa and Bündner Volkswacht. In 1917, Agostino founded a periodical of his own, the Bregaglia del Popolo, with Gaudenzio as a contributor. Distrustful of the local printers, Agostino had the periodical printed in Ticino. It was distributed in secret, the subscribers were chosen with the utmost caution and the financial losses were planned. And yet, La Bregaglia del Popolo was an important tool for the circulation of the two socialists’ political ideas and promotion of new initiatives. The two editors wrote passionate, far-sighted articles about the issues of their time, like pacifism and anti-fascism and expressed, albeit more vehemently in their letters, their condemnation of Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy and his policy of suppressing basic rights.

4. Agostino Fasciati: The Writer

Agostino Fasciati published three short volumes of prose and poetry. He wrote the first, Chiaroscuri, when he was teaching in Casaccia (1891). The two others were published much later: Giovinezza (1925) and Carezze e baci (1931). He wrote about intolerance for injustice, social inequality, hypocrisy, falsehood and insincerity, themes that reflect his moods during the periods when they were written. They start out scornful and sneering and move increasingly towards tirades against the powerful, politicians and ecclesiastics, enemies of the people, with a growing biting, anarchic and nihilistic tone full of bitterness and solitude. In Giovinezza he also wrote about the injustices he suffered after his defeat in politics and the school system. He also translated articles, poems, Leonhard Ragaz’s Sozialismus und Gewalt and publications for schools from the German. As a writer and journalist, Agostino Fasciati used the pseudonym Fulvio Reto or the initials d.t.

5. Agostino Fasciati and Gaudenzio Giovano

Although almost thirty years younger, Gaudenzio Giovanoli (1893–1977), who was also born in Soglio and taught for more than forty years in Maloggia (Maloja), became a close friend and associate of Agostino, the two working together as journalists to spread their socialist ideas. The two teachers were members of the Conferenza magistrale, an association of teachers in the valley, and were tasked with compiling a list of titles for the creation of a public library, many of which were rejected by their colleagues. Their list included literary works by famous writers, history books, scientific tomes and, not forgetting pleasure, collections of love poetry, including the famed guide to sexual pleasure, the Kamasutra. But most of the titles on the list were rejected, and Agostino and Gaudenzio wrote about this in detail in their periodical, calling the other members of the teachers’ association ‘bats and owls’. This impetuous reaction on the pages of La Bregaglia del Popolo led the association to demand their apology: the two indignantly refused and filed a complaint with the Department of Education, which requested the readmission of the rejects, but there was no follow-through. Agostino was already unemployed, whereas Gaudenzio taught for another thirty-two years at the comprehensive school in Maloja/Maloggia.

6. Agostino Fasciati: The Political Career

Despite his promotion of socialist ideas in a rural mountain area indisposed to embracing them, Agostino Fasciati was elected mayor of Soglio during the period when he was teaching at its secondary school (1912–1922) and, in 1915, he was elected president of the district of Bregaglia and member of the Great Council (the cantonal parliament) in Chur. He was re-elected twice, then, the ‘enemies of the people’, impatient, vexed and no longer willing to put up with being continuously pilloried, got the upper hand and he lost his appointment. Writing about this period, he observed: ‘As president of the municipality, I met the lower class; as member of the Great Council, the upper one’. Strengthened by this political experience, he also stood as socialist candidate for the National Council. Although he did well at the cantonal level, this was not the case in the rural valleys (much less Bregaglia), and his election bid failed. It was here that his political career ended, in 1922, in conjunction with the closure of ‘his’ school in Soglio. In 1924, Agostino began to seriously consider leaving the socialist party, because, as he wrote in a letter to Gaudenzio Giovanoli: ‘If our comrades do not support me, it means we do not agree on the ideas; and I cannot be the comrade of people who see it differently’. In 1929, he officially left the socialist party, writing to Gaudenzio: ‘I feel light of heart’.

7. Agostino Fasciati: The Cooperatives

The two teachers, Agostino Fasciati and Gaudenzio Giovanoli, devoted themselves to initiatives aimed at improving people’s social and economic situations. One of the first was in Soglio, during World War I, involving the installation of a town oven and a social dairy. After much conflict, the Soglio bread cooperative closed its doors in 1930. In the meantime, however, Agostino and Gaudenzio had managed to get a consumer’s cooperative off the ground, which started opening shops in almost every town in the valley in 1921. They worked tirelessly and passionately in favour of hydroelectric exploitation and a railway line, but all their efforts ended in bitter disappointment. They had more success with the creation of a health insurance fund in Bregaglia, which found itself in major difficulty due to continuously increasing costs. The campaign that they launched in La Bregaglia del Popolo managed to achieve one objective: imposing a cap on doctors’ salaries in the valley. Their most radical proposal, introducing premiums proportional to income, never got off the ground. The accounts were, in any case, balanced, and the fund survived.

8. Agostino Fasciati: Personal Life

In a letter he wrote in Legnano to his family in Soglio in 1892 (Agostino was twenty-eight at the time), he urged: ‘Send me definite news about Checca right away. I absolutely must know whether or not what you told me is true: tell me. If it is true, look for my red wallet, you’ll find a photograph of her in it: send it to me. Please do this for me’. A year later, again writing to his family, still from Legnano: ‘Checca has a man, know that Checca has a man!’
And he dedicated an irreverent poem to her in Chiaroscuri, a sign that the relationship was over.
Later (1922), in a curriculum vitae published in the Bündner Volkswacht, he had the following to say: ‘I even got engaged in Vicosoprano [where he taught from 1886 to 1889]. But the gods looked kindly upon me this time: she became someone else’s wife.’

The Roncobello (BG) Diary

While teaching in Bergamo, Agostino supplemented his income during the summer holidays by working in a hotel as a bookkeeper. During this period, from June to July 1908, he kept a diary in which he wrote of his love for a widow, Maddalena Beretta, in his view unrequited. This was a new and singular turn in Agostino’s love life. He suffered and complained because in his view she never wrote to him. He felt sad and alone, in the grip of dark thoughts. One gets the impression that he was doing everything he could to convince himself that she did not love him. He was jealous, suspicious, self-pitying. He was forty-four!
And it is not true that she never wrote. During this short period and in the following months, he received about twenty postcards and six letters from her, the last one desolate, because he had ‘disappeared’. She often addressed him as ‘my dear Agostino’ and signed herself ‘Maddalena, forever yours’.
Deliverance from a presumed misogyny somehow kept at bay or a final prank? The fact is that he married Frida Bleuler of Zurich on 1 May 1942. He died a month and a half after.

9. Agostino Fasciati: Polemicist Even in Advanced Age

The following excerpt from a letter written on 19 November 1940 to Edmondo Gianotti from Casaccia expresses all the spirit of the polemicist Fulvio Reto even in the case of everyday events caused by force majeure.

‘I write, I write. It is a disgrace. We are treated like dogs: neglected, ignored, abandoned. For three days, neither electricity, nor post, nor telephone. The electricity is the concern of the company Scartazzini & C. A. A lot of snow fell here [in Soglio]. It’s true, wet, soaking, heavy. It brought a few poles down. Probably rotten. Now, it’s been three days to get these poles back up, and they are still lying there. We’ll remember this when Casaccia’s proposal [to build an electrical plant] resurfaces. We’ll use it as leverage, damn it! Mr Agatos, onward! Maybe we will win.’

He was also seen as a polemicist outside the valley. Christian Michel, who was, like Agostino, a member of the Great Council, but for the opposing party, described him as a ‘volcano that spits out logs, blocks and boulders that no one knows how to digest’. Agostino spent the last years of his life in poverty and isolation. Upon his death on 15 June 1942, he was remembered as follows: ‘He was a very active man, but singular and a little eccentric. He leaves many enemies and few friends.’

10. Agostino Fasciati: The Photographer

Nothing is known of Agostino Fasciati as a photographer from before 1908. There is almost nothing written about his photography in his letters, articles, notebooks and countless notes scattered here and there on endless subjects. Then, in the diary he kept between 30 June and 16 July in Roncobello (Bergamo), we find a few lines on the subject.

‘They started the cutting. I will take some nice photographs, I hope.’

‘I developed a few plates this evening, it was satisfying but not without a few disappointments. The magnificent line of the Rhaetian Alps is missing and the colours have only minimal variations. I will try again with shorter exposures.’

What Agostino meant by ‘colours’ were the various shades of grey between the opposites black and white, which can create beautiful gradations.

We find more information about Agostino and photography from when his friend and associate Gaudenzio Giovanoli sold some of his postcards in the consumer’s cooperative in Maloggia/Maloja. As has been observed, ‘humility, discretion and a socialist spirit’ emerge amidst the business concerns in a few excerpts from their correspondence.

‘I’m also sending you two postcards of my students on a trip we went on to Albigna. Maybe someone will be interested.’ (Soglio, 27 July 1925)

 ‘I am adding six photographs (one not for sale). You were saying he is a worker, so give him a good price.’ (Soglio, 3 February 1926)

‘The photograph of the little girl isn’t the way I wanted it. She wasn’t captured at the right moment. She should have kept her toothless mouth closed and smiled less. We will try again another year.’ (Soglio, 12 October 1927)

‘The photographs turned out OK; the girl came out well, at least I think so’. (Soglio, 2 April 1928)

‘There are good ways of making beautiful things, but who will buy them, who will pay what they are worth?’ (Soglio, 12 July 1928)

‘I was lucky that day in Maloggia: five plates that seem perfect to me.’ (Soglio, 5 November 1929)

‘I am enclosing two photographs: give them to the woman who lives in the house near the Catholic church. If she asks how much they cost tell her to pray for my soul.’ (Soglio, 6 November 1929)

11. The Photographic Archive

There are some interesting stories behind how Agostino Fasciati’s approximately 3,000 glass negatives, preserved in the Archivio storico della Società Storica Bregaglia (SSB), arrived, so to speak, at their destination. Aside from direct delivery (often of photographs and postcards mixed with other documents), the glass negatives, so the originals, instead took more singular routes. The ‘classic’ provenance is from the attics of old houses, emptied out in the course of renovations.
The photographer’s negatives were put in the attic of Agostino Fasciati’s family home in Soglio, along with a lot of other stuff. Agostino had postcards made from some of them, to be sold; others were sold to Maloja Palace, presumably with the copyrights. About sixty glass negatives in the SSB photo archive attest that the photographer from Solgio documented winter sports at Maloja Palace at the end of the 1920s. A lot of them appeared in the publication of one of the Maloja Palace’s last directors, without naming the photographer, which tells us he had sold them, compete with copyright.
The provenances of other groups of negatives also involve stories about attic storage. When the house in Soglio was sold, the priority was to redo the roof, and so everything was moved out. Many of the plates ended up in boxes and were found by chance by a craftsman from the valley.
Others took more curious routes. Before the boxes, there was the town dump, where a German man, who owned a holiday home in Soglio, had found and brought home to Germany a box containing some glass negatives, which he, of course, put in his attic. A few years ago, when the house was undergoing repairs, a relative found it, brought it back to Soglio and gave it to the photo archive.
A few family documents, newspaper clippings, photographs, postcards and more glass negatives ended up in an antique shop in Chiasso and some of those also ended up, via various routes, in the photo archive.

The last group of glass negatives was discovered in 2023, when two builders renovating a farmhouse near Stabio (Ticino) found material from the house in Soglio, including more than 2,000 glass negatives, and sent it all to the archive.