Vincenzo Mascolo (b. 1959, Salerno) is an Italian poet and former lawyer based in Rome. He has published several poetry collections, including A Unique Thought for Which I Am Responsible (2004), In Search of Eggs (Notes on Bioethics) (2009), Q and the Lark (2018), and most recently The Smallest Common Companion (2024). He has also co-edited anthologies such as Full House Notebook – Twenty-Five Contemporary Poets (2012) and A Small Dictionary of Care (2019).
Since 2006, Mascolo has served as the artistic director of Ritratti di poesia, a major annual poetry festival in Rome. The event is a cornerstone of the city’s cultural life and is broadcast live by Italy’s RAI Cultura. He shares the main responsibility for the festival with Carla Caiafa.
Mascolo is a poet of human culture. His works challenge the reader’s understanding of European intellectual heritage and identity, seeking space and continuity for them. His poetry blends the depth of European history, mythology, and art with human emotion, evoking the transformative power of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. His poems are also deeply self-aware, engaging in meta-lyricism that reflects on poetry’s place in the continuum of art and tradition. Each line is a sonic and semantic condensation, a vessel of meaning and beauty.
In his poem cycle Orphée, the motif of the vessel—ceramics being one of Europe’s oldest cultural artifacts—symbolizes the layers of craftsmanship and aesthetic sensibility passed down through millennia. As long as there is voice, there is life; as long as there is poetry, there is cultural heritage. In the present, we hear not only the noise of our time but also the echo of Orpheus’s lyre. The poet becomes Orpheus, and his beloved Eurydice. Mascolo’s work thus joins the long and honored tradition of Orphic literature, contributing new and resonant dimensions to it.
In August 2025, just before the Runokuu Festival, a selection of Mascolo’s poems titled The Sky and the Cities will be published in Finnish (Siltala), translated by poet Jouni Inkala.