Mario Reali

Mario Reali (Mario Lucrezio Reali) is an Italian poet and writer and, at the same time, one of the most prominent experts in gas and oil. He is one of the very few Westerners, and the only Italian, who has received from Gazprom the highest Russian decoration of the energy industry: "Meritorious Worker of Gas Industry of Russian Federation", in 1999 and in 2005.

Career

In 2005 he was working exclusively on poetry and prose, subjects that he practiced during his whole life together with his management activities. Reali was born in Foiano della Chiana, near Arezzo (Tuscany) on 9 October 1939. After the Diploma in a Classical Liceum in 1960 he moved to Moscow where he graduated in Pure Chemistry at the highly prestigious Lomonosov University, the most important of the country. In Italy, at the University of Bologna he obtained a second degree in Chemistry. There he concentrated his researches into theoretical problems in organic chemistry .

In 1967 he created the Montedison office in the Soviet Union, and continued managing it until 31 March 1981, taking part in the construction of 13 chemical plants. One of them is the Fiat plant in the city of Togliattigrad.

From 1981 to 1991 Reali has been the director of Eni ("Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi" - the Italian state oil industry) in USSR. From 1991 to 1993 headed the Moscow Italo--Russian Chamber of Commerce and from 1993 to 2002 he was head Eni representative -in the Russian Federation and Area Chief of the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union Republic), resigning afterwards due to the divergencies about the company's management of the activities in Russia and Kazakhstan. Despite his resignment, Eni offered him a consulting contract of three years asking him to follow the construction of the well-known "Blue Stream" pipeline of which Reali is one of the creators.^[1]

Reali has been one of the key-personalities of the deal supply of Russian gas-metan and oil for Italy; he took part in the construction and revamping of the Russian pipeline towards Europe, in particular the big pipeline of Ourengoï-Pomary-Uzhgorod. He has begun the cooperation with Kazakhistan in the development of the giant gas-oilfield of Karachaganak e Kashagan.^[2]

Poetry

He published three poem collections with Sandro Teti Editore: "Tramonto in Europa", (Sunset in Europe, 2006), that gained the important award of Santa Marinella, "L'anima corrotta"(The Corrupted Soul, 2007), which obtained the international prize Agape 2008 for Poetry, and "L'uomo a quanti" (The Quantum Man, 2008), presented at the Turin International Book Fair. In 2011 Mario Reali published in the United States "A Tired Angel. Selected Poems", edited by Paolo Lagazzi and Irene Marchegiani, with Gradiva Publications.

Critical response

Paolo Lagazzi, literary critic, curator of the three poem collections of Reali's, wrote about "Tramonto in Europa": <<No hypothesis of intelligence, no ideal or spiritual glimmer is untuned in order to find some big answer or in order to oppose a bank to what in places seems, more than the unthinkable order of the things, the whipping up tsunami of the caos>>.

In regard to "L'anima corrotta" Lagazzi wrote: <<The voice of the poet points us to the corruption of the soul as origin, before the modernity sin, but he reminds us that the amazement and the beauty will be able to opposite to it until the extreme>>.

Introducing "L'uomo a quanti", Lagazzi identified the central theme of the collection within "the unsolvable trade-offs of our lifes in this world, with an energy that can overthrow the common categories of thought". The critic Giancarlo Baroni identified such theme with <<moving forward the horizon, taking it as a movable frontier, not a barrier; the needs - that cannot be renounced - to look elsewhere, to avert being enmeshed and caged, limited and compressed; the need to avert surrender>>.

In 2011 Lagazzi wrote about "A Tired Angel": <<At the beginning of the new millennium, Mario Lucrezio Reali distinguished himself with three collections of poems [...] with his harsh and energetic wisdom he has soon become one of the most gifted among the new Italian poets [...] few contemporary authors know how to exploit so radically the ambiguity of language in order to dig into the old history of Western civilization>>.

Press Review

Carlo Boffitto, "L'atteggiamento delle imprese italiane in Russia" (The Behavior of Italian enterprises in Russia), Istituto Nazionale per il Commercio Estero (Italian Institute for Foreign Trade, ICE), January 2001, page 12

"Specchio" weekly magazine of the newspaper "La Stampa", 12 October 2005

Bookshop Mondadori Venezia, presentation of "Tramonto in Europa", 14 aprile 2007

Journalistic enquiry of the program Report, Rai Tre (third public Italian TV channel), "La via del gas" (The Way of Gas), aired on 27 May 2007

Il Giornale, newspaper, 21 November 2006

Le Voci della Luna, Rivista Culturale (The Voice of the Moon, Cultural Magazine), n.38, July 2007

RadioUno (first public Italian radio station), program Zapping, poems aired the 2nd-11th-18–26 March 2009

Poesia, Mensile Internazionale di Cultura Poetica (Poetry, Monthly Magazine of Poetic Culture), n.242, October 2009

Notes

1. ^ [1]^{[dead link]}
2. ^ The oilfield of Kashagan is considered the biggest one in the world discovered during the last 30 years. Please check the newspaper articles of Luciano Mondellini in “MF Mercati Finanziari” of 13th may 2008, and of Giuseppe Oddo and Sissi Mondellini in “Il Sole-24 Ore” of 25th march 2008.

References

• "Gosudarstvennij chelovek" 2005 Moscow
• "Tramonto in Europa" 2006 Sandro Teti Editore^{[dead link]}, Rome - ISBN 88-88249-10-9
• "L'Anima Corrotta" 2007 Sandro Teti Editore^{[dead link]}, Rome - ISBN 978-88-88249-14-18
• "L'uomo a quanti" 2008 Sandro Teti Editore^{[dead link]}, Rome - ISBN 978-88-88249-18-6
• "A Tired Angel", 2011 Gradiva Publications, New York

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Name	Reali
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Date of birth	1939
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