Carlo Bo was a poet, literary critic, and professor at the University of Urbino in Italy; he was one of the foremost authorities on French Literature, writing on Surrealism, Mallarmé, Jacques Rivière, Sainte Beuve, among others, and Hispanic literature. He held office as the Dean of the University of Urbino uninterruptedly from 1947 to 2001. For Bo, literature was the name for a quest of a much wider significance: he was witness to the urgency of asking who we are and how we should see ourselves against the background of the major historical traumas of the twentieth century from the First World War to the concentration camps of the Second World War.