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Guido Seborga, pseudonym of Guido Hess (Turin, 10 October 1909 – Turin, 13 February 1990), was an Italian journalist, poet, painter and writer.
Bordighera and its hinterland are the background of Seborga's literary works; the Vallée des Merveilles and the Ligurian Sea are the references of his art.
In Turin, he became friends with Umberto Mastroianni, who came from Rome in 1928, and with Lojze Spazzapan. Seborga also met the painters Mattia Moreni and Albino Galvano, the art critic Piero Bargis, the philosopher Óscar Navarro, the director Vincenzo Ciaffi, the architect Carlo Mollino, and the music critic Massimo Mila, with whom he discussed art and politics.
Antifascist groups in Turin led him to join the Italian resistance, first with the Action Party along with Giorgio Agosti, Alessandro Galante Garrone, Ada Gobetti and then as a partisan in the .
Since the 1930s, he had worked together with Italian cultural magazines, such as Circoli, Campo di Marte, Prospettive, Letteratura Maestrale. After the war, he contributed to the republishing of the Turin newspaper Avanti!.
He participated with Ada Gobetti, Franco Antonicelli, Felice Casorati, Massimo Mila and others in the foundation of the Unione culturale di Torino ("Cultural Union of Turin"). He was among the organizers of the production of the play Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, with Raf Vallone and performed in 1946 for the reopening of the Gobetti Theatre in Turin.
In 1947 he decided to return to Paris, where he became the director of Italia Libera and worked with Europe and Minuit. From Paris, he continued to collaborate with the Italian newspapers writing about Parisian life and its intellectuals.
Once back from Paris, Seborga lived between Turin and Bordighera. His love for Bordighera came to expression in his participation in the cultural life of western Liguria. In the 1950s and 60s, Seborga was part of the organization and of the jury of the "Cinque Bettole" award in the categories literature and painting, with the likes of Italo Calvino, Giancarlo Vigorelli, Elio Philip Accrocca, Charles Betocchi and Giuseppe Balbo. In the 1960s he chaired the lecture series "Meet the man" in Sanremo, featuring, among others, Salvatore Quasimodo. He also contributed to the creation and the development of the Cultural Democratic Union of Bordighera, for which he helped to organize exhibitions, debates, lectures and plays.
Guido Seborga died in Turin on 13 February 1990.
He also exhibited abroad, in Amsterdam at the Sphynx Gallery (1969), in Menton in the Gallery Arts and Letters and during the Biennale (1970–1972), in Paris at the UNESCO Palace (1972), in Monte Carlo in 1979, in Marseille with the City Museum, in the Biennial of Bamberg, in Strasbourg in 1980, and then in other large cities such as Kraków, London, Lugano, Antibes, etc.
Guido Seborga always had a special focus on youth. There were many exhibitions and conferences in schools and high schools, with the stated goal of opening the minds of young people to the new artistic trends that roamed the world. His works are in private collections and Italian and foreign museums.
Seborga is a writer of strong realistic inflection and, in his novels, he speaks generally of a world of outcasts who are struggling to survive in a tough and difficult land of Liguria, where work is hard and dangerous and where it becomes dangerous to defend beliefs at the time of the fascist regime.
These first two novels will be followed by four other titles translated into several languages and a newspaper published in 1968.
Seborga's characters are part of the drama of life, for better or for worse. They have no chance of escape without risking betrayal and of therefore becoming an accomplice of society. For Seborga automation is a danger, namely the risk of bloodshed by the techno-industrial society to which he opposes the moral rigor of Piero Gobetti which refers to civil commitment.
Seborga also approached poetry, his first collection of poems was published in 1965 with the title "Se avessi una canzone", is dominated by the sea, the sun, the wind, rich olive border valleys and vineyards as wild as its inhabitants.
He participated in the political and musical experience of the Turin group Cantacronache, which offered an alternative to commercial ditties by putting in music some of his poems.
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