V. Butera was born in Conflenti.

VITTORIO BUTERA
Vittorio Butera was born in Conflenti on December 23, 1877. He began very early to compose verses in dialect (Larvas of a fifteen-year-old], but his vein exploded as he returned from La Spezia where he had been sent to study, after meeting Michele Pane (1988). His first poems were of a sentimental nature. Certainly not culturally deprived (he had a degree in engineering), one might say that he almost invented a language suited to the moral fable, in keeping with the lessons he learned from Aesop, Phaedrus, La Fontaine, Trilussa. An official of the Civil Engineering Corps of Catanzaro,
he died March 25, 1955.


For his collections Butera adopts titles that are almost fixed, emblematized in ccanto e ccuntu [to sing and to narrate]; that is to say, to express and communicate, to talk of oneself almost to feel alive, but also to talk for others.
Tuornu e ccantu tuornu e ccuntu, published posthumously by Giuseppe Isnardi and Guido Cimino (1960), totally confirms a poetics tending towards forms of lyricism, which concedes nothing to sentiment and looks instead to the power of narration, of an expression stylistically and thematically controlled, almost standing alone, through precise choices, among Calabrian dialect poets, and aspiring at forms of classicism which, i other respects, lead back to spirituality typical of the region. To the extent that the choice of the fable as privileged instrument of the “story,” in the
wake of the most accredited literary models of the genre, can even appear dictated by a need to make popular again a “story” still apparently tied to the high style.
A reliable collection of poetry, Inedite di Vittorio Butera, was published by Luigi Volpicelli and Carlo Cimino (Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino, 1978), after a volume of Poesie, prefaced by U. Bosco (Rome, 1949 and Cosenza, 1969). Out of print is the collection Prima cantu...e ddoppu cuntu... (Conflenti, 1978). However, the philological problem relative to the edition of these dialect poems, as for other dialect texts, remains unresolved. For criticism cf. U. Bosco, Pagine calabresi, cit.; Calabria Letteraria, single volume dedicated to V. Butera, February-March 1956; P. Tuscano, Calabria,
Brescia 1986; S. Gambino, Antologia..., cit.; R. Troiano, article cited; F. Brevini, op. cit.; L. Reina, op. cit., p. 190;
Poesia dialettale dal Rinascimento a oggi, cit..