Massimo Bacigalupo (born 1947 in Rapallo, Italy) is an experimental filmmaker, scholar, and translator of poetry, an essayist and literary critic. He was a founding member of the Cooperative of Independent Filmmakers in Rome. As a filmmaker of the Italian Independent Cinema (Cinema Indipendente Italiano), he was influenced by the New American Cinema.
Bacigalupo is also a scholar, specializing in Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, and other American and English writers, whom he has edited and translated. Since 1990, he has been a Professor of American Literature at the University of Genoa.
Bacigalupo grew up in Rapallo, the son of Giuseppe Bacigalupo and Frieda Bacigalupo (née Natali). His parents’ house was a center of cultural life in Rapallo. Writers, poets and composers like Gerhard Hauptmann, Ezra Pound, and Isaiah Berlin met there.
Giuseppe Bacigalupo was a friend of Pound. Massimo Bacigalupo often encountered Ezra Pound as an adolescent and young man. Knowing Pound at a young age furthered his contacts and later literary exchange with Eva Hesse, Olga Rudge, with Pound’s daughter Mary De Rachewiltz (née Rudge), and others close to Pound.
In Genoa, Bacigalupo helped to initiate the International Poetry Festival in the late 1970s when this event was known as "Poetry in public" (Poesia in pubblico). At the time, Bacigalupo motivated poets Denise Levertov and Adrian Mitchell to come to Genoa, . Bacigalupo is still involved in the Genoa poetry festival.
Bacigalupo was a founding member of the Cooperative of Independent Filmmakers in Rome. As a filmmaker of the Italian Independent Cinema (Cinema Indipendente Italiano), he was influenced by the New American Cinema. His films have been screened and acquired by the Beaubourg Museum, Paris; the Tate Gallery, London; the Cinémathèque Nationale du Belgique; the Vienna Filmmuseum; the Cineteca Nazionale, Rome, Italy; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Marlborough Gallery, London, and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.