Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
S.i always say it takes time to interpret the era in which you live, impossible to have an impartial judgment on one’s contemporaneity.
Even now we have not settled on the reasons and wrongs of the Second World War e only the passing of time that calms passions and resentments it allows – at least so say scholars and scholars – to judge the past and the events of those who preceded us.
But perhaps to get a complete picture those who study history should also turn to an unusual source but for me able to give back more than many disquisitions the real temperature of by now distant eras of time.
In this sense, the publication of the literary anthology for Rizzoli Italica. The twentieth century in thirty stories (and three prophecies) edited by Giacomo Papi is certainly an illuminating tool for understanding the century that has just passed.
“Italica. The twentieth century in thirty stories (and three prophecies) “by Giacomo Papi (Rizzoli)
“Literature always tells history, even when it reconstructs the past or imagines the future, because there is no history without a story”. Through thirty stories, some better known and others almost unknown, it looks almost like a literary census of our twentieth century.
With an unusual and very enjoyable selection – from Italo Calvino to Anna Maria Ortese, passing through Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Natalia Ginzburg and the magnificent first Fantozzi by Paolo Villaggio – this original book brings together the narratives of authors who, thanks to their happy feathers, have traced a precise fresco of how we were.
The texts, as in a true self-respecting anthology, are enriched by comments, Istat data, parliamentary reports and newspaper articles that help us to immerse ourselves even more in the weather of the years that pass through memorable characters, such as the young manicurist Silvana, protagonist of a 1962 story by the writer Leda Muccini, included in the section “Italian women confess themselves”.
Papi glosses and comments on his choices with the brilliant style that we have already appreciated in his satirical novels and in his company let’s go through a hundred years of our history with the magnifying glass of literatureexperiencing the crucial facts of the century as in a film up to the three final prophecies that foreshadow the future, because only literature has the magical power to tell its time and at the same time to be prophetic.
All the articles by Serena Dandini.
iO Donna © REPRODUCTION RESERVED