Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
“THEGrandfather kept everything. He who wanted amnesia for Italy, has not forgotten anything. And he held it all tight tight. So tight that, despite the fire in the abandoned house for decades, the boxes stacked in the cousins’ warehouse and the humidity, I found everything. A heritage of memory that awaited me ».
Among the most important books of 2021 there is Bloodline and shame by Michela Marzano, published by Rizzoli.
A book in which the author puts herself into question in a total way, from the very beginning and starting with her own name: «Michela Marzano doesn’t exist. Birth certificate, passport, identity card, marriage certificate: everything attests that the person born in Rome on August 20, 1970 is Maria Marzano ».
Everyone calls her and has always called her Michela; “But my father claims that my real name is Maria”, and as such he registered her in the registry office.
“Stirpe and shame” by Michela Marzano (Rizzoli).
But the book revolves around another discovery: the case full of cards and medals from the Twentieth Century. Grandfather Arturo was a fascist of the first hour, whose name Marzano’s brother bears.
Hence the title, Bloodline and shame, on which Giampiero Mughini, in turn the son of an early fascist, wrote interesting considerations.
The theme is: right or wrong to be ashamed of the fascist father or grandfather? Wrong, Mughini replies. And in fact today to expect that children and grandchildren are ashamed for the people who brought them into the world is perhaps too much.
This is the conclusion reached by Marzano herself, who in the display case and in her memory writes that she has found «the ugly things, but also the beautiful ones. His grandfather’s squad, but also his big heart. His defeat with the fall of fascism, but also his revenge when he was elected parliamentary of the Republic. His illness and his lonely death, but also his being alive again today. In the pages of a novel which, perhaps, is also a bit of the history of our Italy ».
Judging people, especially loved ones, with our value system as children of democracy is difficult. But this can and must be said: if not of men, it is right and right to be ashamed of fascism.
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