VErso the Maturity 2025: Silvia Avallone and Teresa Ciabatti They tell two great authors of the twentieth century, Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg. Who still have a lot to say, both to the boys who are preparing for the high school exam and parents.
Silvia Avallone and Elsa Morante
Why did you choose Elsa Morante?
Because he was the first woman in whom I “read”. I had always done it through the male gaze of adults such as Flaubert, Dumas, Dostoevsky. The meeting with Elsa Morante was a electrocution, the beginning of a journey of freedom, language and gaze. Not only did it become my favorite writer but also my teacher of writing and life. It has been capable of great freedom, both in creative expression and when it made countercurrent decisions.
In the 10 minutes of the podcastwhat does it leverage to excite the Matranti to the Morante?
She is a witch of the fiction, she manages to kidnap you doing what a great writer must know how to do: to read a dangerous, vibrant experience. Literature is Eros, it is the desire to move forward, to want to ask uncomfortable questions. The female characters of Morante – I think above all of Lie and spell – They are passionate, full of anger, even unpleasant. In History Instead there is the wonder of a normal woman. For a teenager identifying himself in Ida Ramundo is a way, on the one hand to subvert many stereotypes that still nail us, on the other to take note that in this world we must intervene. Life is too precious not to do something good.
Silvia Avallone and Teresa Ciabatti. Photo Giovanni Previdi and Leonardo Cendamo/Gettyimages.
Silvia Avallone: ”Reading is vital for us adults too”
The lesson for the boys is that in life you should not be dragged, but should we intervene?
Yes. The great literature is uncomfortable reasoning. Reading immense authors like Elsa Morante means digging into oneself to modify both one’s soul and the world in which we live. When we identify ourselves in the others, we become them, we increase life in circulation, we leave the vegetables and start dreaming with our head. We learn to disobey stereotypes and expectations to become ourselves without betraying ourselves, the most difficult thing to achieve.
Elsa Morante in the sixties. (Getty Images)
And that for adults?
Reading during adolescence has repercussions throughout life. But reading is also vital for us adults, who must immerse ourselves in problems, and give them a name. If you don’t find words to appoint desires or difficulties you can’t face them. You cannot understand your story if you don’t enter that of others. We need many stories other than ours to understand who we are, dealing with the past and imagining the future.
Silvia Avallone, a book for the summer to be advised to newly new ones?
In continuity with Elsa Morante I say Niccolò Ammaniti of I take you and take you awayone of my favorites, or also I’m not afraid.
Why is there little room for Elsa Morante in the manuals?
It is gender discrimination, point and that’s it. Of such structured and ambitious novels as History or Lie and spell We don’t have any. For me it is the best novelist of the Italian twentieth century.
A memory of your high school exam?
I would do it a thousand times, with all the stress and sleepless nights. I was doing the classical high school in Piombino. I was the last to deliver the theme, I think I filled 15 protocol sheets, I never had the gift of synthesis and I wanted to give my best. The Latin version was from Seneca: difficult but there was a nice climate, I enjoyed it. And immediately after the oral, away in a motorbike for a dip at the sea.
Teresa Ciabatti and Natalia Ginzburg
Why did you choose Natalia Ginzburg?
Because she is a writer of the present, who speaks to the boys and above all to those of this frightened generation. We don’t know why he is so bad, if it is Covid’s fault, or social networks. It is certainly a new youth, as was new to the early youth after the war that she tells in Dear Micheleset in 1970. Critics like Cesare Garboli appreciated it, but they gave a reading where a piece of the future is missing. For Garboli, Dear Michele It is a book without men, where virility is a ghost. Today we can better understand the writing and say that the question is not the lack of the male. The protagonists, Michele and Mara, are also our youth, we were like this.
In the 10 minutes of the podcastwhat does it leverage to passionate about Ginzburg’s graduate?
Right on the correspondence of youth. She tells, without knowing it, a contemporary youth, and senses that the pain from external – war – becomes inner. He succeeds in something enormous: she who lived racial laws, the conflict, the death of the first husband Leone Ginzburg, she who grew up between heroes who sacrifice themselves to save others, manages not to judge this new youth, grown without war, who could be happy and live serenely and instead fails us, because that pain is inner. Few who lived what she experienced would have been capable of it.
A lesson also useful for adults?
Yes, because what she succeeds – looking with tenderness, understanding and indulgence young people – is what we should do too. Ginzburg does not diminish inner pain, on the contrary, he sees him even more insidious because it is more difficult to face and overcome.
Natalia Ginzburg in her home. (Olycom)
Teresa Ciabatti, a book for the summer to be advised to newly new ones?
In continuity I would say a novel by Sally Rooney, much loved by young people, for whom Natalia Ginzburg was a model. In fact, Rooney said: “When I read a book by Natalia Ginzburg for the first time, many years ago, I seemed to read something that had been written for me, something that had been written almost inside my own head or my own heart”.
Teresa Ciabatti: “My maturity was terrifying”
Why do manuals give little room for ginzburg?
No space give her, perhaps for a gender speech. And it is a real shame, because it is very contemporary and it could be for today’s guys today a link with the past. I really do the example of Sally Rooney: getting Ginzburg discover them, which has been a model for Rooney, can act as a leverage; From her they can move on to Morante, in Pavese and gradually to discover the classics.
A memory of your high school exam?
It was terrifying. I attended the classical high school, I learned everything by heart, for duty. I never said that study and writing would be my job, my life. I only discovered at the university of being able to put emotions, feelings and personal thoughts in the study. It was a discovery, a window that opened. Approaching narration is something that books, cinema, even TV series can do. Who knows if I had read first Natalia Ginzburg or the young Holden … maybe I would have learned to read in another way.
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