uA kind girl from Arpino stops me on the street and announces to me, an accomplice, a welcome gift of books. She smiles and hints. After a while she comes back and gives me three small books. These are rare and almost unobtainable texts by Antonio Piromallia name lost in oblivion, but for me linked to the time of my training, at the Ludovico Ariosto classical high school in Ferrara where, before my years, with my uncle Bruno Cavallini, Piromalli taught, a close friend of Bruno, and a frequent visitor to our house, of my grandparents and my mother.
Name always pronounced and always remembered for the fast career that took him to the top of the Ministry of Public Education (he was the central inspector) and to teaching at the noble university of little Cassino. Cassino. So close to Arpino. And this explains the sending of books to a friend with dedications in the early 1990s, when I, having arrived in Parliament, as president of the Culture Commission, found it again, with happiness and amazement, in the luminous Barcis in Valcellina, in eastern Friuli, dazed but competent president of a dialect poetry prize, dedicated to Giuseppe Malattia della Vallata, precursor of Pasolini poet in the Friulian language.
Piromalli was Calabrian, and knew well the virginity of the dialectal languages, capable of expressing pure thoughts with new words, not consumed by the repetition of too many times experienced verses. Seeing him again after more than twenty years, after the day of my graduation, rekindled my childhood memories, when he used to come to my parents’ house in Ro di Ferrara, and caused me great nostalgia.
So I doubled that prize, creating one dedicated to my uncle who has been missing for ten years now; and, in its first edition, in 1996, I wanted to give it to a kind poet, Gaio Fratini. Fratini was the same age as my father and Piromalli. Many things returned in those days, in the union between the living and the dead, and in the memory of the survivors.
In Barcis, with Fratini, there were Piromalli and my father and mother; and uncle Bruno united us in memory, with that prize, to bring it back to life. Piromalli, friend and teacher, frequented our house which was a cenacleabsolutely underground, in which my uncle held court with an authority that derived from his character and the strength of his thought, but also from his passions.
Among the books that the young woman from Arpino gave me is one entitled “engaging”: The girl from Ferrara. The publisher could not be more unknown: In the name of eyewear. The series winks: “literature as friendship”. I leaf through it with curiosity. Coincidences, family stories reappear. It makes me think: will the girl from Ferrara be my mother? A friend? A fellow student?
In those rites of the students in the poetic and terrible years, described by Giorgio Bassani ne The garden of the Finzi-Continis, the girl from Ferrara is like this: «X was sitting on the seat of the bicycle, her hands resting on the handlebars, one foot on the ground, an elegant clean cut at the waist, a dress that was not ostentatious in color, with small checks, between plum and amaranth , long sleeves… The sun with the extreme sumptuous dance of reflections made the hair golden; it wasn’t the blond colour, it was the gold of fairy tales, of spells».
The “parva domus” by Ludovico Ariosto, in via Ariosto 67, in Ferrara photo Alamy/Ipa).
Piromalli then describes the house he lived in and a visit, after the war and 50 years later, to the remains of the Este family in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. And it is here that, without revealing the identity of the girl from Ferrara, Piromalli opens up to a memory that is moving for me: «As soon as I arrived in Ferrara I met Bruno Cavallini and his sister Rina (Romana, another sister, was a child). We visited medieval and Renaissance Ferrara together. Bruno taught art history in the “Ariosto” high school where I also taught, in via Borgoleoni. Bruno, very sensitive, was moved to see those remains of the Este family and to think of the life-death events, power-annihilation, the transience of what is human. Today Bruno rests in the Certosa, just in front – beyond the church of S. Cristoforo – of the liberty building. Bruno and Rina were owners, in via Giuoco del Pallone, of the “magna domus” of the Ariosti family: there Ludovico had spent most of his life and had composed almost all of his works and the first two drafts (1516, 1521) of theOrlando Furioso. Only in 1527 did he go to live in the “parva domus” in the Mirasole district. In the Cavallini “magna domus”, which I frequented in the evenings, in those years the columns and capitals of the room where Ludovico privately staged his comedies were found on the ground floor: the first Italian-language comedy theater was also born there».
So a kind girl from Arpino takes me back to the places of my city, and at the time of my uncle’s and my mother’s lives, before I was born. Thank you.
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