It appears in the Solferino Young series «A particular day. Small and great stories from the history of Italy»: heroes of yesterday and today, from Spartacus to Falcone and Borsellino
In the year 73 BC, Spartacus it rebels against slavery by challenging the games of power and death of the Romans. On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus he puts to sea with three caravels, following an offshore intuition of what was “universally” known and promising the sailors the cancellation of debts. In May 1611, Artemisia Gentileschi denounces the man who raped her and who then – tricking her, again – promised an impossible marriage to restore her “honor”. On November 17, 1938, a law emptied the Italian schools of nearly six thousand Jewish schoolchildren and students indicating a “race” as the national class enemy. On May 23rd and then on July 19th of a dramatic 1992, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino are assassinated – together with Francesca Morvillo, Vito Schifani, Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro, Agostino Catalano, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina, Claudio Traina, Emanuela Loi – because Cosa Nostra wants to paralyze the state: eleven martyrs, literally, “witnesses” of our falling and getting back up beyond the abyss of mafia blackmail.
These are extraordinary days, days of individual stories that have marked a boundary in common history, they belong to everyone and are deeply ours. There is a before and a after these dates. After Spartacus, slavery is no longer a wall that reaches from heaven to heaven, it cracks, it becomes an injustice, the emperor will be forever naked. After Columbus, the line of the Earth is a curve that moves the point of the compass to new centers and continents. After Artemisia, violence against women is not a natural disaster, like hail: it will be recognized (very slowly, too much, in Italy in 1996) as a crime against the person. After 1938, we should simply be ashamed of fascism, without attempting memory remediation. After 1992, we know that heroes belong to our time, that their sacrifice concerns us and watches us.
Correspondent and columnist of the «Corriere», Aldo Cazzullo writer draws on the freshness of the reporter in this book to Solferino Young, series dedicated to male and female readers aged 5 and over:
A particular day. Small and big stories of the history of Italyinspired by a successful broadcast by the same author for «La7». Cazzullo moves along a path of centuries to stop at the heart of some events that have determined who we are, recounting characters and facts at the moment when everything is done.
Did a gladiator really imagine making a revolution? Is this why Spartacus, instead of fleeing, ventured a reversal towards Rome after defeating the legions nine times? What did Christopher Columbus, a man of the sea since adolescence, feel when he finally set sail to pierce the horizon? And what did Dante expect when he entered his Hell? Did the young Francis, feared by the guardians of order in Christianity, nourish more fear or hope as he prepared to meet the Pope? Tormented, restless, did Michelangelo find consolation in discovering that he could touch, move, move the gaze of others? And again: the defeat of Caporetto; the patriotism of Verdi and Manzoni; the racial laws that – as Liliana Segre did in the inaugural speech of the XIX legislature – we should call racist; then the 25th of April which pushes the insurrection into the embrace of Liberation; up to the Autosole which in the mid-60s united the country, connecting Milan-Rome-Naples in a single backbone of asphalt and trust.
Each chapter opens a door to the stories – small, large, very large – while backstage, i.e. in the following pages, lights up a constellation of data, insights, quotations that allows us to reconstruct the perimeter of the time and to frame the reverberations of the character or event just narrated. We find a map of the explorations that followed the landing in San Salvador in 1492 as, further on, a diagram of the symbolic objects (the Vespa, the 500, the television) that redesigned Italy in the post-war race. The stories are introduced and accompanied by the images of twelve young authors. With different and always surprising strokes, the illustrators dress the sections like a glove, detaching them from each other. The landscape changes from age to age, from room to room, along the corridor of a magical house which is our home.
But is there a thread that sews this free sequence of faces and colours, from Spartacus to Borsellino? Perhaps the word that comes back – and knots distant lives – is “courage”. The courage to come forward, not to give up, not to hide away in the belief that nothing (and no one, at least none of us) will be able to make a difference, for oneself and for others. The two very long years of the pandemic have discouraged and often frightened a part of the younger population. We know it, we see it, the parents, the teachers, the crowded psychotherapy studios that welcome teenagers tell it. They tell it themselves when we get ready to listen. It is as if, having passed the peak of the emergency and undergone an existential suspension, a tail of fine dust remained, a conscious or unconscious intoxication that leaves those who should instead invent a road exhausted, choose it, build it, thinking of themselves with optimism in front of the rest of the world. Everything appears threatened, potentially “fake”, exposed to a manipulation that doesn’t even bother to hide the mechanisms anymore than he does. Indeed, he shows them, almost flaunts them to induce a passivity that is so close and so unhappy.
If ours is therefore the age of uncertainty and anger, of a bewilderment that binds generations, what can a rebel gladiator, a poor saint, a painter aware of her art and her strength, a navigator who bets on a vision, the patriots of the Risorgimento and the partisans of April 25? They seem very far away, yet – writes Cazzullo addressing his children and grandchildren – they are our memory, we (were) us. There are twelve possible stories, twelve Italian days. It makes sense to go through them again, to relive them. And then start over. “Never believe – urges the author – that being Italian is a bad luck, not even for a moment.” On the contrary, being Italian is an opportunity and a responsibility: «It means living up to the moral values that the characters portrayed in this book have defended and transmitted. Because no conquest of freedom is ever definitive.
And since every children’s book speaks to adults,
A particular day it is an opportunity – yet another – to remind us that there is no mission, success, self-fulfillment greater than the time spent with our children.
The book and the illustrations
Aldo Cazzullo’s book A particular day. Small and big stories of the history of Italy, edited by Solferino in the Young series, pp. 204, euros
7.50 pm, it’s been in bookstores since November 22nd. The factsheets are
edited by Massimo Birattari. The illustrations were created by: Elisabetta Bianchi, Federica Bordoni, Serena Gramaglia, Giorgia Grasso, Elisa Macellari, Virginia Mori, Sofia Paravicini, Paola Rollo, Marta Signori, Sara Stefanini, Fortuna Todisco, Marianna Tomaselli
November 21, 2022 (change November 21, 2022 | 20:30)
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