culture
twelve o’clock, September 8, 2021 – 2.30pm
The author of Nocera was born a century ago, he was able to tell without shame the plebs that the left hated
from Goffredo Fofi
Tanti adults and non-Neapolitan adolescents were fascinated and overwhelmed, at the time, by the reading of Spaccanapoli, and of Jesus, shed some light, and of What Cummeo saw, with a little distrust of later works, short stories and novels. Thanks to a hyper-baroque writing, which was judged by many as too colorful and sensual, excessive.
Heir to the seventeenth century of painters rather than to a tradition of writers, of Ribera the Spagnoletto more than of Salvatore Di Giacomo and Roberto Bracco and of Serao herself, Domenico Rea brought back to the Italian literary scene something that fascism had tried to stifle, and thanks Viviani was not entirely successful, if Rossellini’s Naples and Malaparte’s Naples exploded after the war just ended. Yes, it was Rea – who was part of the South friend-enemy group of the participatory but very lucid Ortese del Sea does not wet Naples, like the acid Compagnone, like the crowned choir of the forgotten Staircase in San Potito and like the most nostalgic La Capria – to shamelessly sing a plebe that the leftist of the time detested and whose votes ultimately gave to Achille Lauro and the monarchy.
The underclass, the black beast of the Communists, was in truth, Fabrizia Ramondino among others explained later, nothing but marginal proletariat, inserted in the chain of production at the lowest and least protected levels, and it does not matter if political consciousness Rea did not seem clear to most of the critics of the time, his writing took revenge, sensual baroque unscrupulous but anything but right. In 1953 Mondadori, given the public success of this writer badly ascribed to the ranks of neo-realist neoconformists, commissioned Rea to write a new book Cuore which would deserve a rereading and rediscovery, Portrait of May, the story of a school year, between the children of the plebs of Nofi (the two Nocera from which Rea came) and the post-Bourbon, post-Savoyard, post-fascist capital. It is not true that Italian literature has ignored the world of school after De Amicis, and indeed this is a story to be rediscovered.
In What Cummeo saw, then, there is one of the most beautiful stories (one of my favorites) in the rich literature of those years, The lady goes down to Pompeii.. Where the lady is a poor woman who, on a battered bus of the time, from Naples to Pompeii, has to accompany a grandson as miserable as she is to an orphanage or boarding school for poor, very poor children … Spaccanapoli and for that story, and for the subject of A Neapolitan Moll Flanders which years ago reprinted Dante & Descartes, and deliberately forgetting some excesses of the character Rea, and not forgetting the belated and happy reappearance of Plebeian nymph, Rea deserves an important place in the history of Neapolitan culture, which he told of as no one after Viviani is underground or explosive and not always vital vitality.
8 September 2021 | 14:30
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