protagonists of the history of Italy
NoonJune 24, 2022 – 6:25 pm
“Dear to the gods” is the title of the new book by the critic and writer
from Mirella Armiero
IS a close confidential dialogue with the reader that of Goffredo Fofi in his new precious volume “Dear to the gods” (editions and / or). With his limpid prose, the great outsider of Italian culture, one of the most lucid minds in our country, draws a gallery of portraits for quick effective sketches, in some cases intimate and moving.
These are protagonists of culture and politics, activism and volunteering, whom Fofi has met and appreciated (or in some cases known only indirectly, through their work or mutual friends, as in the case of Don Peppe Diana) and who too soon they were snatched from life and from their work of civil witness.
The one whom the gods love dies young, Menander teaches. Not all the characters told by Fofi died very young, but each of them was in full activity of life and thought. The gallery of protagonists gives us a heterogeneous fresco of post-war Italy, in particular that of the sixties and seventies, crossed by passions, ideologies, thrusts and claims, up to the disappointment and ebb of the eighties and nineties of the last century and the intellectual degeneration of the new millennium. “I have met, for my immense fortune”, writes Fofi in the introduction, “many great Italian intellectuals from the post-war period onwards, and I miss them greatly in Italy today, in the face of the mediocrity and conformism that characterize the enormous majority (a mass) of today’s Italian intellectuals, with very few exceptions ».
The story opens with the commemoration of the forty citizens of Gubbio killed by the Germans on the way to retreat, in 1944, and continues following the stages of Fofi’s biography: after his early youth in Umbria, Danilo Dolci’s “flight” to Sicily and then gradually work and meetings in Rome, Milan, Paris, Turin and Naples, all places of training and militancy. Some protagonists stand out with greater clarity and impose themselves as tutelary deities of the firmament of Fofi, such as the Lucan poet Rocco Scotellaro, who was also a sociologist in Portici with Rossi Doria and who embodied an exemplary fusion of homo faber e wise mananimated by a strong need to know his country.
Another point of reference for Fofi was Raniero Panzieri, the founder of the “Quaderni rossi”, “a man much wiser and more attentive to the world than the professors were”. But Fofi’s book is by no means a romantic and nostalgic exercise of memories: through the portraits that intertwine with each other, the Italian history and events of a crucial period of the twentieth century are clear, from the warlike hope of the movements to the gloomy closing horizon, which took place in the late seventies. From Placido Rizzotto to Pino Pinelli, from the militant of Lotta Continua Alceste Campanile to Peppino Impastato, there are many characters who are returned here to the reader in a more human and authentic light. Among the most poignant, the chapter on the writer and journalist Alessandro Leogrande, “the best of his generation”. And there are many Neapolitans, such as the beautiful and indomitable Lucia Mastrodomenico, forerunner of female thought, or valuable writers such as her lifelong friend Fabrizia Ramondino, who opposed the easy acceptance of the world as it is the obstinate will to try to change it. Moreover, above all personal events, for Fofi the ethical sense of intellectual activity is central, together with the need for a “demanding radicalism and yet as pure as possible, that is, freed from the blackmail of politics and the misery of a thought that does not know how to become flesh, that is, action, intimate change of each and collective change ».
With Rimbaud, Fofi is convinced that you have to be present in your own time. Although he has often openly deprecated our time so depleted on a political, social and cultural level. Being critical of the present is a great effort, but we have to “keep bothering to be heard”. Art in which Fofi excels. And for this and more he remains one of the last great masters, capable of teaching and networking, that is, of generously highlighting the new energies that he encounters on his way.
June 24, 2022 | 18:25
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