2024-02-23 19:03:34
by Ernesto Galli della Loggia
The Stalinist barbarism in Czechoslovakia told by Sergio Tazzer. Fabio Todero on the intertwining of languages and people in Venezia Giulia during the First World War. And then Lorenzetti for political propaganda in a book by Gabriella Piccinni
As always, the truth in the details. For example, in that young hyena in the guise of prosecutor who in 1950 the communist regime assigned to the prosecution team in the trial that sentenced Milda Horkov to death together with others – a jurist with a long career of struggles in favor of women, anti-Nazi resister and deputy of the National Socialist Party (which in its reports Unit gloomily dubs National Socialist). A young hyena, I was saying, who follows the victims to the gallows and demands hanging by a short fall and with a thin rope so that death occurs through slow suffocation and not through a cervical fracture. one of the 248 capital executions which, together with a few centuries of prison, dot the history of the power installed by Stalin in Czechoslovakia after 1945. Very little is written and translated here on communism in Eastern Europe: so welcome to this book by Sergio Tazzer (Milda and the others, Kellermann, pages 223, 16 euros): a little messy and drawn out, but which informs us of things that we otherwise wouldn’t know.
In 1863 Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, father of Italian glottology, coined the term Venezia Giulia to indicate the province that between Venice itself and the Julian Alps and the sea includes Gorizia, Trieste and Istria: a territory that in 1914 still belongs to Austrian Empire, where Italians are a minority compared to Slovenians and Croatians, but which will be the fulcrum of irredentism. In a book that skilfully moves between literary memories, political-social history and military events, linked in a continuous and engaging narrative relationship with the geographical and urban environment (Terra irredenta, terra incognita. The hour of arms on the eastern border of ‘Italy 1914-1918, Laterza, 258 pages, 22 euros), Fabio Todero recounts with a wealth of detail the different vicissitudes that occurred under different flags and on four or five different fronts during the First World War to the constellation of people who had lived there for centuries the region. In an almost inextricable mix of languages, suffering and destinies that serves as a vaccine against any nationalistic arrogance.
It would be nice if the history of art were also taught in this way in all Italian schools: that is, as something capable of speaking about the overall history of a community, reflecting its most diverse and hidden events and aspects. what Gabriella Piccinni has done in this book (Operation Good Government. A laboratory of political communication in fourteenth-century Italy, Einaudi, 323 pages, 55 euros) dedicating herself to meticulously deciphering the famous pictorial cycle by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Siena Municipality building. Ambrose received from the Nine, an expression of the mercantile class in government of the city and in which he himself had once participated, the task of illustrating the goodness of their long power, which was now, however, pressured by a growing crisis of consensus. Ambrose accepted, and depicted a happy utopian society, free of conflicts, entirely aimed at the Common Good: but the splendid realism of the representation that we admire today only served to make what was not the truth more credible.
February 23, 2024 (modified February 23, 2024 | 7:59 pm)
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