«The fragile alliances» published by monitor
NoonJune 3, 2022 – 5:52 pm
An essay by Luca Rossomando reconstructs the season from 1962 to 1976
from Goffredo Fofi
Luca Rossomando’s historical essay on “political militants and popular classes in Naples, 1962-1976” published by the publishing house born from within the magazine he founded, “Monitor”, with the very appropriate title of The fragile alliances, evokes a time full of political events but also of artistic events that marked the life of the “great city on the coast”, perhaps with more vigor and certainly with greater originality than what happened in Italy in the same very animated years that preceded and followed by ’68. I moved there from Milan, without knowing that it wasn’t literary and cinematographic or theatrical-musical, and I was lucky. In ’72 the “Movimento” wore out in Milan in fights with the fascists and the police (every Saturday a procession and every Saturday barrel) but also among the nascent party-groups (or party parody) which arose from the growth crisis of a generation of young people not loved by traditional parties, who relied on those among them who came from the old parties, from their youth organizations.
In Naples, two student groups seemed to me to be more interesting than others, the late Bordigists and the Campania Coordination Center (three leaders: Pugliese, Ramondino and Mottura, who came to Portici from Turin but passed years earlier from Palermo). It was with them that I got involved, before Lotta Continua and groups of young Catholics from Vomero (Father Dini’s parish) founded the Mensa Bambini Proletari in Montesanto, very autonomous in educational activities despite a sort of “political supervision” of Lotta Continua, whose Neapolitan leaders were nevertheless very attentive to the conditions and culture of the so-called underclass. I was lucky, and I lived exciting years in Naples, of great “pedagogical” awakening but also, and perhaps above all, artistic (theater and music and even cinema) while groups and initiatives survived or renewed Post-Risorgimento and post-resistance Naples – a name for everyone, that of Vera Lombardi who accompanied us for a long time.
I am not referring to the many events and the many groups that intervened in Naples as told by Rossomando, but it seems appropriate to me to go further and get to today thanks to the short film by Cyop (conceived by Rossomando!) With the significant and beautiful title of Yeast. It is like a sort of relay race, of passing the baton from one group to another, from one initiative to another, that that film tells, and that The fragile alliances he retraces with solid and extensive documentation: without the (precisely “fragile”) ones resulting in an organizational as well as theoretical synthesis among many initiatives and many models. But still in a common ideal tension.
Rossomando has divided his work not only for years, also for the social classes that were gradually at the center, often at the same time. From the Gramsci Group to Father Borrelli, from street urchins to slums, from various forms of “neighborhood work” different yesterday as today due to the diversity of social classes and areas of a city that was more than a city a conglomerate of cities very diversified from south to north and from coast to inland: a varied and extensive city, which some of us who had been there dared to compare to the New York area, between Manhattan and New Jersey and beyond!). Groups, proposals: from the University Left to the CCC where Ramondino represented the tradition of the Arn (Associazione Risveglio Napoli) about which he wrote in The island of children. But there were also groups of young “conciliar” Catholics, and without forgetting the ferment that the obtuse PCI was going through despite everything, as recounted among other things in a great book, between testimony and novel, by Ermanno Rea.
With extraordinary precision and extraordinary finesse, Rossomando knows how to interrogate a past which he heard about at the time of his first social activities (in the Damm of Montesanto) but which he took care to verify, among written documents and direct testimonies, from year to year, from neighborhood to neighborhood, from group to group … And he knows, like few others, to tell the inevitable and welcome link between social movements and party politics, even if the latter is too often organizationally closed, bureaucratic, obtuse … (even that of groups). At the center, at times, still the Canteen and the movement of the Organized Unemployed, the most representative of those years, in the same years of the cholera that woke up new young people and new groups to action … Not far from Naples, initiatives flourished even in the great city, for example in Giugliano with a socio-health intervention group in close relationship with great psychiatrists such as Basaglia in Gorizia and Piro in Naples and with Foucault in Paris …
The meticulous reconstruction offered by this essay invites further investigations, less “social” and more “cultural”, and it is my humble belief that after the years of the “belle époque”, Naples experienced the richest season between the sixties and the eighties. of theatrical and musical groups and more (even of unexpected literary works, from Malacqua ad Althenopis and beyond, and with the great presence of the “bourgeois” La Capria, and with the birth-and-death of worthy small publishing houses … and with the gatherings and discussions of Galassia Gutenberg). It is up to others to reconstruct this season as well, while Rossomando has fulfilled the task he had set himself very well: to reconstruct and tell, examine and interpret years of formidable vivacity for the ancient capital of the South, but without ever forgetting that Naples is Italy, and that the history of its active minorities – “salt of the earth”, someone wrote – is inextricably intertwined with the national one. But often with avant-garde characteristics even in comparison to the more celebrated Central-Nordic ones (from their leaders and followers!).
Finally, a suggestion: Rossomando’s essay deserves, as once dared to do, a summarized and shorter edition, for the use of new young and very young readers who would really have a lot to learn from it, such as Yeast showed us.
June 3, 2022 | 17:52
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