A text published by the Chamber of Deputies repeats the speeches of the communist exponent. The volume will be presented on Thursday 23 June in Rome in the Parliamentary Groups Hall
Does the name of Giovanni Battista Giuffr mean anything? Probably not, many years have passed. Yet at the end of the 1950s he was on everyone’s lips. For him the nickname of God’s banker was invented (which will later return to be stuck on his shoulders much more important, such as those of Cardinal Paul Marcinkus), he was the protagonist of a scandal involving public authorities and ecclesiastics that made us glimpse the risk of an unregulated finance that raised funds to build new churches and that ended up ruining naive savers (enriching a few but much less naive ones). More than sixty years have passed and yet in the pages of a volume published by the Chamber of Deputies a vivid and acute description emerges. Not a journalistic investigation, but the intervention of a parliamentarian, a somewhat special parliamentarian who responds to the name of Massimo Caprara.
These writings – meant to be read in a strict classroom, without live television – have a clarity and depth that still arouse admiration. Very hard political controversy but not shouted or seasoned with insults but full of details, of study, in which the facts are aligned and the questions are pressing. Whether we are talking about the scandal of anonymous bankers (this is the name chosen for the parliamentary commission of inquiry not on Giuffr but on the lack of controls that had made that scandal possible), or of the building speculation in Rome, and – with an even greater personal passion – the dramatic situation in Naples in the long post-war period, Massimo Caprara always there: documented, pungent, he faces problems head on, argues directly with members of the government.
Caprara was, since 1953, deputy for four legislatures, was the second elected of the district of Naples (the first was regularly Giorgio Amendola, leader) was famous for his culture, for his ways, for the relationship of confidence with Palmiro Togliatti of to whom he had been secretary for years. And already here we see how in the idea of an all-iron PCI there is something wrong. Imagine a political leader who arrives in Italy in 1944, in the middle of the war, after a long exile, who had been among the leaders of the Communist International, who had lived through the years of iron and fire in Moscow. Well, the first thing he does – just launched the turning point in Salerno – is to go in search of talented young people: he meets Massimo Caprara, talks with him about French literature, about hermetic poets and chooses him as editor of La Rinascita and then as his personal secretary. It took courage to bet on a young, passionate bourgeois born in Portici and landed on communism in the cultural circles of Milan where he had studied as a high school student and in Naples where he had animated a circle of young intellectuals gathered around Latitudine. Togliatti had courage, but also an eye, because Caprara and that small group of friends became the director Franco Rosi, the novelist Raffaele La Capria, the writer Luigi Compagnone, the promising political leader (even if he was mainly involved in theater at the time) Giorgio Napolitano.
Here, these parliamentary speeches tell us about a generation and an Italy that may seem distant to us but in which our roots lie. The passion for the South (the proud one, not the one with the outstretched hand of the beggar, as he himself said) led him to be mayor of Portici, to fight against Achille Lauro, the monarchical mayor and the father of a kind of ragged populism, even to make a cameo in Rosi’s film Hands on the city together with that small group of friends who were called Carlo Fermariello, Andrea Geremicca, Maurizio Valenzi … But Caprara’s biography certainly does not stop there, because his is the story of an Italian who crossed the twentieth century, as the beautiful and complex preface signed by another Caprara, Maurizio, who the readers of this newspaper know well. And his was also a story of dissensions, of exits, of second thoughts, of a search driven by questions and urgencies. Massimo Caprara was among those who were expelled from the PCI for the birth of the Manifesto. He went through the experience of that newspaper (rather than of the party that had been the fruit of it), keeping together the respect for Parliament and the institutions and the passion for factory councils and new forms of democracy. Especially writing, with his language trained for French Symbolist poets and political battles.
Rereading these cards today tells us a lot about us, about our history, about a generation of Italians who had shaken off that fascism in which they were born. Which has lived steeped in politics and, gradually, discovering, even in its own ideological field, the beauty of doubt, synonymous with freedom.
Thursday 23 at 18 – The presentation in Rome in the Group Hall
The volume that collects i Political and parliamentary speeches by Massimo Caprara will be presented on Thursday 23 June at 6 pm in Rome (Parliamentary Groups Hall, via di Campo Marzio 78, 06.67609307, [email protected]). After the introductory speech by Ettore Rosato, vice president of the Chamber, speeches by Rocco Buttiglione, former vice president of the Chamber, by Anna Finocchiaro, president of the Italiadecide association, by Filippo Ceccarelli, journalist, are scheduled. Maurizio Caprara participates, the journalist Giovanna Pancheri moderates. During the meeting the actor Ignazio Oliva will read some passages from the volume. Massimo Caprara’s book available in the online library of the Chamber of Deputies at link: camera.it/leg18/1163.
Volume and life
Political and parliamentary speeches by Massimo Caprara, edited by the Library of the Chamber of Deputies, with an introduction by Maurizio Caprara, are published by the Chamber of Deputies (pp. 244, € 10). Politician and journalist, Massimo Caprara (Portici, Naples, 7 April 1922) was, among other things, private secretary of Palmiro Togliatti, mayor of Portici from 1952 to 1954, deputy elected on the PCI list for four legislatures, member of the central committee of the party and regional secretary of the PCI in Campania. One of the founders of the Manifesto group, in 1969 he was expelled from the PCI. died in Milan on June 16, 2009
June 20, 2022 (change June 20, 2022 | 12:29)
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