On January 18, the debut volume of the new review is free at newsstands with the newspaper: dedicated to the Rome of the seventeenth century, the era of Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Sometimes the question arises: is literature or history more useful to understand the past? Not a philosophical speculation, the problem of those who would like to find out what man is, what is the meaning of his life, what are his origins and his destiny, if he is able to orient himself in this world with the acquired knowledge or if he remains a toy in the bala of Nature and a plaything of the gods.
Until a few centuries ago, most historians dealt with our past by observing the emerging part of events: great politics, battles, treaties, conquerors and defeated, palace plots. Man and his will to dominate, titanic enterprises and great gestures populated the fresco of history like the majestic canvases commissioned by the winners and hung in the rooms of the various Versailles to inspire awe and reverence to the guests. It was natural that history should be written by the winners; the most acute even made it themselves, like Julius Caesar, Napoleon or Winston Churchill.
The French Revolution undermined this approach. Put Napoleon to rest, a group of French scholars led by Augustin Thierry hazarded that there was more truth in novels than in history essays. It was obviously a provocation to force academics to open their eyes to the real world. We would not have been able to understand the human parable if we had not begun to take care also of those who never appeared in the history books, that is to say 99 percent of those who trampled the earthly world, and above all of how they lived, ate, what trades they dedicated themselves to, how they dressed, what beliefs they devoted themselves to, how they cured their ills …
On the stage of history the excluded had to be dragged, people who had conquered nothing, but who, living in their community day by day, had made civilizations evolve, had ousted despots and open the way to collective participation, to something that contained the germ of democracy.
They were liberals (a word at the time equivalent to subversive), those historians, had the bourgeoisie in mind as the architect of modernity. Just then the great season of the novel flourished and today we could also argue that You cannot get to know Russian society without reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky or the French without Balzac, Flaubert and Hugo, to limit ourselves to some excellent names.
Also in that period they realized that without Homer, Dante and Shakespeare it was impossible to immerse oneself in the history of humanity and understand, before Freud, that passions and drives, needs and desires guide the destinies of a society. Then came Marx and socialist thought to broaden the number of those entitled to a few lines in the history books. The rest was done in the first half of the last century by French-speaking historians such as Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre and Henri Pirenne. Seeing a new sensitivity in the air also in the English-speaking world, they asked for help from other disciplines, economics and geography, sociology and psychology, and inaugurated the season of new history, the one that does not disdain the ravines of small communities.
So much reflection, discussion and contention would have been relegated to university professorships if Bertolt Brecht had not explained what he was talking about with a rhyme understandable even for a boy elementary school: Thebes of the Seven Gates, who built it? … Where did the masons go on the evening that the Great Wall was finished? … Caesar defeated the Gauls. Didn’t he even have a cook with him? … Every ten years a great man. Who pays the costs?
The history of the newspaper finally offered the possibility of participating in facts that seemed distant oleographies, dogmas to which to bow. He answered questions such as: why did the Renaissance blossom in the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent? Why did the first Christians when persecuted converted the whole of Europe to their faith? Or, again, why did Rome, after having conquered the whole known world, crumble in the face of hordes of beggars? Now the answers can be found in the 35 volumes collected in the History Library series. Daily lives for sale with the Corriere della Sera, which are also the best antidote to the superficiality of those who ask for the demolition of practically all the monuments of the past (don’t the jihadists also preach this?).
If you know the daily history of those who preceded us, you understand that the world not made of black and white but of infinite shades of gray, and that peace and democracy, in order to take root, need to recognize and admit them even when they conflict with our way of feeling. In good faith, slipping on politically correct, there is a risk of obtaining the opposite effect to the desired one, that is, more intolerance and exclusion.
As a gift the first title on the Rome of the seventeenth century
Almo Paita’s book is out on newsstands on Tuesday 18 January as a tribute to Corriere della Sera
Daily life in Rome at the time of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. This is the first volume of the weekly series Library of History. Daily Lives, created in collaboration with Bur Rizzoli. Each issue of the series offers the reader an exhaustive picture of the situation in which our ancestors lived in the various eras and places taken into consideration. It allows you to know what were the habits, the most used tools, the most widespread diseases. We also discover the often enormous inequalities between the privileged and the humblest classes. And then the religious rites, the administration of justice, the differences between the periods of peace and those of war. All rebuilt with the utmost attention by leading historical specialists. The Library of History series. Daily Lives continues with the second volume,
Daily life in Florence at the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent
by Pierre Antonetti, which will be released on Tuesday 25 January. Like all the other subsequent books in the series, it will be on sale with Corriere della Sera and La Gazzetta dello Sport at a price of € 7.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. Subsequent releases: Paul Faure,
Daily life in the Greek colonies
(February 1); Jean-Paul Bertaud,
Daily life in France at the time of the Revolution
(February 8); Paul Faure,
The daily life of the armies of Alexander the Great
(February 15);
Jean-Paul Crespelle,
Daily life in Paris at the time of the Impressionists
(February 22).
January 13, 2022 (change January 13, 2022 | 21:22)
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