LITERATURE AND SOCIETY IN ITALY
MARISTELLA DE PANIZZA LORCH
A PERSONAL PREMISE
An
analysis of the complex relation of Italian literature to society allows me the
unexpected pleasure of reopening an intense dialogue. This I shared during my
forty American years with many contemporary Italian writers and critics, as well
as with men and women from all walks of life. All of whose personal friendship I
shall treasure to the end of my days. That dialogue was interrupted when I left
the directorship of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America in 1996.
I trust that the Italian Academy at Columbia University, built together for the
intensification of that particular dialogue, will fulfill its scope in a not too
distant future. For me, personally, the dialogue re-opens today.
Eduardo
de Filippo, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Ernesto Grassi, Maria Corti,
Alberto Arbasino, Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi, Umberto Eco,
Annalisa Cima, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Giovanni Vattimo, Giuliana Morandini,
Gianni Riotta are just a few of my longtime Italian writer friends. Among the
critics: Giuliano Manacorda in particular; with him, Petrocchi, Bosco, Sansone,
Ossola, Branca, D'Amico, Asor Rosa, Padoan, Baratto, Segre, Quondam, Ferroni,
Lombardo, Perosa, Massimo Salvadori. Each of these names evokes for me the story
of a happy crossing which overcame the separation of Gibraltar and the Atlantic
which lay between us.
Many
other Italians come to my mind today, too many to mention by name. They were the
women and men from different walks of life -- artists, professionals, leaders
and officials in the political world, diplomats, businessmen, publishers,
journalists, shopkeepers and workers of all kinds -- whom I met officially or
casually in my many tours of Italy during the past fifty years, alone or with my
family. Among them I cannot refrain from mentioning a handful of men and women:
Annalisa Cima, Maria Fede Caproni, Dina Vattani, Carla Martella, Marika Bollea;
Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti; Giulio Andreotti,
Francesco Cossiga, Francesco Corrias, Antonio Amato, Antonio Ruberti, Luigi de
Nardis and Michele Dipace.
Thanks
also to Ambassador Paolo Janni, the most active among the first Guarantors of
the Academy, and to the Department of Politics of the Catholic University of
America. These dear Italian friends today are all present among us. They are a
bridge which strengthens and corroborates nella realtį effettuale de la cosa,
as Machiavelli would say, the meaning and value of an international agreement
Italy signed in 1991 with an important American university. It is not a marriage
vow that unites a couple but the need and patiently sustained desire to
complement each other through hardships and differences. Our meeting today
evidences that "pensare insieme", the motto of the Italian Academy at
Columbia, can be successfully realized everywhere in America, beyond a specific
Agreement and a particular beautiful building.
Within
the Academy itself, I wish to thank the staff for their technical assistance and
hospitality and Jenny McPhee, Fellow in Residence and translator of Italian
literature, for having enriched my understanding of the ongoing debate on the noir
novel. The `contemporary' aspect of literature provided an occasion to meet with
young Americans and Italians on the Columbia campus whose familiarity with the
contemporary Italian novel has been much more intense than mine. I am thankful
also to Oonagh Stransky, writer and translator of prose and poetry. Oonagh
translated the excerpts from Arbasino's Fratelli d'Italia and the other
Italian quotations that appear in the final section of the essay. My thanks to
Giuliana Ferrone, a voracious and super-enthusiastic reader of everything
Italian, who inspired me to look beyond the close circle of personal
acquaintances.
The
central part of this essay deals with Dante and Ariosto, whose Poems offer two
paradigmatic examples of an ideal relationship of Literature to Society. Had he
lived, Italo Calvino would have co-taught a course with me on Ariosto in the
"Renaissance Program" at Barnard/Columbia. For the `contemporary'
section, I offer up a collection of notes, gathered from the perusal of my own
library, a personal homage to the Italian writers and critics who enriched it.
THE `DIVINITY' OF A MEDIEVAL COMEDY
Within
the deep transformation that European society and its literature has undergone
during the past fifty years, the Italians stand out for the combative spirit
with which they greeted, during the years 1943-46, a radical cut with their
Fascist past. Evidenced in both theory and practice, Italian neo-realistic film
and literature of that period, by boldly identifying the artist's mission at the
service of his people, constitute a unique moment of spontaneous encounter of
the writer with his `people,' not to be equaled in the rest of the century. The
writer and the artist in general, according to the neo-realistic aesthetic code,
should not only reflect with realistic immediacy moods and mainly needs of his
society, but should support and lead society in the realization of its needs.
The
neo-realistic aesthetic canon is not traditionally Italian. There is, however,
an example of `engagement' or impegno at the very origin of Italian
literature which deserves our attention. The example is so extraordinary that it
precludes imitation.
When Dante wants to express lightness, . . . no one can do it better than
he does, . . . but his real genius lies in the opposite direction . . . in
transmitting the sense that the world is organized into a system, an order, a
hierarchy where everything has its place. . . . Dante gives solidity even to the
most abstract intellectual speculation. (Italo Calvino, Memos for the Next
Millennium [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988])
Columbia
takes pride in one college course named "The Great Books". Virgil,
Lucretius, Ovid, Horace, Livy and Tacitus, Augustine, Dante, Ariosto,
Machiavelli, Galileo -- authors within the Latin-Italian tradition -- have
provided me with my daily bread during my half century of life as an American.
They convinced me that every book that survives through the centuries, that is,
very `good' book (a term I prefer to `great') or those we read more than once
lives a life of its own. The `contemporary character' of such a book is defined
by its power to speak to us today, no matter when and where its author lived. In
the case of a so-called `Great' or `good book,' author and book live together as
an indissoluble unity. This implies that the author survives somehow within that
`immortal' book as a human being living in time and space, in a specific
historical moment and place. The contemporary nature of a `great book' is to be
found in the universality of the theme dealt with, not in the abstract but in
the hinc and nunc of the society within which the author lived.
From these obvious and rather banal premises, we may conclude that, generally
speaking, literature and society are indissolubily connected, if not always,
then at least in special moments of man's History.
Yet,
these miraculous moments of `Grace' are explained only partially by `particular
events' in the life of a given society, such as a great war, a revolution, a
famine, a political upheaval. I personally side with those who, in the much
debated issue, believe that the miracle takes place by force of exceptional
Human Beings who reflect the life of their society not directly, like an
historian, but through a `poetic' Myth or Fable of their creation.
Italian
Literature opens with such a miracle. The Divine Comedy so clearly proves
the point as to make me hesitate to bring it to your attention. Italian received
its baptism as a literary language with a story whose author takes himself,
together with his `society,' on a pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory and
Paradise; it starts with a poem in 100 cantos of 120 lines each, in the words of
its author "a cui han posto mano e cielo e terra," to which
heaven and earth contributed. The Comedia was in fact so perfect in this
unusual combination of the human and the divine that Boccaccio, an Italian poet
and writer who lived a generation after Dante, called it "divine",
read it in public and wrote one of the first commentaries on it. Its
spirituality is based on the concrete of human experience and a `system' based
on it. Its `weight', in Calvino's terms, does not mess on the part of the poet a
magic use of `lightness'. Dante seems, in fact, to be one of those rare poets
who can render the exact weight of lightness, as in "come di neve in
alpe senza vento" (Inf.XV), and in "come per acqua cupa cosa
grave" (Pd. III, 123), snow falling on a mountain without wind, a heavy
object falling in dark water: weight and lightness, body and soul, human and
divine.
What
is divine about the Comedia is something Boccaccio, who was an
instinctively sharp critic of poetry, perhaps intuited and therefore implied.
Its `divinity' -- I dare argue -- makes it today the Italian book most popular
in America, the Italian book which enjoys every year a steadily increasing
number of translations. The Comedia is undoubtedly the most contemporary
of all Italian books because of the harmonious coexistence within it of the
absolute and the relative, the universal, and the particular, what man can
perceive and enjoy under any sky and in any time, and the very personal
connection with Dante's own `world' or society and not necessarily ours.
"Dante's
World" was the title of a very popular course at Barnard and Columbia which
I introduced in the early 70's--immediately after the Columbia riots -- with the
participation of the medieval historian, Susan Wemple, the theologian Ewert
Cousins, translator of Bonaventure's "Itinerarium mentis in deum"
and the art historian, Howard Davis, a specialist on Giotto. "Dante's
World" stood at the center of a "Program in Medieval and Renaissance
Studies" which we officially inaugurated in 1976 with a generous grant from
NEH. Umberto Eco, a medievalist whose doctoral dissertation deals with Saint
Thomas's esthetics, presented in that course "Il nome della rosa"
before it was translated into English.
What
prompted us four colleagues to join hands for one course was the very `divinity'
of the Comedia, defined above as its contemporaneity. How can one hold a
class of fifty American students for three or four hours prisoners of the
luminous heavens of Dante's Paradiso if the poet, by virtue of his art
had not accomplished the miracle of transforming the theology and the astronomy
of his own time into a `vision' that lives like his Empyreon beyond time and
space? Although, however, we were, all four colleagues in the course, convinced
of the miracle accomplished by Dante as poet, we felt the students should become
aware of Dante as a human being within the historical background, in all of its
ramification, in which the miracle took place.
Dante
held our students spellbound -- as they listened to his poetry in the original,
I must add -- not because he is a saint or a life model, but because he is a
man/poet whose poem was born out of his very human experience. He lived the
problems of his own society with an extra-ordinary perceptiveness and intensity,
not necessarily with historical objectivity. Dante accomplishes the miracle of
universalizing the reality of his own personal life and society as a human being
conditioned by the human body within which he breathes. The Comedia lives
of this paradoxical reality.
From
the very first Cantos the reader learns that Dante is an exceptional human being
with a tremendous faith in God and in himself; he is God's creature as a poet,
the two being inextricably interwoven. Dante is so convinced of being the
`Chosen One' as to discourage , at the threshold of paradiso, those readers who
cannot identify with his mission from following his boat into an ocean that
nobody has faced before or will ever face after him:
O
voi che siete in piccioletta barca
desiderosi
d'ascoltar, seguiti
dietro
al mio legno che cantando varca
tornate
a riveder li vostri liti. . . .
L'acqua
ch'io prendo gia mai non si corse
Minerva
spira, e conducemi Apollo.
O you that are in your little bark, eager to hear, following behind my
ship that singing makes her way, turn back to see again your shores. . . . The
water which I take was never coursed before. Minerva breathes and Apollo guides
me. (Singleton)
Then
he adds:
Voi
altri pochi che drizzaste il collo
per
tempo al pan delli angeli . . .
metter
potete ben per l'alto sale
vostro
navigio, servando mio solco
dinanzi
all'acqua che ritorna equale (Pd. II, 1-15).
You other few who lifted up your necks betimes for bread of angels . . .
you may indeed commit your vessel to the deep brine, holding to my furrow ahead
of the water that turns smooth again. (Singleton)
Paradise
is the kingdom of light. Yet, the Light of which paradise is made, expression of
God's glory, is darkened by the constant shadow of a misled humanity on earth
that daringly attempts to efface such glory. Dante conceives of, and portrays
humanity in the most detailed concreteness of his own personal life, of his own
society, of his own city, the Florence he loves and detests. In the very heart
of paradise, the most powerful invectives against a Pope that misleads humanity
involve Florence, the Poet's sweet nest. There he was born and grew to be a man;
there he hopes to return someday honored with the laurel crown he earned as a
poet. High up in paradisiacal space, in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, Dante
expresses this hope with a sudden tragic sense of certainty which disconcerts
us. The canto was composed in 132O, one year before the Poet's death in exile,
in a moment in which he drew hope from the historical condition in Italy and
Florence:
Se
mai continga che 'l poema sacro
al
quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra
sķ
che m'ha fatto per piu'anni macro,
vinca
la crudeltą che fuor mi serra
del
bello ovile ov'io dormi' agnello
nemico
ai lupi che li danno guerra;
con
altra voce omai con altro vello
ritornero'poeta,
ed in sul fonte
del
mio battesmo prendero' il cappello. (PD XXV, 1-9)
If ever it come to pass that the sacred poem to which heaven and earth
have so set hand that it has made me lean for many years should overcome the
cruelty which bars me from the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb, an enemy
to wolves which was on it, with changed voice now and with changed fleece a poet
I will return, and at the font of my baptism I will take the crown. (Singleton)
The
Comedia, which marks the birth of Italian literature, is at first sight a
powerful indictment of the society in which the Poet lived. The Poet speaks not
for himself, but in the name of God for the people who suffer under leaders who
are unaware that individual human life on earth is nothing but `a running
towards death':
"Tu nota," says Beatrice to his beloved in the unreal
light of Earthly Paradise, "e come da me son porte,/ cosi queste parole
segna ai vivi/ del vivere ch'e'un correre alla morte". (PG. XXXIII,
52-4)
Do write down (in your memory) and as they are said by me, reveal these
words to the living of a life which is a rapid run to death. (Lorch)
Here
in a nutshell is the case of the divine comedy. At the threshold of the 14th
century, Dante Alighieri, socially-speaking a modest Florentine poet, boldly
declares: God has chosen me, a Florentine poet, to experience the other world.
God himself engaged me to write down that experience by memory, so as to warn
the misleading leaders of humanity of the impending divine intervention to
re-establish order within a humanly-created chaos. The poet speaks for and to
his own Florence, as well as to the people of the world as Vox Dei. By
living it as real, he believes the very myth on which the poem is based and
which is unbelievable by human reason.
The
Comedia stands like a lonely rock in a desert. Unreachable and therefore
inimitable. Dante creates a language but does not establish a tradition of
deeply committed literature. Popular in Italy through the XIV century, the Comedia
was almost immediately eclipsed by Petrarch's Canzoniere and its
imitators, and later by the revival of ancient Rome during the Renaissance.
Dante re-emerged only four centuries later, not by merit of the Italians but of
the German and English Romanticists, as the most forceful expression of the
rediscovered Middle Ages.
A
poetic myth, even as forceful as Dante's Comedia, carried within itself
the characteristics and tastes of a society antithetical to, and therefore
rejected by, a differently oriented society. Dante's moral, religious and
political engagement did not appeal for centuries to the literary world of
Italy, because it was for centuries alien to the taste of Italian society. If
asked, I guess Calvino would say that the Italians incline to the `light'.
RENAISSANCE HUMANISM AND THE MYTH OF FOLLY AND INSANITY
IN ARIOSTO'S ORLANDO FURIOSO
We might say that throughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have
competed in literature. One tries to make language a weightless element that
hovers above things, like a cloud, or better perhaps the finest dust, or, better
still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the
weight, density and concreteness of things, bodies and sensations. . . . We
should be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not
appreciate language that has some weight to it. . . . Lightness for me goes with
precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard. (I. Calvino)
An
epoch, like an individual, has its own unique way to express its essence and
identity. The Comedia proves by its very contemporaneity that poetic myth
expresses forcefully, in a way different from history, the essence of Medieval
society in crisis. Two centuries after Dante, during the Italian Renaissance,
which was wrongly defined by some 19th century historians as the triumph of `Art
for Art Sake', two leading poems, the Orlando innamorato and the Orlando
furioso, closely mirror, through their fantastic tales of labyrinthine
adventures, the essence of an era we define today as "Renaissance
Humanism" .
`Lightness',
Calvino would say, characterizes the two poems of fantastic adventures in
contrast with the `weight' of the Comedia; the lightness, however, is not
obtained at the expense of precision and determination. The precision of images,
as well as the masterly use of irony within the world of adventures created by
Boiardo and Ariosto, is a direct reflection of a society permeated with the
philological and rhetorical ideals of a militant kind of humanism which climaxed
in Italy during the second half of the 15th century. It takes `lightness' to
convey through literature a feeling for such a complex and in many ways
contradictory period in the history of Italian society as the phenomenon in
question.1
A
myth which centers on the folly of Orlando, the wisest and the most popular
Paladin of Charlemagne -- the very popular Italian version of "Roland"
of the Chanson des gestes -- is the leading motif of the Orlando
innamorato and of the first half of the Orlando furioso (up to Canto
23). Only folly, as freedom of the senses and of the imagination defeating all
conventions, can explain as expression of extreme vitality, the most passionate,
all encompassing, doubly sinful, unrequited love of the wisest and strongest
Christian warrior for Angelica, an Oriental Muslim princess. In spite of its
sinfulness and unconventionality, this love spurs Orlando to the most daring
adventures. With him the best Christian knights and Muslim heroes all lost in
their love for Angelica.
The
myth of Orlando's folly reflects in its extraordinary irrepressible vitality the
mood of the society to which Boiardo and Ariosto belonged. Orlando's immenso
vigor, the leading motif of the Innamorato and of the first half of
the Orlando furioso constitutes in this sense a homage to the greatness
of an era in which philology was born as the discovery of the revealing power of
Literature, the key to the affirmation of Man in history. The era of erudition
and of its limitless value; of a godlike drive for life, not in contrast, but in
harmony with a new concept of Christianity; of the liberating power of laughter,
which triumphs particularly in Pulci's poem Morgante; of the constructive
force of diletto; of docta ignorantia and coincidentia
oppositorum. Tout court, it was the era of folly. Erasmus composed
the first version of his "In Praise of Folly" after a visit to Italy
in 1512!
At
the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, the Dutchy of
Ferrara, seat of the Court of Este, where the two poets lived and wrote as
courtiers and refined humanists, offers the ideal background and inspiration for
a society of literati, most of them very practical men, involved in the
politics of their time, all inspired by the highest humanistic values.
At
the time Boiardo was working at the Orlando innamorato Ferrara had
enjoyed almost 50 years of `golden peace', during which art and letters thrived
and a free exchange of ideas was enjoyed at its best throughout the peninsula
without limits or borders. The literati like the bankers, were citizens
of the world. Debates on ideas of this very special res publica literarum
had given birth to a new literary genre, the dialogue which was realistic at
least in appearance.
A
century before Ariosto, the daring humanist, Lorenzo Valla, founded `philology'
in the "Elegantiae Latinae linguae" and `history' based on
philologically credible documents in the "De falso credita donatione
constantiniana." He vigorously upheld in his dialogue "On Pleasure
as the True Good" man's godlike drive for earthly sensual pleasure as the
source of life. The dialogue was composed by a very young Lorenzo at the court
of Pope Martin V. Later it was revised by him as a teacher at the universities
of Pavia and Milan. It was finally completed at the court of Alphonse of Aragon
in Naples before Valla returned to Rome in charge of translations from the Greek
at the Vatican Library. Valla had not only boldly defined the basic drive for
life as voluptas, or sensual pleasure, but with the support of the Bible
and of Saint Paul developed it into love of and for God, source of all kinds of
goods for man to enjoy. Voluptas'/`utilitas', pleasure/expedient, was proved by
Valla to be the basic Christian virtue, antithetical to `honestas' the
pagan (Ciceronian) virtue for virtue's sake.
In
his dialogue, De Voluptate ac de Vero bono (1421-44, Rome, Pavia, Milan,
Naples, Rome), Valla attempted to give a daring philological justification to
sensual pleasure as the origin and source of life. This eloquently interprets a
curiosity, widely experienced in Italy, for life on earth in all its aspects. It
is this new intense form of `curiosity' that leads Italian society to exploit
the discovery of classical antiquity as a new model and inspiration for a fuller
life on earth, as well as to face with a new enthusiasm the challenge of the new
geographical, scientific and artistic frontiers. With the humanistic dialogue
there triumphed a new form of thinking and visualizing reality. This inspired
both the Innamorato and the Furioso, and in Ariosto found its most
daring and well-rounded expression.2
Ariosto
goes one step further than Boiardo in the interpretation of Amor omnia vincit
improbus. The positive creative force of `folly', precisely in the middle of
the Poem (Canto 23), transgresses into insanity, a subhuman state in which man
-- in this case, the great Orlando -- loses his identity. It is `folly,' as
life's creative spirit, however, in the first half of the poem, that allows us
to enjoy a vision and extraordinary portrayal of human passions parallel to
society's discovery of a world within man.
Ariosto's
poetic interplay, within the myth he invents, of `folly' and `insanity' betrays
the Poet's awareness of the dramatic historical change that took place in the
world around him after Boiardo's death in 1494. The year 1494 marks, with the
descent of the French King Charles VIII into Italy, the first of a series of
catastrophic events.
The
tale of Orlando's folly, before the hero is overcome by insanity, can be
understood in itself as the most comprehensive metaphor of life a poet could
conceive. Within this metaphor, la gran follia or Orlando's insanity
presupposes a development to the limits of Orlando's positive follia, his
greatness in love, in arms, in life, the great humanity, tout court, of the
opening of man's inner life. Orlando's positive follia should be read as
a homage the poet pays to the discoveries and ideals of a `humanistic' society
of which he is the product, insanity should be interpreted as the mythical
version of the dismay for its tragic ending, caused in great part by almost
thirty years of bloody fighting the poet Ariosto witnessed in part at least with
his own eyes.
With
the end in 1509 -- year of the first publication of the Furioso -- of the
so called "Herculean peace", an epoch abruptly ends for Ferrara.
During the next three years the city and its poet are hurled into one war after
the other. In 1508 the League of Cambrai had allied Emperor Maximilian and King
Louis XII of France against the Venetians for the partition of the territory of
the Republic. The League ends in 1510, setting Pope Julius II free to try to
expell the French from Italy. Alfonso, Duke of Este, is at the side of the
French, providing with his two famous guns, Gran Diavolo and Terremoto, the best
part of their artillery. Fighting takes place all over around Ferrara. The Pope
now proclaims The Holy League with Venice and Spain against the French and
Ferrara -- which, by the way, had been for centuries a fief of the Vatican. The
Duke of Este and General Bayard cut to pieces the Papal forces. In 1511 the
Spaniards and the Papal Army enter the territory of Ferrara. Yet, the young
French General Gaston de Foix moves triumphantly from one victory to the next.
Joined by Alfonso's powerful artillery, Gaston de Foix fights on Easter Sunday ,
April 11, 1512, the bloodiest battle fought on Italian soil since the overthrow
of the Goths: the battle of Ravenna, a city a short distance from Ferrara. The
dead included 4,000 Frenchmen and 10,000 confederates; all Spanish and Papal
leaders are captured. Gaston de Foix is killed when the fighting is almost over.
Alfonso's artillery is a decisive factor in the final victory, as well as in the
cruel death of thousands of people. When the fighting is over, he tries in vain
to restrain the French from committing atrocities against the unarmed people of
Ravenna.
The
poet Ariosto openly condemns such atrocities in the first person at the opening
of a canto in the 1516 version of his poem. He witnessed, against his own will
-- since he was by nature `a lover of tranquilities' -- many of these events as
he physically stood near Alfonso, against his will courtier and `servant' of the
defiant Duke. As a poet, he takes his revenge by carving out for himself a space
at the opening of each canto -- a couple of octaves -- within which he expresses
his own view on human passions as well as, at times, on contemporary events. It
is however through the myth of Orlando's Folly degenerating into insanity, that
he succeeds in making those tragic events as permanent as they were originally
vivid.
The
treaties of Cateau Cambresis, some twenty years after Ariosto's death, brought,
with Emperor Charles V, a definitive peace to the peninsula. With peace came the
end of the independence of most Italian states. Ferrara will survive under the
Dukes of Este until the end of the century when the Pope will finally reclaim it
as his possession.
Ariosto
lived long enough (he died in 1532) to see the end of the harsh fighting. The
final development of Orlando's myth may be read as reflecting a serene
acceptance of the new political equilibrium established under Emperor Charles V.
Orlando, who acted through 16 cantos as a brute deprived of reason, finally
regains sanity in Canto 39, five cantos before the closing of the story.
Orlando's recovery of his senno by will of God, specifically in order to
assure the victory of the Christians in the final duel against the Muslims (42),
evidences a remarkable optimism on the part of the poet, an optimism in spite of
all odds, an adaptability and a resilience which I am tempted to define as
typical of Italian society in general, not uniquely of 16th century Italy.
I
am tempted also to relate, by contrast, what I call Ariosto's final `optimistic'
solution in the development of his hero Orlando to the deeply pessimistic view
of a Northern society which is evidenced by the contemporary Poem, Narrenschiff.
Brandt's Ship of Fools, published in 1494, stands at the threshold of
German literature as a strong pillar of Reason and social order, a nostalgic
longing for the old order, described in word and image as chaos through the
shipwreck of the historically real `boat of the insane' or `ship of fools'.
In
contrast with Brandt, Ariosto's agile and fluid development of his myth from
folly to insanity to a kind of miraculous recovery of reason by divine
intervention is made possible by Ariosto's masterly use of `literature', that is
by his capacity of molding to his heart's content that kind of `lightness' of
language which Calvino describes as one of the two opposite tendencies in
literature;
One tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above
things like a cloud, or, better, perhaps, the finest dust, or better still, a
field of magnetic impulses. (Calvino, Six Memos . . ., p. 15)
Ariosto's
`lightness' of language is to be identified mainly with his all pervading use of
irony, in the development of the plot of the poem, as well as within the
individual stories. As light as Dante's magic butterfly `that flies towards
justice without impediments' (Pg. X), Ariosto's irony untangles the world he
creates free from the worm of the `real'. Not darting straight upwards like
Dante's, but flittering from flower to flower, irony follows and permeates in
the Furioso the uninterrupted wandering of its knights into a borderless
world of forests, mountains, plains and islands, their duels and love making,
their fantastic battles in which horses and men inextricably intermingle like in
a painting of Paolo Uccello. Irony transforms the real into a magic world that
exploits the earth to the maximum by including the moon as part of it, together
with new islands, continents and underground miraculous realms. At the very
center of this magic world is man as the poet sees him, spurred into living by
his passions and desires, so greedy of life as hardly to listen to the voice of
reason. Irony imbues the whole of the poem, transforming it into something
`else,' as does a snowfall to a familiar landscape.
Irony
permeates from beginning to end the episode of Orlando's re-acquired mental
sanity. The most foolish of the Christian warriors, the English Astolfo,
recovers the hero's senno (reason) in a huge flask among discarded
objects, by flying to the moon on the Ippogrifo, a winged horse. Subsequently,
helped by some friendly Paladins, Astolfo chains the giant brute Orlando --
after having properly washed him -- to the Atlas Mountains. Finally, Orlando is
forced to breathe in the content of the flask. What the poet gives us in the end
is the old Orlando, the one we have never known in the Italian literary
tradition, the Paladin devoted to the Cause of God and Emperor, who will,
indeed, contribute to its final victory. But `Reason,' alas, has deprived our
hero of the creative charge of Folly's imagination! Ariosto's final message
regarding the fate of his hero Orlando is ambiguous to say the least, as
ambiguous, perhaps, as his opinion of the political developments he witnesses in
Italian society .
Ariosto
acquires his `lightness' of language often in the wake of Dante's `weight'.
Analogies and differences can be discovered at times in Ariosto's use of a
Dantesque image, a word, a metaphor. This is the case of the word/image/metaphor
selva, forest.
The
first image we meet as we open the Comedy is the one of a dark forest in
which the poet/pilgrim is lost:
Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/che
la diritta via era smarrita.
Midway in the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood for the
straight way was lost. (Singleton)
What
the poet Virgil offers Dante is a way out of that dark forest, not directly but
through a long deviation that includes Hell and Purgatory. The allegory of
Dante's forest is transparent: the moral and psychological confusion that cuts
the poet/pilgrim off from the Light of God.
Like
Dante's Comedy, Ariosto's poem is written in the first person. The poet,
however, is not a pilgrim in search of personal salvation but a storyteller who
entertains his fellow courtiers with the product of his imagination, the
fantastic adventures of the mythical Italianized Orlando. While the Comedy
proceeds on a straight line, focusing on Dante as the main character, the Orlando
Furioso moves on by continuous digressions, offering the view of a thick
forest, an intricate interplay of adventures by a great number of knights who
endlessly wander through a mythical world covering the whole planet and beyond.
Orlando's story of folly and insanity is but one thread of the multicolored
cloth.
Under
a certain aspect the Furioso could be read as the parody of the Comedy,
which it definitely is not. The most constructive and enjoyable way to read it
is actually in relation with the Comedy as the reflection of a moment in
the history of Italian society which is as much plurivocal and rich in
contradictions as Dante's is univocal.
Realism
triumphs in the description of the phenomenon of insanity itself, in its
physicality, of the stages one by one that a human psyche undergoes when in prey
of this terrible illness, until a human being, no matter how noble and strong,
totally loses all contacts with the world around him. Without senno
action lacks motivation and purpose. Orlando, insane, can be explained only like
the eruption of a volcano, a flood, an earthquake.
At
the threshold of the second section of his Poem (Canto 24, 1-3), immediately
after the description of Orlando's painful entrance into darkness, Ariosto stops
to meditate for a moment on the nature of pazzia, insanity, which he
conceives of as a human deviation from the road of sanity. The poet humanist's
main interest is not the pursuit of spiritual happiness, but serenity of soul.
This is obtained within an Epicurean/human rather than a Christian/religious
context. Here in the description of pazzia or insanity, he echoes Dante's
language. The loss of reason, in consequence of unrequited love leads man into a
great forest, una gran selva where one is bound to get irremediably lost,
no matter how much one tries to find a way out. That forest is a prison where
one is forever chained down, without hope of escape:
Varii
gli effetti son, ma la pazzia
e'tutt'una
pero che li fa uscire.
Gli
e' come UNA GRAN SELVA, ove la via
convien
a forza a chi vi va fallire:
chi
su' chi giu', chi qua', chi la' travia.
Per
concludere insomma, io vi vo dire
a
chi in amor s'invecchia, ogn'altra pena
si
convengono i ceppi e la catena. (XXIV, 2)
The
various effects which from love spring
By
one same madness are brought into play.
It
is a wood of error, menacing,
Where
travelers perforce must lose their way;
One
here, one there, it comes to the same thing.
To
sum the matter up, then, I would say:
Who
in old age the dupe of love remains
Deserving
is of fetters and of chains. (Reynolds)
The
ironic twist to which Ariosto submits the Dantesque metaphor of selva --
echo in more than one instance Dante's episode of the unfortunate lovers Paolo
and Francesca. It is reinforced by the poet's following personal confession,
carried out tongue in cheek in the first person. The poet would personally like
to free himself from the chains of physical sensual love, but he cannot do so
because the illness has reached the bones: "ma tosto far come vorrei non
posso/che'l male e' penetrato infin all'osso." "And yet I fear my
vow I cannot keep: In me the malady has gone too deep" (Reynolds).
Is
Ariosto using the metaphor of selva for insanity or for `life' itself in
general, human life as he sees it is prey of passions and desires? Is this a
confession of frustration on the part of a humanist who lives `free' of the many
constrictions to which Dante and his society were subjected, or rather an
acceptance of a de facto condition which has its advantages? It is hard
to tell. There are very few moments in which Ariosto seriously means what he
says. One instance of tough seriousness, indeed anger, is the episode of Ebuda
-- an addition of the last, 1532 version of the poem -- in which Orlando
pronounces a curse against firearms --l'archebugio -- by throwing the
satanic invention into the ocean. What evokes the poet's unconditional
condemnation is an inhuman deviation of society around him, a threat for human
survival. For the rest we are left to guess.
Dante
singles himself out within the society in which he lives. Victim of his own
society, he seeks and finds justice and harmony by appealing to eternal
principles above humanity. Ariosto, a man among men, shares the good and the bad
of his own society. Through the arm they have in common, the use of language in
literature, Dante condemns while Ariosto smiles at human weaknesses and sins and
at the deviations of his own society.
NOTES ON LITERATURE AND SOCIETY IN CONTEMPORARY ITALY: A
NOVEL; A GENRE; DEBATES 1945-2000; THE PROFILE OF AN AUTHOR
A Novel
From
Arbasino's Fratelli d'Italia (1969-1993) (Milano, Adelphi, 1993):
Da noi, si agita Antonio, in questo momento sono denunciati o sotto
processo Testori, Pasolini, Visconti, Antonioni, mi pare anche Fellini, e
parecchi altri che non ricordo, tra i quali parecchi astuti che fanno in fretta
un romanzo con un titolo equivoco e un poco di porcate nelle prime pagine, le
sole che il magistrato di solito legge. . . . Tutti ben scritti, tutti
brillantini, tutti uguali . . .perfettamente traducibili, coi falsi problemi
moderni di una coppia molto moderna in vacanza tra l'autoroute e la Riviera in
mezzo a ragazzine tutte uguali alle attricette . . . vanno sempre bene . . .
grandi puttanate . . . solo esercizi, collages di parole in pagine come pezze di
tweed . . . e mai un'opera compiuta, mai LE LIVRE! come se un pittore o un
musicista producessero solo schizzi e abbozzi e `appunti per.' (pp. 92-3)
"In our country," Antonio says agitatedly, "they're
accusing and prosecuting people like Testori, Pasolini, Visconti, Antonioni --
Fellini too, I think, as well as many others whose names I can't remember,
bright people who churn out books, give them provocative titles, throw in a
couple of raunchy scenes in the first few pages -- the only pages the judges
actually read . . . they're all well written, all quite brilliant, all the same,
perfectly translatable, with their false modern day problems -- a modern couple
on vacation, caught somewhere between the highway and the Riviera, surrounded by
girls that look like young actresses . . . it always works . . . all gimmicks .
. . they're only exercises, really, just collages of words woven together like
tweeds . . . there's never a completed work, never Le Livre! It's as if a
painter or a musician were to produce only sketches or drafts or `Notes
for'."
Cosi raccontiamola anche a questo, al ristorante Margana, la vecchia
storia degli anni di guerra passati sentendo i bombardamenti di la dal confine.
. . . (p. 197)
And so, while sitting at the Ristorante Morgana, we tell him, too, the
same old story of how we spent the war years listening to bombs dropping on the
other side of the border.
Il Romanzo, all 'osteria! . . . a cercar padron migliori. . . . (p. 95)
The Novel, to the tavern! . . . to find a better host.
Se poi il tema di un tuo romanzo o di un tuo film fosse come sempre la
Fine di un Mondo? o di una societa', o di una civilta' o di una cultura . . .? (p. 94)
And what if your film or your novel were always about the end of a world?
Or the end of a society or of a civilization or a culture . . . ?
"La fine di un'epoca!" come sigla e formula di successo. . . . (p. 1342)
"The end of an Era!" as the mark of, and formula for, success.
Il romanzo tradizionale, invecchiato come le pensioni con clientela
interessante. Ordine, cautela, assenatezza, rispettabilita', decoro. . . .
Garanzie: il Passato assicura l'Immobilitą..la Morte accerta che tutto é gia'
successo, nulla puo' cambiare, ci si puo' dar pace; l'imperfetto stabilisce
l'atmosfera; il Filtro della Memoria regola il passaggio a senso inico di
materiali preselezionati, senza imprevisti ne `turbative.
Due periodi ben distinti: fino a un certo punto si e' tentato di vivere;
dopo si e' cominciato a scrivere "
(p. 1343).
The traditional novel, like a run-down pension with its
"interesting" clientele. Orderliness, prudence, common sense,
respectability, decorum. . . . Guaranteed: the Past assures Fixedness. . . .
Death ascertains that everything has already happened, that nothing can change,
that we can leave each other alone; the Imperfect sets the atmosphere, the
Filter of Memory regulates the flow of pre-selected material in one direction,
with no surprises or disturbances.
Two clearly distinct periods: up until a certain point one attempts to
live; then, one begins to write.
. . . Un Nido di Memorie: tana di nostalgie, cuccia di malinconie, covo
di rimpianti. Desiderio di immutabilita'; riordino di dagherrotipi; il paese dei
nonni, non un posto nuovo. Vegheggiamento del finito, del gia' conosciuto.
Elevazione del concluso, congelamento dello status quo, con manutenzione in
economia e un alone 'flou'.
Tema fondamentale per tutta la cultura piccolo-borghese: come avendo
chissą cosa da rimpiangere e da inorgoglirsi: Sciuscia', Ladri di biciclette,
Riso amaro, Fontamara, La Ciociara? L'8 settembre e date analoghe? . . .
Nostalgia della provincia sentimentale e crepuscolare, nella letteratura a
successo. Vagheggiamento per il Rinascimento, nella regia antiquaria e
gentilizia.. Costumi e mobilio. Magazzini e deposito.
(p. 1343)
A nest of Memories: warren of yearnings, lair of sorrows, cove of
regrets. Desire for constants; the immutability of things; the reorganization of
daguerrotypes; the land of our grandparents; no new places. The longing for
endings, for the already known. The elevation of conclusions, the congealing of
the status quo, thriftiness and a blurred halo.
Basic theme for the culture of the petit bourgeois: having something to
mourn, something to be proud of: Sciusciį, Ladri di Biciclette, Riso Amaro,
Fontamara, La Ciociara? What about the 8th of September, and other such dates?
Nostalgia for the sentimental and crepuscular aspects of the provincial, as in
the major literature. Courting the Renaissance with antiquated and heraldic
stagings . . . costumes and furnishings, warehouses and storage areas.
La riproduzione della lingua parlata . . . Ma insomma come sara' stata la
conversazione italiana in un paese che (secondo la sua letteratura) e' sempre
stato impacciato o muto? (p.
1350)
The reproduction of the spoken language . . . now really: what can spoken
Italian have been like -- in a country (as depicted by its literature) of
awkward and embarrassed silences?
Non soltanto le persone: anche le epoche hanno un loro modo riservato,
scaltro e frivolo insieme di comunicare il proprio io piu'profondo a qualcuno
che coglie al volo le confidenze piu' sorprendenti di un secolo spossato e
vicino alla morte come un altro Swann . . . dando a una societa, a un momento
storico la possibilita' di raccontare le proprie memorie. . . . (p. 1368)
Not just people: epochs, too, have their hidden ways, simultaneously
cunning and frivolous, of communicating their deepest sense of self to one who
can grasp the shocking intimacies of a worn out century, close to its death, a
Swann. . . . Giving society, giving a historical moment a chance to retell its
own memories.
Ma che non muta l'eta'? Si rivolgono i regni mentre che io canto e si
cambiano le mode galanti.
(Abbiamo
appena ordinato i pomodori al riso)
What doesn't alter a period? Kingdoms turn against me as I sing, and
gallantries change.
(We just ordered tomatoes with rice.)
Sento rumore: due o tre gridi, trambusto nel corridoio. Poi bussano
forte. Desideria si e' buttata dalla finestra. Scendo le scale di corsa, e il
corpo e' davanti alla porta sul marciapiede; lo stanno coprendo adesso. Morta
sul colpo battendo la testa. (Tutto da riscrivere qui).
Siamo li tutti. Non aveva parlato a nessuno? No. Non ha lasciato scritto
qualche cosa? No, niente.
(p.l371, closing statement).
I hear a noise, two or three yells, a scuffle in the hallway. Then
they're knocking hard at the door. Desideria threw herself out the window. I run
downstairs, the body is in the doorway, on the sidewalk; they're covering it at
this very moment. Dead on impact, a blow to the head. (All this has to be
rewritten.)
We're all there. She didn't say anything to anyone? No. She didn't leave
anything in writing? No, nothing.
Carlo
Bo, a veteran of Italian letters, said more than once that everybody in Italy
today writes a novel, but very few have something to say. Faced with the
challenge of a choice of books to select that may serve the purpose of relating
literature to society in Italy, I remind myself that my aim in the present
lecture is not to offer you a path in the dark forest of contemporary
literature. For that task I am not the most competent person available. Rather,
I follow my natural instinct which almost unconsciously leads me towards those
books whose authors I have met, towards those critics who have allowed me a
personal insight into their way of thinking and a perusal of their books they
left in my personal library.
There
are two copies of one book in my library, a ponderous novel of 1371 pages,
entitled Fratelli d'Italia. Each copy has an affectionate dedication by
the author. My reaction as I reread the book today, seven years after the
publication of its second version, is more positive than ever before. Here is
one of the few novels of which it can be said that it truly takes place in
contemporary Italy , light and anguishing, happy and tragic, brilliant and dark.
It is a novel that deals with the present with a deep almost unconscious
awareness of the past. It `photographs' Italian society as it breathes around
its author with such an uninterrupted use of irony as to allow us readers from
this shore of the Atlantic ocean a sense of its complexity, rather than of its
merits. For discriminating Italians, in my opinion, it is "the Italian
novel of the century"; it lashes out while laughing and praises while
condemning. It takes into account not only the world of creative writing , of
novels (romanzo) in particular, but of the lively debates on its nature
and mission. These have thrived in Italy since the early 50s, that is, from the
birth of the so called `neorealistic' movement in literature and film after the
end of the war and the fall of Fascism. Its author, Alberto Arbasino has been,
from beginning to end, a leading figure within those debates, as well as a
prolific writer.
The
title itself of the novel, Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) makes us
stop and think. Coming from the opening of the Italian National Anthem, the
title denounces ironically as fake and void a nationalistic inclination in
Italian letters which the book sets out to destroy.
The
l371 page volume I have in hand today constitutes Arbasino's rewriting of a
novel he wrote in the 60s, a living echo of the Italian society of the time. The
plot is so loose that it can hardly be summarized: the story of a grand tour of
Italy by a group of young men and women, Italian, French, German, Antonio, Jean
Claude, Klaus, Enrico and many others as they meet in their uninterrupted
wandering -- a group of young men and women permanently "on the road".
The
result of the 1993 re-elaboration of the original is an irreverent and imposing
novel which portrays Italian contemporary society in action with incomparable
lightness and mobility. What inspires Arbasino to rewrite an old book is his
conviction that "literature is not made only of definitive texts. Most of
it reveals itself as temporary versions that one can improve by going back to
them with the added advantage of new experiences. . . ."
Tutto libri,
the Italian version of our New York Review of Books, with reference to
the new version of Fratelli d'Italia -- said "Arbasino -- it was
written in a 1994" is one of the few Italian successful writers because of
his immense curiosity in overcoming `la letteratura da cortile che affligge
da sempre il nostro paese' (the `neighborhood literature' that forever
afflicts our country). He is an Italian writer who acts, speaks and writes like
a Frenchman or an Englishman, bending the Italian language and behavioral
patterns of Italians to ways foreign to them. Excess of knowledge, of
information may hinder the narrative rhythm. Aware of this risk, Arbasino breaks
the sentence in two, overcoming the structure based on monologue (of the first
version) molding it into a structure marked by intensive dialogue. The result
may be fatiguing for the reader. Yet in Arbasino we have the one Italian who
consciously breaks with the traditional novel still in use in Italy today, `un
romanzo', he says, "invecchiato come le pensioni con clientela
interessante" (like a run-down pension with its `interesting'
clientele). Hence, the co-presence in the new version of narrative and
reflection, soul and body, irreverence and real drama. A parody of life. The
young men and women who are the protagonists of the story meet, converse, eat,
sleep, laugh, admire without really `existing' because they have apparently used
up their existence in an effort to capture everything that the century has
produced in ideas, emotions and thought, experiences, fantasies, pain, desire,
anguish and miseries. . . .
Fratelli
d'Italia is an indescribable novel in American terms which we
should read. It calls for translation!
Arbasino's
Fratelli d'Italla reflects with irony a confused echo of ideas and voices
in contemporary Italian society as well as in Italian literature and at the same
time a longing for something new and different to express a moment of crisis.
Among the many genres practiced in Italy today, the most successful, in the
sense that it has found a favorable audience in America, judging from the recent
translations, is a special kind of detective novel, `il giallo', the noir.3
I
shall not attempt here to trace the origins of the genre, but only say what I
know about it. At the beginning there was Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose,
as an example of a mixed genre, the detective and the historical novel. Was Eco
aware that he was inaugurating a genre destined to great success? I doubt it. If
one were to ask him, he would dismiss the question as irrelevant. I have in my
library one of the first copies of Il nome della rosa brought to America.
It bears a generous dedication from its author "da letterato esordiente,
timorosissimo". Eco followed with the apprehension of a `novellino'
the reception of his first novel in society.
Eco's
first novel was successful not because of the genre he chose, but because it is
written from beginning to end in limpid, fluid prose and because, within the
`detective', the author, a most serious medievalist, respects the medieval
environment in which it takes place -- one intense week in 1327, five years
after Dante's death.
Most
novels by Sciascia are classified as `detective' and reflect with passion
contemporary history. But today's Italians seem to have moved further than Eco
and Sciascia. Whereas the detective novel follows a paradigm of clues-- my
friend Oonagh reminds me of Ginzburg in Miti, emblemi, spie -- in the noir
surprises and contradictions beset the plot. The noir offers at first
sight at least a mimetic interpretation of society. On a deeper level, however,
the protagonist lives within a reality that's not based on cause and effect, but
formed of compromises. In line with Gianni Vattimo's `pensiero debole'
all choices, however, are weak ones. The protagonist does not seem to obey any
universal law. Violence prevails and overwhelms the reader. The author, on the
other hand, may stand aside and philosophize about it. What can we make of it in
America today?
It
is perhaps this `philosophizing' that unbalances the American reader. Take the
case of Antonio Tabucchi in his recently translated and successful The
Headless Body. A reviewer in the Times on Feb. 20 (Michael Pye,
author of Taking Lives), definitely likes the book. Yet he remarks as a
weakness that
this Italian academic, professor at the University of Siena, theoretician
and translator, does not write the usual type of thriller. Fascinated by
Portugal, he follows crimes in Oporto with the precision of a reporter. The
result is an exceptionally `vivid book' but `for the oddest reasons': the
author, obsessed with observing reality with all his senses, focuses on
"how theory can possibly relate to literature," how, for example, the
literary world connects with someone being tortured. Result: a journalist who
makes his living with bloody murders suddenly slams the door on the captive
reader and starts a seminar. You may sometimes snort with exasperation and send
Tabucchi's book swirling across the room. But then again when did you last find
a novel this interesting?
What
the American writer resents in his Italian colleague, I surmise, is the art of
mixing high and low culture, evil and good, dark humanity and higher ideals: To
contaminate the pure divertissement of the noir with reflections
on violence and on the nature of evil.
A Genre
A
debate on the Italian passion for and against the noir is going on at
this moment on the Internet, Giuliana Ferrone reminds me. I should follow it.
The writer Scalfaro defends the traditional novel as it changes through phases,
against the fixedness and superficiality of the noir. Isn't the
traditional novel dying of its self-inflicted death -- the defenders of the noir
counterattack -- because the society on which it is based has become a `folla
vociante di individui anonimi e isolati'?
A
fact universally recognized in the world of letters is that Italy does not
traditionally incline towards long narratives as do France, England and Russia.
Perhaps the noir fits best with the short novel the Italians tend to
write. Or is Italian society rejecting the `intellectualism' of some Italian
novels? (Thus runs my discussion with Jenny McPhee.)
Simon
Blackburn, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North
Carolina, in reviewing Eco's latest book (which is certainly not a novel)
"Kant and Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition" in the New
Republic of February 7, 2000, warns the reader that the "intellectual
temperature is here much higher than in the novels. . . . Eco's trademarks are
there: high themes, arcane learning, strange corners of philosophy and history
and natural history, large intellectual vistas, a sense of play." Yet
something is discouraging about this particular book. In reading it one finds
oneself running off with the author to the edge of a cliff. Eco refuses to
recognize the cliff because "like the platypus he has adapted himself
perfectly to an environment, in this case an intellectual environment. But what
he has produced should make us worried about that environment, which is much
bigger and ubiquitous even than he is."
Eco
is one of the intellectuals more deeply connected with a recurrent debate on the
issue of engagement or commitment of the writer to the community. Although the
reviewer deals here with a collection of essays, not with a novel, by relating
this particular work to Eco's novels he suggests that there is an inclination to
consider intellectualism characteristic of the contemporary Italian novel. Do
intense recurrent intellectual debates interfere in any way with the spontaneity
of Italian novelists? Is the noir one of the forms of escape from this
tendency, while still partakiing of it?
E pero' vero che tutto il Novecento e' mosso dalla contraddizione.
L'intrecciarsi, l'intersecarsi e il divergere di discorsi (e correnti) su questo
nostro secolo vuol dire proprio che esso e' aperto a ogni possibile discorso
sulla letteratura, che mai potra' essere esaustivo, allo stesso modo che mai
potra' essere esaustivo un discorso sulla realta' e l'uomo contemporanei. (Giovanni Occhipinti, L'ultimo
Novecento, Foggia, 1997)
And yet, it is true that the 20th century was spurred by contradictions.
Discourses and trends have intertwined, intersected and deflected in such ways
that now any commentary on literature is to be considered valid, the topics will
never be exhausted, just as the discourse on reality and contemporary man can
never be exhausted.
Dove
sarebbe la mia libertą se
non
fosse nel libro
Se
il mio libro non fosse la mia liberta' cosa sarebbe?
(Edmond
Jabes, quoted by Occhipinti)
Where
would my freedom be
if
not in the book
If
my book were not my freedom, what would it be?
Un
concerto indifferenziato. (R. Luperini)
An indifferentiated concert.
Ognuno senza trionfalismi e con i mezzi a disposizione se ne va per la
sua strada. (A. Beradinelli)
Each of us, freed of the need to triumph, equipped with our natural
means, sets off down his own path.
&