Microcosms (Panther) by Magris Claudio

Author:Magris, Claudio [Magris, Claudio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446433768
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

The Piedmontese made Italy. But nature – wrote Cesare Balbo in 1855, six years before unification – made them “as non-Italian as was possible” and they have found themselves “wishing, wanting, believing […] that we must be, that we are Italian.” All identities, especially national identities, which vaunt themselves as immutable facts of nature, are acts of will, as heroic and artificial as any other peremptory moral imperative. Giovanni Cena spoke of an “Italian mission that we Piedmontese must carry out.”

If identity is the product of a will, it is the negation of one’s self because it is a gesture made by someone who wants to be something that he evidently is not and who therefore wants to be different from himself, to make himself unnatural, to pollute himself. In Carlo Alberto’s day, Tommaso Vallauri proposed to him that there should be an illustrated version of the literary glories of the “Piedmontese nation”, misunderstood by the “foreign” historiographers such as the Italian Tiraboschi. But Piedmontese identity is no less ideological and precarious than the Italian; each identity is an aggregate and there is little sense in dismantling it so as to reach the supposed indivisible atom. Even to maintain that it is enough to be Piedmontese to be immune from rhetoric, as Thovez suggested, might be an exaggeration.

The true Piedmontese, from Alfieri onwards – as Carlo Dionisotti reminds us – are those who have been capable of stepping outside of this Piedmontese identity. This capacity to transcend one’s own roots, however much beloved, is also part of that sense of history, of liberty and of Europe that made Piedmont a bastion of anti-Fascism and led Natalino Sapegno more or less to identify Piedmont with anti-Fascism. Today – after so much rhetoric about the Resistance, but also in the face of a suspect revisionism that seeks not so much to re-evaluate myths, reveal truths and understand and respect the enemy, as to place everything on an equal footing, the executioners of Auschwitz and their victims – today we cannot fail to call ourselves Piedmontese. The Collina is also Pian del Lòt, where on 2 April, 1944 twenty-seven people were massacred by the Fascists.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.