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It is a poetic book, «Il maestro del Duce» (Bompiani), just released in bookstores, which in the form of a diary (with the literary style of the rediscovered diary) tells, beyond the oleography, a year of school of a young teacher during the twenty years of fascism. The author, Alessandro Di Nuzzo, Emilian, writer, screenwriter of docufilms, editorial manager of Aliberti Editore (but also author of musical lyrics, for Cremonini and Morandi), has relied on memoirs and diaries and on the great pages of history, literature and Italian cinema.
It is September 1937 when the twenty-year-old Guido Centofanti, narrator of the novel, leaves from the province of Arezzo towards Morra Terzana, in the mountains of Cilento, for his first job as a teacher, with the candid enthusiasm of serving the fascist homeland and the precepts of the Duce. But soon, together with the initial misunderstanding of two worlds that are distant, the atavistic misery of the place, where everything is missing in the dilapidated school – in the beginning even the students – presents Guido with the account of a different reality. Then, however, for the students who express themselves in the local dialect there is the encounter with the other word and with the object book (where, in spite of the single book, the literary text remains the main repository of meanings), for the “gnor mae”, also an alumnus to be nourished every day, there is empathy with a varied humanity, from the janitor-undertaker-handyman Masturzo to the painter Salviati, to the prisoner, to the seamstress Augustina, and with the places, thanks to a wild nature far from imposture.
Doctor Di Nuzzo, how did this beautiful story rich in symbols and enlightening for our disturbing present come about?
«Those of a certain age like me preserve family memories, including objects, of grandparents and parents who lived through the twenty years of fascism, like the photo of my father in a table uniform. The novel mentions the Libro unico, the subsidiary that I found on the stalls of street markets together with report cards, notebooks of the time or reading books such as the “Balilla Vittorio”, cited in the novel. This is to say that that story concerns us for our family memories but also, unfortunately, for that fascism that always resurfaces like a karst river.”
Guido truly becomes a teacher when a mutual restitution of meanings occurs with the students, albeit in dialect on the one hand and in Italian on the other, when he moves from the bureaucratic-conformist register to the emotional and profound one, and welcomes imagination into his teaching, expressed, among others, by the beautiful image of kites that make minds fly.
«The meaning is precisely this, of a teacher who becomes “taught”, as is told in all the great stories of teachers, from the book “Cuore” to “I hope that I get along” to “Diary of a teacher”. Guido, it’s not that his nature changes much, but little by little, in that year of teaching, he understands what conscience and responsibility really are. Conditioning has always existed in the educational environment, even today, when in various forms we want to constrain everything that is fantasy and the ability to imagine. Pascoli’s image of kites carries with it the meaning of an object of freedom that opposes the regime’s instruments of war.”
Morra is an imaginary town in Cilento. How did you work to integrate dialect and Italian?
«Morra is an iconic place of the South of Italy, an internal southern Italy, and, if you want, also of the South of the world. My family is originally from the province of Caserta, and what I remember of my grandmother, who was illiterate and spoke in dialect, reverberates in the story of the book. One of the themes of the novel is that of female illiteracy, widespread especially in the most inland and disadvantaged areas of the South, despite the Gentile reform requiring enrollment in primary school. Which makes Guido understand how big the distance was between propaganda and the reality of the facts. As far as the language is concerned, my knowledge of dialects is carried over. Together with family memories and the help of many friends from the Agropoli area, I followed the lessons of the great Eduardo, using a level of Italo-Neapolitan or Italo-Campanian. However, it also helped me that when Guido records what happens to him and therefore also the dialogues, he writes in the diary what he understood.”
Salviati and Augustina represent the critical, free thought that shakes the dogmatic one of the master.
«Salviati, whose name bears reference to Galileo but being a painter is also a tribute to Carlo Levi, is a man of thought, probably trained in the Turin world near Gobetti and Gramsci. It represents the critical conscience, and feels, with anguish, that fascism is something inherent to a certain way of being Italian (after all, Gobetti said that “fascism is the autobiography of the nation”). He appreciates Guido’s sense of responsibility, which is the key to the young man’s change. As for Augustina, illiterate, intelligent, rebellious and with her natural sensuality, she is the symbol of the powerful feminine that causes upheaval in Guido.”
In the second part of the novel there is a total change of register, both in the content, more dramatic than the first, and in the language.
«It is so, because it is there that Guido, sent to the Greek war front, although initially reformed due to a slight limp, also linguistically strips himself of the rhetoric of the regime. War is a catalyst, unfortunately, with which we become aware and from certain positions we move on to another vision of the world, which in Guido is closely linked to his teaching activity. Like many others, I am aware of the dryness of the language with which Pavese or Vittorini write their novels, and which is already a form of opposition.”
Doctor Di Nuzzo, do you give your work a civil and political value?
«Inevitably yes. I thought of this story about ten years ago. I was wondering, however, who this might be of interest to. Ultimately, I thought, the theme of fascism is consigned to history. Unfortunately this is not the case, and we see it every day, it is no longer a question of revisionism but of waves of ideology. And not only in Italy, just look at the success of the AFD in Germany.”