In 1975 Tullio De Mauro, linguist and future minister of public education, published the “ten theses for a democratic linguistic education”. In the eighth the teaching of traditional grammar was called “partial, useless and harmful”. The severity of this judgment rested on the repetitive character of many manuals, which recur, more or less, the same content, in the three cycles in which the Italian school is divided. 50 years after that polemical essay he released for the Luigi Pellegrini publishing house “Emotional grammar, journey into the words”, written by Dino Petralia with a preface by Arnaldo Colasanti and PostaPazioni by Alessandro Bergonzoni and Sarantis Thanopulos. The author is not a linguist, but a retired magistrate, who held very important assignments within the judicial order, including an experience at the CSM, the direction of the Department of the Prison Administration and the guide of the General Prosecutor of Reggio Calabria. And yet Dr. Petralia relaunches the study of grammar in an original form, alive, capable, precisely, of arousing emotions.
In his volume we do not find the axillary list of the rules, nor the multitude of exceptions that flood the Italian language and not even the variety of examples reported, to be honest, in a not always clear and distinct way. Thanks to Dino Petralia, the parts of the speech show, however, feelings, relationships and human behaviors so that, as Massimo Recalcati writes, words become alive and enter the body. And then the subjunctive way is “sociable and expansive”, but also “rather elitist and a little snobbish”, while the conditional, which “of the previous one is the cousin, lives of uncertainty, but its potential is made of good intentions”. The adjectives are “impalpable” if indefinite, “intelligent but a little saputelli” if demonstrative. The point is “strong and categorical”, the comma “separates with affection” and the two points are a “couple of twins vertically”.
Literary references are pleasant and frequent: from Shakespeare to Sciascia. Petralia delights he also quote the great authors and interpreters of the Italian song: to explain the adverb “always” he turns to Mina and Celentano (always always), for the gerund he resorts to Baglioni (Traveling). The irony is also subtle, when Cicero is combined with the Calabrian comedian Franco Neri or the similarity between “I” and “God” is highlighted, alluding to those of those of the former often believe they are … the second. Recent Invalsi data worries the increase in “implicit dispersion”: students who, especially in the south, do not reach the sufficient level in Italian tests. Dino Petralia’s book can contribute, with Calvinian lightness, to reverse this trend.