There is a choral feeling that animates the pages of «Aqua e tera» (The Ship of Theseus), the fifth novel by Dario FranceschiniDemocratic Party senator, former Minister of Culture of rare longevity (four governments) and, above all, rare “productivity” in that role. The setting is his Ferraraa place of the soul and memory that becomes a place of collective memory, in a narrative that participates in the family saga and the historical novel, but finding its own dry figure of testimony and shared emotion.
The incipit echoes – but it is a flash, a suggestion among others, perhaps an act of devotion to much loved (generationally loved) readings and lessons – a Marquezian trend, in the stories of Isauro Callegari, son of Nivardo and father of Milvano ( sublime, as always, the Emilian onomastics, which would deserve recognition as a UNESCO intangible asset), descendant of a lineage of “fiocinini” who became “scariolanti” at the end of the nineteenth century: the innumerable workforce that literally cleared, reclaimed, cultivated, built Italy and, in Franceschini’s novel (which will be at the Feltrinelli in Messina tomorrow at 5pm), made the marshes Ferraresi – water and land – fertile fields to cultivate.
At the price of unspeakable hardships, of endless deaths from malaria, malnutrition, pellagra: the force that imposes itself immediately, in the pages of the novel – right from the hypocritical act of “generosity” of Nivardo’s owner who allows the boy to stay in «an uninhabitable ruin» «in the midst of putrid waters», where it was certain that he would die of disease – is injustice. That enormous, flagrant social injustice against which the socialists of the time fought, a dawning era for certain magnificent struggles that we have almost forgotten: the era of the great agrarian strikes, of the “leagues” (alas, how can they become perverted, certain words…) of workers.
Milvano throws himself into it body and soul, in that beginning of the twentieth century which is incubating revolutions and horrors, enormous hopes and immense scams. Like fascism. In the climate of hatred and violence – and of an exasperated vitalism that feeds on them – in which the “Fasci” were born, the love story between two women was also born, a Shakespearean story but as Bassani could have told it (mentioned in the novel, which is also a network of homages to figures and characters, one senses, much loved by the narrator, and part of his ideal and literary history): Lucia is the daughter of Milvano is a housekeeper and has a beautiful soul; Tina is the daughter of a rich family of early Mussolini enthusiasts, she is a dreamer and a pioneer, who tries to escape the marked destiny of women (even more so in the chauvinistic world built by the fascists) and is enthusiastic about the “modern” arts of photography and cinematography.
There is a powerful feminine to which Franceschini pays homageindeed certain recognition: the figure of Ginisca, wife of Isauro and charismatic matriarch, imposes itself from the beginning: she, when she speaks passionately about horizons of freedom and dignity of workers, “sheds light with her eyes”; she organizes the women and pushes her niece Lucia to “free herself” – alone, as it should be, with the forces of education and awareness. They are the women, the immobile engine of History, who also travels on the trucks of the gendarmes or thugs, speaks in the Senate and in the squares with the voices of men, leaves for military campaigns on the legs of poor laborers and workers who have become poor soldiers and cannon fodder.
There is a network of female solidarity that goes beyond individual affairs and is a form of salvation, one of the few forms of beauty in a harsh and unjust world, and even more so for women: the last are always the last, and we see even today.
There are many historical figures, but not only the best-known ones – an unusual Matteotti in a restaurant, Don Minzoni, Italo Balbo, Mussolini making a speech to the “people of Ferrara” – and this is the political value of the novel, which establishes a subdued , a firm epic of the defeated (whose dialect it takes on in certain dialogues, a quick and savory Ferrarese, an obligatory choice for reasons of realism, but also a highly expressive choice) and recalls the names and stories of forgotten victims and heroes (the author immediately warns: «All the events narrated really happened, except for a few»), such as Celestina Bergamini or Tullio Zecchi, killed by the fascists; like the teacher Alda Costa, like the journalist and trade unionist Rina Melli.
A memory we must shareespecially in this dark moment in which the most technological and knowledgeable world ever seems to want to hand itself over to populists and fanatics of every creed and latitude. The stories – invented or almost, true or almost – serve to remind us of that light of Ginisca, that light in which Ginisca believed. She called it “the sun of the future”.