Che cosa LEGGERE in italiano? 3 libri FONDAMENTALI

0:00 Three books by three great twentieth-century Italian authors,

0:04 three classics of contemporary Italian literature,

0:07 three masterpieces of different genres that share

0:10 an ethical intent and a spirit of denunciation.

0:13 If you want to improve your Italian by discovering

0:17 three of the most important works of twentieth-century Italian literature,

0:22 this video is for you.

0:23 You'll see, when your Italian friends discover you know these three books,

0:27 they'll be speechless.

0:28 The first is Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi:

0:32 the story of an exile in the forgotten South of Italy,

0:36 where the state is distant, almost unreal,

0:39 and peasants feel excluded even from history.

0:44 The second is If This Is a Man by Primo Levi:

0:48 a testimony born in Auschwitz, inside the concentration camp,

0:51 to answer a terrible and necessary question...

0:54 what remains of man when everything is taken away?

0:57 The third is The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia:

1:01 a crime novel set in Sicily that for the first time

1:05 dares to publicly utter an uncomfortable

1:09 word—mafia—and exposes the silence of omertà.

1:12 These are three "necessary" books, born from the urgent need to inform

1:17 the Italian community about truths that, until then,

1:22 had been either silenced or ignored.

1:25 This is Podcast Italiano,

1:27 a channel for those learning the Italian language and culture, and I'm Davide.

1:32 Turn on subtitles if you need them;

1:34 the full transcript is on my website, podcastitaliano.com.

1:37 I've also prepared a PDF to accompany the video,

1:42 which contains a summary of the video's contents,

1:46 some insights into the works and authors cited,

1:50 and other book recommendations that are

1:53 essential for understanding the twentieth century.

1:55 You can also print this PDF, if you like,

1:58 both to follow the video better and to study and practice after watching.

2:03 I'll leave the link in the description,

2:06 but you can also scan this handy QR code.

2:09 Let's go!

2:09 The three texts I've chosen for you,

2:12 beyond their spirit of denunciation, have one thing in common:

2:15 they dramatize the conflict between the individual

2:18 and the power structures that oppress them.

2:22 These are abstract, impersonal, threatening, if not cruel,

2:27 structures in the face of which the only possible

2:30 attitude for the individual seems to be acceptance and resignation.

2:33 In Christ Stopped at Eboli,

2:36 the power is that of a state, the central Italian state,

2:40 which the peasants of Southern Italy perceive as a distant,

2:45 indeed very distant, entity, sometimes an enemy, sometimes simply absent.

2:52 "The state is further away than heaven, and more malignant,

2:54 because it is always on the other side," Levi wrote.

2:58 In If This Is a Man,

3:00 the criminal power is obviously that of the Nazi extermination machine,

3:04 responsible for the Holocaust.

3:06 And in The Day of the Owl, finally,

3:08 the occult power against which the individual clashes is both

3:12 that of the Sicilian mafia and that of a corrupt and collusive state.

3:18 Although with different nuances, the three novels fall within the cultural

3:23 climate of Neorealism (or immediately follow it).

3:27 They share the need to use clear, direct, and rational language;

3:34 to document reality as it is, without literary embellishment;

3:38 and finally, starting from autobiographical or real-life events.

3:46 Let us now examine each of these works,

3:49 in order of publication, beginning with Christ Stopped at Eboli.

3:55 The book was published in 1945 by the Turin-based publishing house Einaudi.

4:03 It was an immediate success and quickly achieved international fame.

4:09 It is an autobiographical work,

4:11 somewhere between a memoir and a historical-anthropological essay.

4:16 The story is set in Southern Italy,

4:21 specifically in Basilicata, or even more specifically in Lucania.

4:24 It is in this region that the author—a native of the North,

4:30 Turin, like me—was condemned to exile

4:33 by Mussolini for his anti-fascist political activities.

4:36 In the book, Carlo Levi raises the "problem of Southern Italy," that is,

4:42 Southern Italy, describing the poverty, backwardness,

4:46 and neglect of the Lucanian peasants.

4:50 The book deserves credit for having brought

4:56 the gap in socioeconomic development between Northern

4:58 and Southern Italy to public attention and the center

5:01 of political debate for the first time.

5:03 The book was adapted into a 1979 film of the same name,

5:08 directed by Francesco Rosi, starring, among others, Gian Maria Volonté,

5:12 whose iconic face helped bring the image of Levi's exile

5:17 in Lucania to life and eternal in the Italian collective imagination.

5:22 The book deals with this exile,

5:25 between the villages of Gagliano (now Aliano) and Grassano.

5:29 The Eboli mentioned in the title is a small town in Campania,

5:33 just north of Lucania,

5:35 which symbolically represents the boundary between the possibility

5:39 of a human existence and the reality of an animal existence.

5:43 The Lucanian farmers, who live south of Eboli,

5:47 among whom Levi spends his days of exile,

5:51 speak of themselves thus: "We are not Christians.

5:54 Christ stopped at Eboli." In their language,

5:57 "Cristiano" means "man." “We are not Christians,

6:00 we are not men, we are not considered as men,

6:04 but beasts(…), and even less than beasts(…),

6:07 because we must(…) endure the world of Christians,

6:10 who are beyond the horizon, and bear its weight and comparison.

6:14 Christ truly stopped at Eboli,

6:16 where the road and the train leave the coast of Salerno and the sea,

6:21 and enter the desolate lands of Lucania.

6:24 Christ never arrived here, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope,

6:31 nor the link between cause and effect,

6:34 reason and History.” A world– that of Lucania– irrational,

6:41 primitive, magical and pagan.

6:43 A world populated by archaic and mysterious characters,

6:46 whom Levi observes and describes: incompetent doctors,

6:50 pedophile and drunken priests, gravediggers skilled at taming wolves,

6:56 witch-women, jealous husbands, actors, travellers, bandits.

7:00 Here, brigands, let's focus on them for a moment,

7:06 because the book's very lucid contextualization of the phenomenon characteristic

7:10 of the South of Italy at that time is particularly interesting:

7:15 "brigandage." This term refers to the actions of criminal gangs, brigands,

7:21 who infested the countryside and roads to steal and kill,

7:27 an action induced by desperation and authorized by an absent state.

7:33 Levi describes it thus:

7:34 "Brigantage is nothing but a fit of heroic madness and desperate ferocity:

7:39 a desire for death and destruction, without hope of victory." The anthropologist

7:44 and ethnologist Clara Gallini has emphasized the "capital"

7:48 importance of Carlo Levi's book

7:50 in the history of anthropological disciplines in Italy,

7:54 marking a turning point in the understanding of the "global

8:01 South." Let us now turn to the second of our novels,

8:04 If This Is a Man, by another Levi, Primo Levi.

8:07 It is a memoir, a novel-testimony set in Auschwitz,

8:11 inside the concentration camp.

8:13 The author was held prisoner in that camp,

8:16 and can denounce the horror and dehumanization he witnessed.

8:21 The manuscript, he believes,

8:23 was rejected twice by the major publishing house Einaudi.

8:26 The author was forced to turn to the small De Silva publishing house,

8:32 which printed the work in 1947 in a run of just 2,500 copies.

8:37 The book's success would have to wait until 1958,

8:41 when it was republished by Einaudi.

8:45 By the author's own admission, the book was "born during the concentration camp

8:51 days out of the irrepressible need to tell others,

8:55 to involve others," and it was written to satisfy this profound need.

9:01 The book's title, If This Is a Man, is explained by the introductory verses,

9:06 inspired by an ancient prayer from the Jewish liturgy.

9:09 Very famous lines, which make your veins tremble,

9:13 and which place each of us before a responsibility,

9:18 the responsibility of memory: You who live safe in your warm homes,

9:23 you who return in the evening to find hot food and friendly faces:

9:28 Consider if this is a man who works in the mud who knows no peace

9:34 who fights for a scrap of bread who dies because of a yes or a no.

9:40 Consider if this is a woman, hairless and nameless,

9:43 with no more strength to remember her eyes empty

9:47 and her cold womb like a frog in winter.

9:51 Meditate on what happened: I command you these words.

9:56 Carve them into your heart as you stay at home and walk along the street,

10:01 Going to bed, getting up.

10:03 Repeat them to your children.

10:04 Or may your house fall to pieces,

10:07 illness prevent you, or your children turn away from you.

10:11 These are verses that, unfortunately, are still very relevant.

10:15 In just a few lines, the author manages to do many things at once.

10:18 He manages to succinctly describe the reality of the concentration camps,

10:23 the lives of prisoners: men working in the mud for a crust

10:29 of bread and women stripped of femininity and identity.

10:33 He manages to place life in the concentration camps outside of life, real life,

10:37 through the contrast with the warm,

10:39 safe homes where you find hot food and friendly faces.

10:43 He manages to launch an appeal to readers,

10:45 the "you" to whom: the appeal is that of memory,

10:49 "this has been," a memory that becomes a duty,

10:52 "I command you," to be passed down from generation to generation,

10:56 "repeat them (these words) to your children." In the book,

11:00 the author analyzes the senseless and arbitrary rules that govern camp society,

11:04 the group dynamics that arise among prisoners,

11:09 the strategies for survival and for maintaining dignity,

11:13 and the isolated episodes of solidarity among prisoners.

11:18 He describes the harshness of physical labor,

11:20 and then the hunger, a condition that constantly torments the prisoners,

11:24 along with the mathematical certainty that most

11:27 of the living are destined to die.

11:30 He recounts the nights, nights of half-sleep,

11:33 in which the boundaries between reality and dream are blurred.

11:37 Levi describes these nights in a famous passage:

11:40 You can hear the sleepers breathing and snoring, some moaning and talking.

11:46 Many smack their lips and wriggle their jaws.

11:49 They dream of eating: this too is a collective dream.

11:52 It is a merciless dream(…).

11:54 You don't just see the food, you feel it in your hands,

11:57 distinct and concrete, you perceive its rich,

12:00 powerful odor; someone brings it close to your lips,

12:03 then some circumstance, different each time,

12:06 prevents the act from being completed.

12:09 Not even in their dreams are the prisoners of Auschwitz able to eat.

12:12 In their dreams, food is close, very close; it has a shape, a color,

12:17 a smell, it almost touches the hungry mouth,

12:20 but finally disappears before it can be eaten.

12:23 The story of the hell of Auschwitz continues until

12:27 the arrival of the Soviets on January 27, 1945.

12:36 Finally, we move on to today's third and final book,

12:38 Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl) by Leonardo Sciascia,

12:42 published in 1961, which was adapted into the 1968 film of the same name,

12:47 directed by Damiano Damiani.

12:48 This is a detective novel, a crime novel, set in Sicily.

12:54 With this work, Sciascia denounces for the first time

12:57 the Sicilian mafia system and the culture of silence,

13:01 that is, the silence of witnesses

13:04 to mafia crimes enforced through fear of revenge.

13:08 The book is a denunciation of the Mafia's power in Sicily,

13:13 the author's native land, and an unfiltered snapshot of the society of the time.

13:20 The story takes place in 1960.

13:22 In a small Sicilian village near Syracuse,

13:25 the president of a small housing cooperative is found murdered at a bus stop.

13:31 The causes and perpetrators of the murder are shrouded in mystery.

13:36 Carabinieri Captain Bellodi investigates the crime,

13:39 but getting to the truth is not easy,

13:42 because everyone in the village is afraid to speak out:

13:45 a code of silence reigns.

13:47 As time passes, it is discovered

13:50 that the case also involves prominent public figures.

13:53 At a certain point, even the only

13:55 person who had recognized the murderer is killed.

13:58 But Captain Bellodi does not give up and, thanks

14:01 to the information of the widow of the last victim,

14:04 he is finally able to reconstruct the facts.

14:05 I will not tell you more about the story

14:07 so as not to spoil the pleasure of reading.

14:10 Instead, I'll leave you with a page from the book,

14:12 where the narrator delves into Captain Bellodi's thoughts,

14:15 to give you a taste of the narrative

14:18 style and the culture of the time and place.

14:21 The language isn't exactly simple,

14:23 but let me know in the comments if you understand.

14:26 Otherwise, you can always use the transcript on our website,

14:30 which includes a glossary with explanations of difficult words.

14:33 And in these cases, it's very helpful!

14:36 the captain thought that the family is

14:38 the only truly "living" institution in the Sicilian consciousness:

14:42 but "living" more as a dramatic contractual,

14:46 legal knot, than as a natural and sentimental aggregate.

14:50 The family is the Sicilian State.

14:52 The State, what for us is the State, is outside:

14:56 an entity de facto created by force;

14:59 and it imposes taxes, military service, war, the Carabiniere.

15:03 Within that institution that is the family,

15:07 the Sicilian crosses the boundary of his own

15:11 natural and tragic solitude and adapts,

15:13 in a sophisticated contractual nature of relationships, to coexistence.

15:17 It would be too much to ask him to cross the boundary between family and State.

15:23 We have reached the end of today's reading recommendations.

15:26 What do you think of the selection I suggested?

15:29 Which of the three books caught your attention, and why?

15:31 Which would you like to read first?

15:34 Let me know by leaving a comment.

15:36 And if you want to continue exploring today's authors and themes,

15:40 download the summary PDF.

15:41 And if you're interested in delving even deeper into the historical,

15:44 social, and cultural dynamics that have shaped contemporary Italy,

15:47 then I'm waiting for you in Inside Italy,

15:51 the advanced course (level C1) I created with historian Marco Cappelli.

15:55 It's designed for those who already have a good

15:59 level of Italian and combines advanced Italian with historical,

16:02 social, and cultural themes: we're talking about the economic miracle,

16:07 politics, the Church, the Mafia, regional identity...

16:11 complex topics, real, very important, and often a bit controversial,

16:15 just the way I like it!

16:18 Each episode is accompanied by grammatical and lexical insights,

16:23 exercises, transcriptions, flashcards,

16:25 and even a community where you can exchange

16:27 and test your skills with other students and our teacher.

16:31 So, if you truly want to delve into the complexity of the country—and not stop,

16:36 like many do, at the more touristy side— Inside

16:40 Italy is the natural next step in your journey.

16:43 You'll find all the information in the link in the description.

16:49 Happy reading, happy studying, and...

16:53 see you next time!