Genina Jacobone

Contributor to our magazine since many years, Stenio Solinas is one of the most prestigious names in the Italian journalism. Formerly head of the culture editorial office at the “Giornale”, today is correspondent for the same newspaper. In his book he deals with the cultural history of our country and the last one - “ Loneliness-companion “ (published by Ponte alle Grazie) - represents a sort of intellectual autobiography, throughout the portraits of the authors he read and loved the most since he was young: from Heminghway to Celine, from Rimbaud to Chatwin, from Morand to Lawrence. The point of view is obviously that of a man against the general trend, afar from the trends prevailing in the post-war Italy. Unfortunately the aesthetic taste of Solinas is not common, and his readings are unknown to the sizeable part of his journalist colleagues.

How did you get to this book, that means how did you work it out?

I had realised several portraits of writers over time, and the publication of this book is the way to rescue from oblivion that the newspapers articles are unavoidable destined to. When the publisher proposed me to collect in a book these portraits gallery, he suggested me also to “personalize them “, what I carried out practically writing all over again the pieces published in the newspapers. I felt it was right to give back a voice to a series of authors of these last thirty-forty years that have completely disappeared in libraries and in the great editorial industry.

This is the editorial origin of the book. But I wonder which role it plays in your personal researching.

The truth is that some times one carries out balances over one' s own life, one's own choices. Nowadays it is so in fashion talking about Right and Left that I want to narrate the last thirty years of the cultural Right I belonged to, even if feeling paradoxically a little uncomfortable. At the same time I tried to describe experiences and frames of mind common to many persons who for thirty years lived as exiles in their own country, put on the fringes of the political life and of the cultural debate in our country.

Don't you think the same is happening also nowadays?

Sure. Indeed the so-called Right “clearance”, between 1993 and 1994, occurred when this word did not have any meaning anymore. The several political forces embodying this word made a clean sweep of what they have been earlier, for many motivations, and when it is made sweep of one's own past, one losses roots, bonds and identity. It has been never talked about Right as now the Right does not exist anymore. Indeed it lacks at all, cultural level, alternative information. New generations do not know what has happened thirty years ago, far less they know the fifty years ago history. At schools the right culture does not exist, it exists only the culture of a certain left, but also in that field there are some divergences. Indeed, starting from post-war it had prevailed a certain kind of intellectual and ideological performance for which all what had been previously must be object of mockery and derision. It was pretended that the fascist period - a twenty year period made of shadows, mistakes and horrors -did not exist, while it must not be set apart if aiming to understand the history of our country.

What are the effects of such an attitude?

All that has turned Italy into a country without dignity, giving up any power policy within foreign policy, since it would have been synonymous of fascism. Since 1948 Italy has had in average a government per year and, as a rule, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs it was given less importance than the Ministry of Post and Telecommunication (for reasons inherent to policy of patronage). We have lived for forty years under the Nato protective umbrella, but since the fall of the Wall of Berlin the world has changed and we find us in troubles. We have a war at 200 km from our coasts and we don't know at all what to do, since it has always lacked a national policy. These are consequences affecting also the new generations and the future of Italy.

Unfortunately this is the heritage we leave to our young, and from this point of view your book, so well structured and anyhow impartial - will have a very important function just in communicating young people what they do not know.

   Leadership Medica^®  
  Mensile di scienza  medica e attualita`  
 Copyright 1997© All Rights Reserved