Piero Gobetti between history and myth

Francesco Malgeri, Sergio Zoppi and Emma Fattorini review the book edited by Bartolo Gariglio, L’autunno delle libertà. Lettere ad Ada in morte di Piero Gobetti. Malgeri keenly dwells upon the topics of death and exile, drawing both on the letters anthologized - written by such anti-Fascist intellectuals and politicians as Croce, Fortunato, Salvemini, Einaudi, Dorso, Salvatorelli, Rosselli, Sraffa, Sturzo, Tasca, Miglioli among others - and on literary and scholarly works by such contemporary writers as Francesco Luigi Ferrari, again Gaetano Salvemini and Ada Marchesini Gobetti herself. Zoppi examines the emotional texture of Ada’s letters and the moral values they express - uprightness, broterhood, the dignity of culture and civil commitment - together with the faith that for now dispersed, these values would be "able to survive during the dictatorship and regenerate, nourishing the resistance against barbarism and the foundation of a republic based on freedom and justice". Emma Fattorini underlines how the numerous letters by women are first of all marked by the solicitude for - and the taking care of - Ada as a real person, while in the ones by men "we find all the classic identification ingredients forming the male model of the twenties: moral strength, heroism of will, boldness in serving the right cause, frankness and open-mindedness, [...] in a still positive and idealized dimension, typical of pre-war culture".

Keywords: Letters, antifascism, twenties, death and exile, male identity model, moral strength

Francesco Malgeri, Sergio Zoppi, Emma Fattorini, Piero Gobetti tra storia e mito. Il mondo di Gobetti di fronte alla sua morte ; Dalle amiche e espressioni più toccanti ; La differenza nella partecipazione al dolore in "ITALIA CONTEMPORANEA" 258/2010, pp 103-107, DOI: 10.3280/IC2010-258006