LIBRI DI GUIDO PANICO

Il volume dibatte sul rapporto, mai pienamente risolto, tra memorialistica, scrittura di finzione e storia. Scrivere di se stessi, sotto la forma delle memorie e dell’autobiografia, richiede una particolare ipertrofia dell’io e la tendenza a imbellettarsi. Ciò non impedisce alla storia, costruita con consapevolezza di metodo, di scavare in queste pagine in cerca della soggettività del passato, cioè di come è stato vissuto dai suoi protagonisti e narratori il tempo trascorso. Ciò vale, sebbene con modalità diverse, anche per le pagine letterarie.

Many authors have written history and fiction papers about the story of Philomena Pennacchio, a key figure of the Italian post-unification brigandage. Her story and her character are a case study leading to the discussion about the relationship between history and narrative fiction. In some instances this meeting produced a genre, that I would call «historical feuilleton». In the middle of the following pages there is the comparison between the production of the history books, which tells the story of a young woman and her companion as an opportunity of revisionism of the national unification history, and the philologically accurate novel of a woman writer, Licia Giaquinto. The essay will demonstrate the cognitive force of the fictional novel, dropping the small personal story, worth of a micro-history, in a social and cultural well-defined context. Exactly the opposite of the biography in the form of feuilleton, which is now more popular.

Terroni. Tutto quello che è stato fatto perché gli italiani del Sud diventassero meridionali. This is the title of the first book, published in 2014, dedicated to Pino Aprile and it tells the history of South of Italy from the national unification to the recent past. After the first one, three other books were published. The historiographic work of the three works is weak and It reflects a secular literature, based on the interpretation of the Risorgimento as a prosperous kingdom conquest done by the Piedmont, considered one of the advanced countries of that time. The nostalgic historical revisionism of Pino Aprile and other journalists about the Risorgimento has no scientific importance, but It contributes in an important way to the construction of a common sense of the South of Italy history with political repercussion. Therefore, historians should pay attention to it. This paper represents a case of history told to the population with its legacy of simplifications and anachronisms.

The essay analyzes the literary case, represented by Roberto Saviano, one of the most prominent figures within the Italian communication sphere. Saviano is well known in Italy and abroad for his first novel, Gomorra, for a series of public actions against the Camorra power and for a second novel ZeroZeroZero. This novel aims to tell the cocaine traffic across nearly the entire globe. It is said that Saviano, with his works, explained to a large audience, clearly, without the pedantry of analytical essays, a social and economic phenomenon of enormous importance such as criminal organizations, which are generically called "Mafia". But how can the writing style of Saviano, which mixes, offhandedly, literary fiction, investigative journalism and judicial documents, have value for the social and historical knowledge? The Mafia and Camorra crime has been, since the nineteenth century, the subject of studies. Weak, on the other hand, its presence in the literary page. It is only with The Day of the Owl (1961) by Leonardo Sciascia that the Mafia becomes the object of narrative plots describing, realistically, the mafia and its culture. The literary and cinematic page, dedicated to the Camorra, is, however, more ancient. This paper analyzes the page of "invention" and, in part, "documentation" of the Camorra before and after Savianio and intends to contribute, through a case study, to the debate on the historical value of the literary page

La storia e la sua rappresentazione. Congetture intorno a "LA tela di ragno" di Joseph Roth - Published in instalments in the Austrian socialist party’s newspaper in 1923, Das spinnennetz (The Spider’s Web) is a novel by Joseph Roth. A writer of Jewish origin, Roth moved from Vienna to Berlin in 1920, where he started his career as a journalist. The novel is about a young veteran of the German Imperial army who joins a paramilitary extreme right nationalist group. Driven by a profound anti-Semite hatred, more radical than his hatred for Bolshevism, he makes a career within the organisation by means of a systematic use of violence and treachery. This literary work may be also read as an uncommon historical evidence. The relationship between literature and history is the object of an age-long and, probably, insoluble debate. There is no doubt that a great many literary pages convey ideas about the contexts and customs to the historian. Whether these pages may be regarded as providing relevant evidence, or even that they themselves are ‘history’ in the proper sense, and not just a bit of rhetoric, is to be argued case by case. The spider’s Web is preceded by numerous journalistic pages which tackle the fundamental themes of the novel. It describes a widespread sentiment - of anti-Semite nationalism and violent deep-rooted sense of hierarchies - which preludes to the post- World War I period. As early as the end of 1919, Roth wrote that the Bolshevik revolution was declining in the former middle-European Empires. What was increasing, instead, was the barbarity lurking in the recesses of a part of European society. Key words: Anti-Semitism, Bolshevism, National Socialism, Literature, History, Representation. Parole chiave: Antisemitismo, Bolscevismo, Nazionalsocialismo, Letteratura, Storia, Rappresentazione.

Il volume offre un importante contributo alla storiografia sportiva, individuando nel Ventennio fascista un punto di svolta in cui il controllo statale si manifesta anche attraverso un tentativo di “sportivizzazione”. I contributi raccolti offrono un ampio ventaglio di prospettive: dalle vicende istituzionali e sociali interne alle discipline (calcio, ciclismo, alpinismo, nuoto) all’uso propagandistico dei mezzi di comunicazione (stampa, radio, cinema, fotografia), dall’architettura alla medicina sportiva, dal ruolo della donna al contesto universitario e all’olimpismo...