chiudi

In the introduction to this well-researched study, Stefano Giannini begins by offering an insightful panorama of the café as a vibrant theatre for Italian political and cultural life from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Italy’s finest historic

In the introduction to this well-researched study, Stefano Giannini begins by offering an insightful panorama of the café as a vibrant theatre for Italian political and cultural life from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Italy’s finest historic cafés, like the Florian, the Greco, the Rattazzi, and the Giubbe Rosse, are reminders of the rich literary tradition associated with this social space.  Inspired by Goldoni’s use of the café as a chronotope, Giannini explores the central narrative role that this space plays in the works of Piero Chiara and Lucio Mastronardi, two contemporary writers who are closely linked to the world of the provinces. Giannini observes that it was perhaps only in the provinces where the institution of the coffee house still maintained its identity as a “luogo di rifugio, palestra retorica, crogiuolo di idée e di evocazioni di storie” (20). By contracting and limiting their horizon to the hermetically sealed universe of the provinces, Chiara and Mastronardi succeed, according to Giannini, in creating that dimension of real that Ortega y Gasset believed to be of paramount importance to the contemporary novelist. What follows are four chapters, a brief conclusion, and an extensive bibliography. Sections of the first two chapters on Piero Chiara have appeared respectively in Modern Language Notes, 119.1 (2004), and in Atti della giornata di studi su Piero Chiara, Varese 2 dicembre 2006 (Confini, 2008).  
The first chapter, entitled “L’apoteosi del caffè nell’opera di Piero Chiara,” tells of  Chiara’s infatuation with the café in his native Luino and how he ascribed to the tradition that saw in this environment a center of formation and education equivalent to any school or university. Giannini convincingly demonstrates how the situations and the conversations of Chiara’s characters recreate a “fiction di eguaglianza in cui per un momento notai, commercianti, impiegati, medici, insegnanti, flaneurs, giocatori, impiegati di concetto, artisti e nullafacenti si ritrovano in uno spazio franco che garantisce il rispetto reciproco” (60).  Giannini’s attentive reading of the question of identity in Chiara’s fiction, beginning with his most well-known collection of short stories Uovo al cianuro, reveals  strong correspondences with Pirandello’s Il fu Mattia Pascal.
The title of chapter two, “Il caffè è lo scrigno della memoria,” serves as the unifying metaphorical thread of this section as Giannini examines how in Chiara the café functions as a point of departure for reflection on memory and, as such, acquires a fundamental role in the development of his stories. Beginning with an analysis of the most suggestive autobiographical character (Càmola) in the novel Piatto piange, Giannini eloquently articulates how the clients of Chiara’s café make this place “il depositario delle registrazioni di ogni atto umano, una sorta di ‘anagrafe pubblica’ i cui clienti-flaneurs sono i funzionari che animano le storie ivi conservate […] (99).  The highlight of this chapter is the author’s treatment of the personal and artistic exchange between Chiara and his close friend and fellow native of Luino, Vittorio Sereni, surrounding the genesis of the above mentioned novel and the latter’s homonymous poem “Il piatto piange.” For Giannini, each work offers a dramatic and vivid portrayal of the clandestine gambling locales of their provincial town.
In chapter three, “Lucio Mastronardi, ovvero il caffè della disperazione,” Giannini begins by observing that the central narrative focus of Mastronardi’s entire artistic production remains, with very few exceptions, aimed at his native town of Vigevano. It is precisely the provincial nature of Vigevano, suggests Giannini, that offered Mastronardi a comfort zone as an artist, which allowed his “poetic microcope” to examine what Mombelli, the protagonist of Il maestro di Vigevano, called the “fatterelli” of life in his town.  Giannini suggests that in the cafés of Mastronardi’s novels, the author creates an exemplary atmosphere of town life in which his characters place on display the spectacle of their lives. Here Giannini adeptly emphasizes how Mastronardi’s reflections on the universality of Verga’s I Malavoglia extend to his own local characters who “toccano le corde dell’emozione artistica al punto che diventano cittadini d’una provincial universale in cui le loro vicende diventano le vicende d’ogni lettore” (156). While Mastronardi’s cafés serve as a privileged space for the so-called “chiacchiere da caffè,” the social interaction of his characters is often reduced to a display of economic exhibitionism, with the “industriali” holding center stage in the social fiction.
In chapter four, “Storia di un’autodistruzione tra vita e modelli letterari,” Giannini offers an exhaustive history and analysis of the literary representation of the flaneur to argue why Mastronardi’s characters, who are often described as being engaged in long, seemingly aimless walks, ought not be categorized as such. What motivates Mastronardi’s characters are not, asserts Giannini, the “observational interests” that guided the flaneurs but rather the desperation “di chi cerca segnali d’umanità in un mondo istericamente votato a celebrare il nulla” (182).  Giannini rightly finds an affinity  between Mastronardi’s Maestro di Vigevano and Alberto Moravia’s novel Agostino to articulate the crucial theme of masochism and the atmosphere of defeat inherent in both works. Although the café in Mastronardi does at times serve as a palliative to loneliness and the crisis of values that pervades his works, it cannot, as Giannini suggests, save his characters from the desperation and the moral stasis that enshrouds them.
In the volume’s brief conclusion, Giannini provides a synthetic overview of the key points of his study and reasserts his thesis that nowhere in the panorama of twentieth-century Italian literature does the image of the café assume a central role at the narrative level as in the works of Chiara and Mastronardi. These two writers, insists Giannini, are the last to join “lo spirito della provincia con una delle sue manifestazioni più sincere, come la vita al caffè” (222).
The breadth and scope of the study is impressive, and the result is excellent scholarship, highly original and informative. It is a welcome and valuable contribution to the bibliography of two important, albeit often neglected, authors and to twentieth century Italian literature in general.
Data recensione: 01/09/2010
Testata Giornalistica: Symposium
Autore: Mark Pietralunga