Non Fiction Authors From Italy

"Dracula is a psychiatric novel in the sense that it focuses on strange behavior. The word madness is frequently used."

"(About Abraham Van Helsing) He is a psychiatrist, although he has many other specialties: he is a surgeon but also practices hypnosis, which he does regularly with Mina. He was one of Dr. Seward's teachers. He deals with the occult sciences: a term that well expresses the attempt to heal the contradiction between positivism and mystery."

"‘'The case of Renfield’', although fictionalized, does not lose its connotation of psychiatry and that of the time. On the contrary, it serves to raise a very pressing issue at the time: the relationship between mental illness, a natural phenomenon, and demonic possession, which is an extra-natural phenomenon. The psychiatric category that best lends itself to this issue is that which allows for rapid changes in behavior and thought. Renfield goes from a phase of excitement and delirium to a state of calm and apparent normality. Renfield's delirium is the need to feed on living creatures in order to obtain vital energy for himself and thus not die. To this end, he asks for sugar, which he places on the windowsill of his hospital cell to attract flies, which he then swallows. A subsequent phase is to encourage the development of spiders that feed on flies and then swallow them. And the next plan is to have mice that eat spiders and cats that eat mice, so that by eating cats he gains extraordinary vital energy. His whole life is conditioned and focused on this idea."

"A two-stage illness, disorder-disappearance of the disorder (normality), focuses attention because it is closest to demonic possession: when the demon possesses the body, the possessed person exhibits behaviors that disappear immediately when the demon leaves as a result of some therapy (exorcism). Dr. Seward's interest in Renfield probably stems from Kraeplin's discovery of manic-depressive illness in 1895: in the same patient, a phase of mania can be followed by a phase of depression in temporal sequence."

"While Renfield represents psychosis, Lucy represents neurosis. The hysteria that Bram Stoker uses in his novel is what we would today call “dissociative,” leading to a split personality. And with this form, he brings us back to the theme of antithetical behavior in the same personality: Lucy's hysteria is expressed through sleepwalking, which manifests itself in actions that the young lady performs in a state of unconsciousness, of trance, even if it is a trance in motion. This is an extraordinary condition, as it allows one to have experiences and encounters without remembering them when one returns to a waking state. And it is during her sleepwalking phase that she falls prey to Dracula."

"Blood is life; without blood, one is exhausted, close to the end. After sucking blood, Dracula has strength and even becomes young. Without it, he cannot live among the dead. Even in the present day, there are countless references to this symbolism, which take on religious expressions: Christ transforms bread into the body and blood of the Lord and thus gives life to men. He transforms it into blood because the body cannot live without blood. Moreover, when he dies on the Cross, he gives all his blood, so much so that the evangelist notes: water flowed from his side. He had given everything."

"Sucking is the gesture of life, the way in which a newborn baby lives. It attaches itself to the breast and devours it. Life passes from the mother to the child, who sucks it in. It remains a gesture full of charm, and in adult erotic games, sucking plays an important role: once again, it is a symbol of vital force. Dracula has none of the oral aggression of those who eat; on the contrary, he never eats, he only sucks. And in this, he has remained at the gesture of newborn life, the primary movement par excellence: if the child did not know how to suck, it would die."

"Among the possible metamorphoses of Dracula, the most significant, so much so that it has become known to all, is into a bird, a bat. The symbolism of the bird is boundless and is also part of life. The penis is popularly called a bird: precisely because it rises and in that flight gives life, the seed. The bat is a strange creature, we might say perverse: both because it belongs to the mammals and not to the bird species, and because it is nocturnal and at night becomes a bird of sin, of the forbidden. It also has the characteristics of attracting and repelling. During the day, it has no life and remains hanging limply in a cave, while in the dark it is reborn and continuously searches for its prey in that unstoppable flight. Blood therefore recalls the bird-penis, and the image of the ‘baptism of blood’ with Mrs. Mina attached to Dracula's chest, in a position reminiscent of fellatio, is evocative."

"We must now have the courage to say that the count even manages to soften us, to make us feel sorry for him. After all, he is not the monster with superhuman and unstoppable strength, one of those who appear on today's screens of stupidity. Dracula is still a man, he was one while he was alive, in the historical sense of the term; he was a hero, one who saved his people from the Turks, and at that time, the word ‘Turk’ brought to mind evil and extreme violence. A dead character yet full of needs: during the day he must return to a coffin hidden in the ground of the cemetery where he was buried, so much so that he must always carry it with him. He is terrified of good or signs of good: the silver crucifixes and consecrated wafers that Professor Van Helsing uses as his weapons of defense. He is a monster who is afraid and who can be defeated, so much so that this is the conclusion of the story."

"The strength of this novel, however, lies in the great and ever-present theme of the struggle between Good and Evil. A titanic struggle that moves from the everyday scene to the tragedies of the classical period and throughout literature with a capital L. After all, Dracula is Evil, even if he has a charm that sometimes captivates, and the group of characters who eliminate him represent Good, not least because they act in the name of Good."

"Professor Van Helsing is the priest of Good who, given the times, does not wear the robes of a monk or priest, but the garb of science. And so he interprets well the period in which the action takes place: positivism. A priest, therefore, who uses reason, the power of science, but who does not forget the sacred, magical instruments."

"Interviewer:Exhibitionists Andreoli: Of course, this is the mask that hides masochism. And keep in mind that, generally speaking, exhibitionism is a sexuality disorder. Showing off one's organ, but not because it is powerful. To compensate for impotence."

"[Second symptom of Italy's mental illness] Ruthless individualism. And mind you, I mean this adjective. Because a certain amount of individualism is normal, one must have one's own identity to which one attaches esteem. But when it becomes ruthless..."

"[The British] never talk. Instead, we talk even when we listen to music or read the newspaper."

"Interviewer: You can't joke about faith. Andreoli: Not faith in God, let's leave that aside. I'm talking about believing. Thinking that tomorrow, at eight in the morning, there will be a miracle. Then whether it's God, Saint Januarius, or anyone else, it doesn't matter. In short, to be clear, we live in a disaster, in a sewer, but we believe that tomorrow morning at eight there will be a miracle that will change our lives. We're waiting for Godot, who isn't there. But try explaining that to Italians."

"Interviewer: Hidden masochism, ruthless individualism, acting, belief in miracles. We're in a terrible state, Professor Andreoli. Andreoli: That's right. No psychiatrist can save this patient that is Italy. I can't even take away these symptoms, because without them you would feel dead."

"All it takes is a hundred people willing to die as suicide bombers, strapping explosives to themselves, to render ridiculous the system of certainty and the certainty of power on this earth, of the potentates of this world."

"Well, if I have been, and am, a good psychiatrist, if I have helped my crazy patients, it is because of my fragility, because of the fear of a madness that lurks within me, because of the fragility that I feel capable of splitting me in two, of taking away my will to live and making me like a depressed person who only wants to disappear in order to erase the pain that shapes him."

"The Song of Songs speaks of necessary love: being two makes it possible to exist for those who separately would not have made it, would have broken."

"Pain is a quality of being fragile."

"Pain is the primary source of fragility because it breaks you and you feel shattered, unable to put the pieces you see in yourself back together; indeed, you are a pile of fragments, grains of sand that should come together and shape, sculpt a man."

"Pain makes more noise than any other noise."

"The limit of energy becomes the limit of civilization, of a civilization that seems to be one of well-being and that at times appears to be a civilization of waste."

"Marriage is my life with her and our children, but none of us can say that it has been a forty-year trip out of town."

"Marriage is the greatest of human frailties, capable of producing good and incapable of avoiding evil."

"The powerful do not believe they need to be resurrected because they think they are unshakable, like the Eiffel Tower made of iron and not flesh, soulless, cold as a railroad track."

"The powerful do not know how to love; the man of iron is cold, he knows how to envelop and bind in order to subjugate, to enslave."

"The sense of belonging. This is marriage."

"The old man lives on the dead and awaits death."

"Love has nothing free about it, because fear does not allow this utopia to be exercised."

"Man would not survive in the dark without a light bulb to illuminate a page to read or to power a computer on which to type a new world, which also depends on energy."

"The end is not a distant appointment, but a present that perpetuates itself, and so we die continuously and are dead even when we breathe."

"The fragility of fine Murano glass or Bohemian crystal: beautiful, elegant, but it takes very little for it to shatter and turn into useless fragments. Knowing its nature, one must be careful how one uses it, how one preserves it: one must keep it away from places where impetuous actions are performed, because otherwise that fine glass becomes nothing, just a memory."

"Fragility remakes man, while power destroys him, reducing him to fragments that turn to dust."

"My fragility leads me to love, so love is the answer to a need born of fragility, of the perception that without the other, my being in the world is doomed only to death, to non-existence; and the loneliness of the glass man is the worst of all diseases, of the diseases of living."

"Fear is not only linked to physical pain, to the feeling of no longer functioning, it also attaches itself to well-being, which has a mental and social dimension, to how one lives with one's personality within that environment made up of relationships."

"The perception of the end is within each of us, it is a stigma of the species, a mark of its transience."

"The presence of the divine in the world should serve to calm the visceral pride and sense of human omnipotence that exalt power and domination."

"Repetition has always been the source of certainty."

"Old certainties appear as gross errors, and there is now a need to educate, and to do so urgently, at a time when no one knows what it means anymore, since for several generations, throughout the 20th century, this term has not been used, obsolete and with the flavor of something dirty and perverse."

"Violence does not make history, it is not a difficulty that can be worked through, but simply a war that leads only to the death of love and sometimes even of its protagonists."

"Beliefs in heaven, populated by the living, express well the denial of death and the desire to remain."

"In the family, where daily disagreements have disappeared, dramas made up of extreme behaviors arise."

"To accept defeat, you have to believe in those who decree it, you have to be sure that the competitions are not rigged, that they do not become a business, but that they are conducted with absolute respect for skills and talents, whatever field they may be in."

"If your neighbor is antisocial and does not like your noise, he turns on his own and cancels yours."

"Of course, Catholics have a terrible habit: thinking about the power of modernity and ignoring how this modernity, insofar as it seeks to deny religious transcendence, is currently experiencing its greatest crisis, as recognized even by certain secular writers."

"These days, I am writing an introduction to Monarchia by Dante. It is a work that contains some very interesting insights into current affairs, including what I believe to be an unsurpassable definition of “laity”."

"The theocratic ideal is based not only, as is often repeated, even by distinguished writers and by Maritain himself, on the unity of faith, but also on the medieval non-problematization (at least not experienced problematization) of faith as truth. The theocratic ideal is unfeasible today, and not only from a prudential point of view and taking into account the actual situation, as too many theologians and, behind them, too many Catholics think; but it is unfeasible for ideal and logical reasons, because the spiritual condition of the modern age is precisely the problematization of faith as truth (how truth can become my truth). The theocratic ideal is therefore not, at least in my view, the absolute ideal of Christian politics, but its specification in relation to the spiritual situation of the Middle Ages: even if the unity of faith were to be reconstituted, the theocratic ideal would no longer be feasible, because it would be a reconstruction of unity subsequent to its problematization."

"[...] it is within the theology of original sin that the mutual autonomy of the Empire and the Church is understood."

"The originality of Dante lies not so much in his affirmation of the autonomy of the state, but in the religious reason for which it is affirmed. This is the path to asserting the religiosity of politics and the religious meaning of secularism."