Historians From Italy

"Years ago, a curious debate took place in England: the poet Eliot wondered how it was possible to admire the work of a poet (in this case Goethe) whose ideas and conception of life were not accepted. The problem was declared insoluble. Yet the problem had already been solved by Marx, an admirer of Greek tragedy, which arose from a social structure and a conception of the world that was certainly not his own. Even Friedrich Nietzsche did not deny the art of Richard Wagner when he declared that Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was an attack on civilisation, and he did not pose the problem because he recognised that there is no necessary cause-and-effect relationship between aesthetic admiration and ethical consent. In any case, such a problem cannot arise in Italy because Croce has been there. (p. 51)"

"An internationally renowned novelist, Arthur Koestler, whose most popular book earned him a flattering review from Benedetto Croce, recounted in “The Earth's Foam” how Croce's philosophy was our daily topic of conversation even in the concentration camp. (p. 59)"

"Often, people find it in their interest not to think, or they lack the energy and intellectual perseverance necessary to think seriously. But if they think, overcoming the practical obstacles that stand in the way of thinking, they can arrive at the truth. (p. 67)"

"If thought is truth, then, if it encountered no obstacles, it would consist in the contemplation of itself. (p. 68)"

"The paradoxical thing is that Tolkien, now a mass phenomenon, was a niche writer: he wrote by hand and did the illustrations for his books himself. Above all, he wrote not only for himself, but also for his colleagues and students at Oxford, for people trained to recognise all the references and quotations. In short, he wrote for an elite, and it is worth bearing this in mind when reading him today."

"In the festival [...] the arcane becomes everyday, the mystery becomes visible. Who said there is no longer any place for myth?"

"Vittorio de Caprariis, Eugenio Montale, Leo Valiani, Benedetto Croce, Edizioni di Comunità, 1963."

"Leo Valiani, Terrore a porte chiuse, in Storia illustrata, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano, n. 339, February 1986, pp. 104-112."

"[...] with the finest artistry, not only concealed or hidden, but lost within it, that body (of the Colossus of Rhodes) appeared, like the men of Deucalion from stones, born of himself by divine teaching. And to say nothing of the well-understood proportion of his limbs, all corresponding to the most perfect natural form; and of the softness and sensitivity, without one discordant with the other; and of the lively and spirited attitude with which he posed and stood upright; his face was tempered with such a beautiful and, above all, difficult mixture of air that it was impossible to distinguish which was more dominant in him: the lovable, rightly desired in an effigy of the Sun, or the majestic, equally due to the face of a God. (Part I, Chapter XX, “Rhodes”; 1664, p. 308)"

"As if it were Trento in the first decade of the 20th century, just before the war that was to “return” it (!) to Italy, it may seem strange and paradoxical, but I – a Florentine and Tuscan by birth, I believe, from the middle Valdarno area for several generations (people who came from Signa, perhaps as far away as Pescia in Valdinievole) – know this quite well. I know a few things about this city of about thirty thousand inhabitants, which even for those in the region must have seemed like a semi-metropolis, if only because it looked like a city and not a large village. And to some extent, in addition to the beautiful and severe memories of its prince-bishops who had embellished it over the centuries and the Habsburg imprint that had been strong since 1777, when the prerogatives of temporal power had passed to Empress Maria Theresa, was the strong garrison of the imperial army, with 3,000 soldiers who alone made up 10% of the population. Between the Italian population and the Austro-Germans (officers and civil servants, above all, as well as a few innkeepers and tailors who served the garrison), there was a relationship of correct neighbourliness, but also of mutual segregation. It was not that they hated each other, but rather that they ignored each other."

"It is dignity that forms the basis of authentic and non-abstract equality: a possible and concrete equality, since absolute and perfect equality does not exist and, if it did, it would be horrible."

"It is true that there was already a divide between the north and the south, but it is no less true that the unification of Italy was paradoxically achieved by accentuating this divide. The real industrial take-off of the north took place with money and labour from the south, and this gap has actually widened. The fight against brigandage was something horrible. The royal army, the royal carabinieri and the royal bersaglieri behaved like a colonial army. These things need to be said and taught in schools."

"There is only one path to the true: straight as a ray of light. Infinite and contrary are those that lead away from it to falsehood. (Book I, Chapter IV; 1659, p. 55)"

"Bartoli represents the typical mentality of the seventeenth-century man of letters: marvellous mastery of form, absolute lack or deficiency of thought. One would not really say that he came into the world a generation after Galileo and Sarpi."

"[...] this incomparable King of the Mountains, Atlas towering above us. Behold how he rises up, how he rears himself, and how his proud head [raises] and turns towards the ever-feared and ever-hostile Europe, in an act of recognition and spying: and how he spreads his immense back towards that jealous frontier of his Africa, in the act of securing and defending it with his shoulders. However much we see of him, he is neither the whole of Atlas, nor more than that; but only the summit. (from “'L'Atlante,”' p. 79)"

"Here no sail is lowered, here no hand is removed from the oar, here no anchor is yet thrown to drop. Terra Incognita} Just to name it is to understand how much there is to know about it. Here are the shores of this sea, visible to the eye but not yet to the foot of anyone who knows it. If you are not satisfied with just seeing it, and you wish to venture forth to inquire about it, turn towards it and cry out: O you over there, what world is yours? What region? What country? Is it an island in the sea or mainland? Is it cultivated or uncultivated? Is it deserted, solitary, uninhabited or inhabited? And by what multitude of men? And of what language, customs, religion and God? Are there kings, magistrates, people; are there assemblies and cities, or do they live in uncertainty, like the Scythians, wandering and roaming? No one shows up to answer: so the answer is a profound silence, which is nevertheless the true answer to those who have good ears, because only by remaining silent can one say what it is, that is, Terra Incognita. Now, let us believe that this concealment of such a large part of the world is done for the sake of Nature's reputation; otherwise, as the Stoic said about philosophising about this great universe, “Pusilla res mundus est, nisi in illo quod quærat omnis mundus habeat” : thus, once the Earth has been completely discovered, it would cease to appear to us as a world, and we would begin to consider it as nothing much ,so much remains unknown in the North, so much in the South, so much in its parts far from the sea, and so many islands, small worlds in themselves, scattered and lost in the immensity of the ocean, as in the infinite spaces of the void, the worlds seen in their philosophical dreams by Democritus and Epicurus. Thus, one might say that the Earth is so great that for as many centuries as time has recorded in its annals, people have laboured to discover its parts, and yet God knows how many centuries remain for others to discover. (from “'Terra incognita”', pp. 330-331)"

"The root, which fears so much that the sky will not see it, the sun will not touch it, the air will not harm it, well aware of what its ministry is, burrows deep underground, and in its tender birth, it pierces, penetrates, branches out, and spreads: and throws out so many trunks, branches, and roots everywhere that it looks like an upside-down, buried tree: and therefore it lives because it is buried, otherwise, if you dig it up, it dies. There it is the first foundation of the [fabrica] it supports, and well suited to it, that is, for the high, deep, for the wide, spread out, for the shocks from the whirlwinds, divided and firm on every side from which the wind blows: like the masts of ships, which are held by the rigging, which, like arms, grasp it from all sides and hold it steady. In addition to this, the root is all together what [in] animals is the mouth, the belly, and the liver. It sucks in food, cooks it, transmutes it into juice, indifferent to receiving the different forms of the different parts that derive from it. (Book I, Chapter VII; 1659, p. 97)"

"Hear: the day might seem too honoured with the works of the hand, of which the night is deprived, if the works of the mind were not given in exchange for those. The day therefore has its labours, the night its thoughts; and appropriate to each, the former has noise, the latter silence. (Book I, Chapter X; 1839, p. 97)"

"And has God not shown himself to be supremely admirable in varying in a hundred and more different ways the circling and coiling of a snail within itself? Could anything be more equal, more determined, more simple? And yet, in his hands, it has become capable of such great art. Some turn with volutes, one inside the other, as if they were twisting around a spindle: and as they proceed lengthwise, they become thinner and gradually taper to a point. Others, on the contrary, all return to themselves: and tell me, Archimedes, who wrote so ingeniously about them, who teaches them to draw a line so perfectly that it is not out of proportion in any way? Tell me, architects, who struggle so much to draw volutes with a ruler, and yet never anything but false ones, while, not knowing any better, they compose them from some part of a circle, and they are not circles, even though they are circular: who has instilled the rule in snails? Born masters of an art, of which they are not yet good disciples. (Book I, Chapter XI; 1659, pp. 173-174)"

"[...] working on Grotesque [...] everything is, one might say, a mosaic of disproportionate elements put together, all the more beautiful because the parts are taken from further afield and come together in more foolish forms. The neck of a crane sprouting from the stem of a flower, ending in a [scimia] head, with four snail horns that shoot fire: a peacock's tail blooming on an old man's chin as a beard, and a thick mop of coral hair; another has vine arms, twisted legs, and two little lights shining in the shell of a conch; a nose like a flute, ears like a pair of bat wings, and when he looks at himself in a net, he sees the image of a mammoth behind him: and such fantastical oddities, as painters are wont to imagine. But even in this, he needs wisdom, for just as not every tree can be grafted onto every other tree, so not every part can be well joined to every other part in the grotesque, and it must be whimsy, not nonsense, nor should the wisdom of [judgement] in arranging it be less prominent than the madness of ingenuity in inventing it. (Book I, Chapter XVI; 1659, pp. 284-285)"

"Tolkien was a member of the Oxford Christians, a Catholic and a conservative. He was part of that rural solidarity movement, linked to the neighbourhood and traditions, which has been important in English politics since the time of Coleridge. The “Shire” in the book is an idealised England, which is ultimately destroyed by rampant industrialisation. Moreover, Tolkien was anything but simple politically: he was conservative, yes, but anti-totalitarian. Letters to Father Christmas is in fact a book against Hitler. If this seems obvious, it is worth remembering that in 1930s England, many Catholics of South African origin - like Tolkien - were pro-Hitler. He, on the other hand, understood very well the demonic, Faustian aspect of Nazism."

"The Marino of prose was Daniello Bartoli, a highly skilful and unsurpassed craftsman of periods and phrases, with a style that was both refined and ornate. He travelled to almost every corner of the earth and produced thousands of descriptions and narratives: one never sees that the prohibition of so many new things has refreshed his impressions. A rhetorician and abstract moralist, his head full of mythology and sacred scripture, copious in words and phrases in all fields of knowledge, a brilliant colourist, he believed he could say everything, because he knew how to say everything well. Nature and man were nothing more than stimuli and opportunities for him to draw out all his erudition and vocabulary. He has no other, more serious purpose. Unfamiliar with the European cultural movement and all the struggles of thought, stuck in a second-hand classicism and Catholicism that came to him from school and was not explored by his intelligence, his brain remains as idle as his heart, and his attention is entirely focused on the technical and mechanical aspects of expression. He treats the Italian language, like Greek or Latin, as a dead language, already fixed, and fully possessed by him."

"Il p. Dan. Bartoli è il Dante della prosa italiana. Il suo stile in ciò che spetta alla lingua è tutto a risalti e rilievi."

"Uomo che fra tutti del suo tempo, e fors'anche di tutti i tempi, fu quello che e per teoria e scienza e per pratica, meglio e piú profondamente e pienamente conobbe la nostra lingua."

"When the idea of national unity was chosen in the nineteenth century, the identity of the peninsula, which had always been polycentric, was not respected. Naples never referred to Italy, but to the Mediterranean and Europe. The Neapolitans called themselves “regnicoli” (subjects of the kingdom), never Italians, and they were not."

"We have no scientific reason to argue that one system is better than another, unless we rely on historical determinism or the law of the jungle, whereby the winner is right because he wins."

"I know that mine, here and in this context, is a difficult task. Catholic, traditionalist, a man of order and with a strong sense of state, I could perhaps still call myself “right-wing”. For years I have not considered myself or described myself in this way, but I see that people continue to label me as such. I confess that this annoys me a little, but I let it go. But my commitment to social justice and my staunch Europeanism prevent me from feeling the slightest sympathy for a right wing that has now almost unanimously chosen the most unbridled liberalism and Atlanticism and that often flaunts a hypocritical, instrumental pro-Catholicism, revealing that they consider the Catholic Church to be nothing more than a bulwark of the established order (their “order”) and conformist right-thinking."

"[...] there are things in the media that can be spoken ill of with impunity: the Middle Ages is one of them. And this is done in order to speak ill of Christianity, which everyone feels entitled to spit on."

"Daniello Bartoli, La ricreazione del savio, Borel e Bompard, Napoli, 1839."

"[...] Croce always felt at ease with artists who were fully “sliricati”, totally adhering to a fundamental motif, to a unified state of mind. Artists such as Ludovico Ariosto and Giovanni Verga seemed to have been born especially for him because every page they wrote contained him in his entirety. (p. 43)"

"I owe my love for the Middle Ages first and foremost to Joan of Arc."

"Why Joan? Why this girl in the 15th century, clad in iron and burned at the stake by order of the Inquisition, then rehabilitated by a subsequent ruling, then canonised [...], later becoming an emblem first of traditionalist Catholics, then of anti-clerical populists, then of the right, then of the left, then of patriotic gatherings, then of feminist movements? Does it make sense to revive, at the turn of the second and third millennia, this young woman born on the borders of France and elevated to a central symbol of the French nation [...]? (p. 3)"

"The Maid of Orléans [...] continues to jealously guard her maidenhood, the intimate and profound core of her vocation. I am left with a deep doubt that I have not understood her: but running after her, retracing old written pages and old paths between the Vosges and Normandy, has perhaps helped me to rediscover a part of myself that I thought was lost or vanished. For this too I must be grateful to her. (p. 6)"

"Even from these and individually from the Tartars of Niuche called Chin, who are more eastern, China is defended by hand ammunition, that is, the famous wall, which is worth discussing here. The head or founder of the imperial Cin family, one of the most ancient, a prince renowned for his prowess in arms and his works of more than royal magnificence, glorious above all others in Chinese history and for various reasons remembered by scholars, whether it was a dream he had or a prediction made by soothsayers (on which writers disagree, and perhaps there was nothing more than a good omen of providence), foresaw that the Tartars, as soon as the opportunity arose, would make every effort to break through the borders and descend to flood and fill China with their nation. Therefore, after consulting with his great heart, he decided not only to close the borders to them in the present but also to build a shelter that would secure them for centuries to come. He determined to arm those northern borders with a wall that would be invincible against both the Tartars and the weather. He did not delay in setting to work."

"I have never wanted to fight anyone, neither in open battle nor in a duel. But if ever I did, it would certainly not be with Grammarians; terrible men, like those whose words are not words, but deeds. And may God protect me from ever provoking them; for they are quick to anger, and if they take up their open dictionaries, as if they were Michele Scotto's Scongiuratore, just by opening them, they bring forth, like spirits ready to obey their every command, so many, I do not say nouns and verbs, but nicknames and proverbs, that it would be less dangerous to find oneself in the midst of a swarm of angry hornets than among them."

"[...] the most beautiful part of a discourse is the beauty of the subject: and those who work with their brains know from experience that an ingenious subject wonderfully sharpens the intellect and it seems almost as if the noble subject itself provides thoughts worthy of itself, ambitious to be treated nobly."

"The main merit of the school of Alexandria is that it created theological science, granting Christian citizenship to philosophy and building a solid Christian metaphysics. (p. 23)"

"There are two salient features of Renaissance culture that influence Metaphysics speculation: spiritual unrest and the secularisation of culture. (p. 10)"

"The God of Clement's Christian metaphysics is endowed with intelligence, will, freedom, power and goodness. (p. 32)"

"It is from the new truths contained in the great philosophical potential of Christianity that Christian metaphysics derives its main characteristics. It will always be a “'creationist”', “'personalistic”', “'spiritualistic”' and “'agapic”' metaphysics. (introduction, p. 15)"

"Israel is not Austria, which kept Lombardy-Veneto under its heel. It is like the constitutional Austria of 1867, which opened its Parliament to minorities, to the Italians of Trento, Trieste and Pola. No one denies the Palestinians living in the occupied territories the right to irredentism. I fully recognise that. But under that Austria, would Italian irredentists have done well to resort to terrorism? Even in Trieste, many distanced themselves from Oberdan's plan to assassinate the king. His attempt would have had dramatic consequences if it had been carried out."

"Of course, it would be good to evacuate the territories occupied in the 1967 war, with the exception of Jerusalem, which is a special case. But this cannot be expected if an organisation that practises terrorism against Israel and whose aim is the destruction of that state is established in these territories. No one can be asked to commit suicide."

"At the school of Philo, Christian doctors from Alexandria learned to do philosophy and to develop Christian metaphysics, creating a synthesis between Greek philosophy and the philosophical potential of Christianity. (p. 22)"

"The cradle of Christian metaphysics was Alexandria, Egypt. When Christianity was born, this city was the most important cultural centre of the Roman Empire, having taken the place that had previously been held by Athens. (p. 21)"

"Origen embraces the key principle of Christian metaphysics, the theorem of creation. With Clement, he affirms that everything that is not God was drawn from nothing. He is the only principle of all things. (p. 55)"

"I am the first to criticise Israeli policy in the West Bank, the settlements, the restrictions on democratic freedoms, everything that is reactionary and repressive. I criticise Israel's very presence in those territories. But I do not demand its suicide."

"Only thanks to the concept of persona – a being endowed with dignity and absolute value – brought by Christianity, which makes all men images of God created directly by Him, do all forms of discrimination based on sex, age, race, language, power, wealth, religion, etc. All men are equally worthy of esteem, respect and love, even their enemies, especially the weakest, the poorest, the most humble and defenceless. (introduction, p. 10)"

"Humanism remains a deeply religious and essentially Christian culture. However, the shift in the cultural epicentre – from God to man – generates a new spirituality marked by tensions and anxieties unknown in the previous era. (p. 10)"

"There is a faith that is enriched by the concepts of reason, and there is a reason that is enriched by the gifts of faith. (introduction, p. 6)"

"The long and patient exploration of the spiritual world led classical Metaphysics, in its final phase, to the discovery of God: the one God (the One, the Good) of Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus. (introduction, p. 5)"