playwrights-from-italy

"How many times have I asked myself whether it was possible to tie oneself to a mass without ever having loved anyone .. whether one could love a collectivity if one hadn’t deeply loved some single human beings . . . Wouldn’t this have made barren my qualities as a revolutionary, wouldn’t it have reduced them to a pure intellectual fact, a pure mathematical calculation?"

"Theologians, both Christian and Muslim, especially in the Middle Ages, have always been struck by the power of money and the devastation it can wreak on the human soul. More secularly, orthodox Marxists have condemned it as a “means of appropriating other people's money”. Psychoanalysts liken it to excrement, because of the pleasure derived from both expelling it and retaining it."

"The political power of a TV network does not lie solely or primarily in the information it provides directly about politics, but in the culture it disseminates through its entire programming schedule. If in 1994 the entrepreneur Berlusconi, despite running for office for the first time and being a political novice, was able to win the elections with percentages similar to those of a large mass party such as the Christian Democrats, it was not because his three networks campaigned for him (at that time, his opponent also controlled three networks), but because for a dozen years, owning the entire private national television system, he had been able to educate Italians in his culture and preferences."

"But the problem is not the Americans and those who command them. It is us Europeans. It is since that day, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that we should have understood that the United States had become, from forced allies, adversaries if not enemies. We Europeans have no interest in following the United States in its repressive policy towards the Arab-Muslim world, if only because it is on our doorstep and not ten thousand kilometres away. And in the economy, it was the Americans, pursuing the insane dream of mortgaging the future for ages to come, who caused a devastating crisis that they then dumped on Europe, even allowing themselves to blame it for a crisis that started with them and further undermining it with negative forecasts from their rating agencies. For the Americans, we have always been “useful idiots” to be used as they please."

"The day of the Big Bang is not far off. Money, in its extreme essence, is the future, a representation of the future, a bet on the future, an inexhaustible relaunch of the future, a simulation of the future for use in the present. If the future is not eternal but has its own finitude, we, at the speed we are going thanks to money, are shortening it vertiginously. We are racing headlong towards our death as a species. If the future is infinite and unlimited, we have mortgaged it to temporal regions so far away as to render it virtually non-existent. The impression, in fact, is that no matter how fast we go, or rather precisely because of this, this orgiastic future constantly recedes before us. Or perhaps, in a circular motion, Nician, Einsteinian, typical of money, it is coming up behind us, laden with the immense debt we have burdened it with. If, as we believe, the future is a non-existent time, a figment of our imagination, as is money, then we have staked our existence on something that does not exist, on nothing, on Nothingness. In any case, this future, whether real or imaginary, expanded to monstrous and dreamlike dimensions by our imagination and our madness, will one day fall upon us as a dramatic present. On that day, money will no longer exist. Because we will no longer have a future, not even one to imagine. We will have devoured it."

"In the 1950s and early 1960s, Christmas was still a holiday that had something to do with the spirit and the soul. You didn't have to be Christian to believe that something extraordinary was happening on that night, which for believers was the birth of Jesus, and for others (for me, for example, who am from Russia, where we celebrate not Christ but “Father Frost”) it was something magical and enchanted, irrational and incomprehensible. We seriously believed that on Christmas Day, people were all a little bit kinder."

"Paul Tibbets is the pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In 1985, a journalist from The Columbus Dispatch, Mike Harden, interviewed him and, in light of the appalling consequences of that bomb, asked him, “Would you do it again today?”. “Of course,” he replied, 'I was brought up to obey orders. In my day, if you received an order from someone in authority, you obeyed." I don't understand why what was true for Paul Tibbets at that time should not also be true for Erich Priebke. Why did the Americans win the war and the Germans lose? [...] If Priebke had refused to obey Kappler, he would have been a hero. But he wasn't Salvo D'Acquisto, he wasn't a hero. He was a man with the intellectual and moral depth of a servant dressed in a soldier's uniform. And I would really like to see among those journalists, opinion makers and television presenters who today act so tough and “beautiful souls” who, in 1944, would have dared to resist an order that came directly from Adolf Hitler."

"*If he had been born in another country, Giulio Andreotti would have been a great statesman. In Italy, he could only be half a statesman, having to devote the other half to the often shady intrigues that characterise Italian political life. But at the hour of your death, we bid you farewell, “divo Giulio”, with regret. With you, a long season of Italian politics comes to an end, and, given what has come after, certainly not the worst. If the God you believed in, going to Mass early every morning, exists, he will surely be kind to you.'"

"The Constitution establishes that punishment must aim at the re-education of the convicted person and their reintegration into society. This is clearly not possible if they remain in prison until their death. This is why even life prisoners can be released from prison if they have served 28 years, behaved well and “in such a way as to make their repentance credible”."

"In reality, no representative democracy is a democracy, but rather a system of organised minorities that prevail over the majority of citizens taken individually, suffocating them by severely limiting their freedom and keeping them in a state of minority. It is a system of oligarchies or polyarchies."

"The fate of the West seems to be condemned to turn, in a painful twist of fate, the line that Goethe puts into Mephistopheles' mouth in Faust: ‘I am the spirit that eternally wants evil and eternally does good.’ The paradox of the West is to believe itself to be Good, to eternally desire Good and to eternally do, in a sort of heterogenesis of ends, Evil. And the fundamental flaw lies precisely in this Manichean distinction between Good and Evil and in the Promethean claim to increase Good at the expense of Evil, wiping it off the face of the earth, when in reality Good and Evil are two sides of the same coin and grow together, the greater the Good, the greater the Evil."

"I have gone blind. My career as a writer and journalist is over. I have gone blind. Or, to be more precise, I am partially blind or “visually impaired”, to use the convoluted language of doctors. Basically, I can no longer read and therefore cannot write either. For a writer, this is the end, if you like, and in its own way romantic, but I would gladly have spared myself it."

"Once, several years ago, Indro Montanelli, expressing his disgust at the softness and weakness of Christian Democracy, which softened, incorporated, exhausted and ultimately neutralised any opposition, depriving it of all satisfaction and dignity, showed me a photograph, set in a small silver frame, which he kept, like a a holy card, as others do with pictures of their mother or wife and children, on his desk at Il Giornale. To my surprise, I saw that it was Stalin. “It would have been fun to fight him,” he said."

"Luigi Manconi, sociologist, political scientist, university professor, former spokesperson for the Green Party, former member of the Olive Tree coalition, unwisely appointed undersecretary of justice in the Prodi II government, after following in the footsteps of Bersani in calling Beppe Grillo a “fascist” and Antonio Di Pietro, he also labelled, by transitive property, the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano as “close to the positions of Grillo and Di Pietro”. And if we are not exactly “fascists” for Manconi, we are still right-wing thugs. [...] Manconi, 64, is one of those happy people who were born yesterday and have the enviable ability to completely erase their past. Luigi Manconi was an important leader of Lotta Continua. In the 1970s, he took to the streets with his comrades and, in addition to smashing shop windows and, when necessary, a few skulls, he shouted “Fascist, black beret, your place is in the cemetery”, “Killing a fascist is not a crime”. [...] The truth is that Grillo [...] is frightening with his 15-20% approval rating in the polls. And so he is a “fascist”. [...] It is the fate of my generation, contemporary with that of Manconi, to have to take lessons in good political manners from those who, in words and deeds, were squadristi, and even worse."

"Let it be said in passing that Richard Nixon was the best American president of the post-war period: he ended the Vietnam War, opened up to China forty years ahead of his time, eliminated the misunderstanding of the “gold exchange standard”, and was not a mafioso. But because, unlike Kennedy (who started the Vietnam War, botched the dangerous “Bay of Pigs” affair, brought the world to the brink of World War III alongside Khrushchev, and was close friends with notorious gangsters such as Sam Giancana), he had an ugly face, he went down in history as “Nixon the hangman”."

"In September 1997, Emma Bonino, European Union Commissioner, requested to visit Afghanistan. The Taliban had no obligation to allow her entry, as the EU did not recognise their government. However, they granted her a visa and treated her with kindness and courtesy, as they had always done with guests, even during the dramatic period of the US aggression in October 2001, and as is the Afghan tradition. Emma was able to visit Afghanistan and see everything she wanted. On 28 September, followed by a retinue of 19 people, including EU delegates, journalists, photographers and cameramen, she entered a hospital in Kabul and headed straight for the women's ward, where the photographers began to take pictures and the cameramen began to film. This was extremely foolish behaviour because in Islamic culture the reproduction of the human figure is, in principle, forbidden. Just look at a Persian carpet; it is decorated with plants, animals and fish, but there are no human figures. And this was even more true in Taliban Afghanistan. After all, even in our country, you cannot photograph or film patients without their consent or the authorisation of the hospital management. The “Corps for the Promotion of Virtue and Punishment of Vice” arrived, grabbed Bonino and the others and took them to the nearest police station. For such an offence, the punishment was flogging with “sacred rods”. Bonino was explained how things worked in those parts and shortly afterwards she was released by the officials, who were perplexed and a little disgusted. They would have done better to flog her. With the “sacred rods”, of course. Perhaps she would have understood what, as a good Western radical, she has never understood: that the sensibilities and customs of others also deserve respect. Instead, she wanted to make an international case out of it and, back in Brussels, she got the EU to cut humanitarian funds for Afghanistan."

"For the first time, a prime minister has found the courage to speak clearly and bluntly to the Americans, even telling them exactly what they need to hear. Who was it? Mario Monti at the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico."

"When I appeared on television and radio talk shows, I stated that during the first Gulf War, ‘smart bombs’ and ‘surgical missiles’ had killed 32,195 Iraqi children, who are no less children than ours, I expected a reaction from my interlocutors, who would tell me that it was a provocation, that I was lying, that it was not true, that it could not be true. But they could not do that because these are Pentagon figures and therefore above suspicion. I expected cries of outrage, of horror, of disgust. Instead, nothing. Silence. The topic was glossed over and quickly moved on to Berlusconi, Rutelli, Fini, Follini, Prodi or other nonentities of politics and life. I don't think it's always indifference. It's also passivity."

"In any case, the government, led by Giulio Andreotti, and the Christian Democrats, with the decisive support of the Italian Communist Party, decided to say no to the blackmail of the Red Brigades and Aldo Moro. It was the only way forward. [...] The very survival of the state was at stake. What would the Red Brigades have done if the government had given in to blackmail? They would have kidnapped the first Mr Rossi who came within their reach and started all over again. A downward spiral would have begun, leading only to the dissolution of the state and the victory of the terrorists."

"It is shameful that even today the Christian Democrats are still being accused of the only occasion on which, by sacrificing their leader, they demonstrated that sense of statehood that they have always been accused of lacking. What did Moro ask for? In those letters, the “distinguished statesman”, the man who had governed the country for over thirty years, asked the state to renounce the principles on which it was founded, its laws and its institutions in order to save his life."

"If there is one case in which the sentence has been served in full, it is that of Fioravanti. He was 23, little more than a teenager, when he was arrested and imprisoned, and he is now 51, a mature man approaching old age. He spent the best years of his life in prison, which no one can give him back, just as no one can give back the lives of his victims. It was a fair and sufficient punishment, at least according to the principles of our Constitution. Having declared himself neither repentant nor dissociated from his terrorist past, which includes other murders, which he admitted [...] Fioravanti did not benefit from the substantial reductions granted by the infamous 'reward legislation' that released murderers who were certainly much worse than him from a moral point of view after only a few years in prison, but he was released only in accordance with the general principles of our legal system."

"The certainty of punishment is not undermined, or even almost nullified for some crimes, by these general, fair, just and humane principles, but by the abnormal length of our trials, which means that the majority of crimes (especially financial, economic and those against the public administration, in short, the crimes of “the powers that be”, politicians and privileged citizens) fall under the axe of the statute of limitations. This already unsustainable duration has been exacerbated in the last fifteen years, after Mani Pulite, by a series of so-called “guarantee” laws with which the Code of Criminal Procedure has been crammed and which, in reality, by ensuring the statute of limitations, only guarantee the impunity of the aforementioned gentlemen."

"The certainty of the law is not called into question by the fact that Valerio Fioravanti, after paying his heavy debts to justice, is out, but by the certainty that countless other criminals will never pay their debts, albeit less heavy ones."

"The editor of Il Foglio, [Giuliano Ferrara], is so blinded by his neoconservative ideology that he fails to realise that by promoting Oriana Fallaci's crude anti-Islamic racism, he is paving the way for all other forms of racism and, sooner or later, for a resurgence of anti-Semitism, which will be very difficult to combat if anti-Islamic racism has been endorsed."

"In fifty years' time, books such as The Force of Reason will be viewed with the same horror with which we view Mein Kampf today, and we will wonder how it was possible."

"The judiciary is like the referee in a football match. You can say that the referee makes mistakes, that he is unprepared, that he doesn't see, but if some players claim that he is corrupt and refuse to accept his decisions when they are against them but demand that they be upheld when they are in their favour, the game quickly ends in a brawl because, sooner or later, all the other players will behave in the same way. Metaphor aside, the social contract that holds us together is broken and we descend the steep slope of anarchy and civil war."

"In any case, if there were any doubts about the “line of firmness” at the time the events took place, today there can be none. It is no coincidence that terrorism began to lose momentum after the Moro case and dissolved within a few years. This proves that the line of firmness was right not only from an ethical and legal point of view but also from a practical one. If we had listened to Craxi, Mancini, Signorile, Pace, Liguori and Deaglio, that is, the entire area that flirted with terrorism, today Renato Curcio would be the master of the country."

"Yet war has played a decisive role in human history. Both from a political and social point of view and, perhaps above all, from an existential point of view. It satisfies deep urges and needs that are generally sacrificed in times of peace. War allows us to legitimately release the natural and vital aggression that is in all of us. It is an escape from the frustrating daily grind, from boredom, from the sense of futility and emptiness that, especially in affluent societies, takes hold of us. It is adventure. War evokes and strengthens group and team solidarity. We feel, and are, less alone in war. War blurs the differences in class, social status and economic status, which lose their importance. We are all a little more equal in war. War, like military service, university and regulated games, has the quality of waiting time, of suspended time, the end of which does not depend on us, to which we surrender ourselves totally and which frees us from all personal responsibility. War brings everything, starting with feelings, back to the essential. It frees us from trappings, from the superfluous, from the useless. It makes us all, in every sense, leaner. War gives enormous value to life. For the simple reason that it is death that gives value to life. The real, close, imminent risk of death makes every moment of our existence, even the most trivial, intensely precious. Although it is painful to say, war is a unique and invaluable opportunity to learn to love and appreciate life."

"There is a man in Italy, w:Adriano Sofri, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for the murder of a police commissioner outside his home, after nine trials, one of which, in a case that is extremely rare in Italy, was reviewed, thus enjoying the maximum guarantees that a state can offer one of its citizens. Yet Sofri served only seven years in prison and, without being able to take advantage of the normal benefits of the law, which do not kick in after only seven years out of twenty-two, he has been free for some time and writes in the most important left-wing newspaper, La Repubblica, and in the best-selling right-wing weekly, Panorama, and from those columns he lectures us daily and is honoured and paid homage to by the entire intelligentsia who, despite all the court rulings, considers him, a priori and by divine right, innocent."

"Fallaci is a great journalist for the same reason she is a mediocre novelist. She is an enormous, protruding uterus that embraces a wide swath of reality. But what she gains in breadth when she writes articles, she loses in depth when she writes books."

"Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, has stated that he ‘does not rule out a military strike against Iran’. Israeli President Shimon Peres, Nobel Peace Prize winner, has said: ‘An attack on Iran is getting closer’. Why don't we also give a Nobel Peace Prize, posthumously, to old Adolf Hitler?"

"Bruno Vespa was a journalist who served the First Republic completely and utterly; as the bard of the Christian Democrats, rewarded with the position of director of TG1, he was subservient to his masters and real employers, namely the various secretaries of Biancofiore, and whose only act of courage in a life spent as a servant was to admit that he was one when (but it was already the last days of Saigon) he said, “My reference publisher is the DC”. Bruno Vespa is to the First Republic what Mario Appelius is to Fascism. admitting that he was when (but it was already the last days of Saigon) he said, “My editor is the Christian Democrats”. Bruno Vespa is to the First Republic what Mario Appelius is to Fascism."

"Milena Gabanelli claims that ‘ordinary people don't need more than fifty euros a week’. Where does she live, in a monastery? A good bottle of wine and a packet of cigarettes already cost 15 euros a day. The moralism of the left is unbearable. And now I understand why so many people, without being crooks, voted for Berlusconi. Because by defending his criminal freedom, Berlusconi also defended, by extension, everyone's freedom from the excessive power of the state. Bring back Cainano immediately."

"Moro is not the imaginary saint depicted in the self-serving official iconography. [...] Moro is the man who emerges from his letters, the letters he wrote while he was a prisoner of the Red Brigades, which are the most painful and humiliating words ever to come out of a prison. The “distinguished statesman” who, when push came to shove, renounced all the principles of the rule of law, seemed to consider the state and its institutions as his own private property, and invited his party friends and the leading representatives of the Republic to do the same. The man who asks for mercy for himself but, in ninety letters, has not a word for the men of his escort, killed for him, and indeed, the only mention he makes of them is coldly bureaucratic, describing them as “administratively inadequate”. He is a politician who confirms the tradition of the Italian ruling class, ready to demand everything, even life, from the humble, but never willing, on the rare occasions when it happens, to pay personally (think of Benito Mussolini fleeing under a German overcoat, or the way in which the king and Pietro Badoglio abandoned Rome). To say these things about a man who died as Moro did may seem, indeed it is, cruel. But it is the truth. And since I wrote these things when Moro was still alive (“Distinguished statesman or poor man?”. Il Lavoro, 4 April 1978), I have no qualms about repeating them now that he is dead and other pieces are coming together to complete the picture."

"The woman bent down to pick up the fallen pomegranate from the grass. It was ripe, it had burst open in the fall, stained her white dress. The vision of the laden barge, the pale island, the flowery meadow returned to her loving spirit along with the Creator's words: 'This is my body...Take and eat..."

"And in the kisses, what deep sweetness! There are women's mouths that seem to ignite with love the breath that opens them. Whether they are reddened by blood richer than purple, or frozen by the pallor of agony, whether they are illuminated by the goodness of consent or darkened by the shadow of disdain, they always carry within them an enigma that disturbs men of intellect, and attracts them and captivates them. A constant discord between the expression of the lips and that of the eyes generates the mystery; it seems as if a duplicitous soul reveals itself there with a different beauty, happy and sad, cold and passionate, cruel and merciful, humble and proud, laughing and mocking; and the abiguity arouses discomfort in the spirit that takes pleasure in dark things."

"But the daily tasks and prayers of men, the ancient city tired from having lived too long, the ravaged marble and worn out bells, all those things oppressed by the weight of memories, all those perishable things were rendered humble in comparison with the tremendous blazing Alps that tore at the sky with their thousand unyielding spikes, a vast, solitary city that was waiting, perhaps, for a new race of Titans."

"He wanted to possess not the body but the soul of that woman; and to possess her entire soul, with all her tenderness, all her joys, all her fears, all her anguish, all her dreams, in other words, the entire lief of her soul; and to be able to say: I am the life of her life."

"It was the beginning of June; summer was arising out of spring, like an aloe from a field of grass."

"Commander Gabriele D'Annunzio, I know of nothing that equals the harmony of your captivating words, the energy of your victorious work. With the devoted, grateful heart of an Italian and an artist, I hope your wishes be fulfilled. For beautiful Italy, for great Italy, for her noblest son, for his valiant comrades, eja, eja, eja, alalà!"

"I’m not really a poet. It’s only once in a while that what I have to say seems to find its best expression in a poem. But I do read a number of poets—Montale, Sandro Penna, Sabba."

"(there must have been other writers whom you regarded as models.) NG: In my adolescence, the Russians were tremendously important to me. More than anyone, Chekhov. Of the Italians, Svevo, the Moravia of Gli Indifferenti. When I started writing these were the writers I kept before me."

"Style is not something that can be improvised: one has to construct it, to make it."

"dialect is really impossible to translate adequately."

"The novels and essays of Natalia Ginzburg (among them, The Manzoni Family and The Little Virtues) address both her Sephardic ancestry and her leftist political philosophy."

"(Are there other English language writers who mean a lot to you?) NG: Well, of course, Shakespeare. And I love George Eliot as well. I’ve read the major authors, but in Italian, not English. Perhaps my favorite English novelist is Jane Austen. I hardly know contemporary American literature. The two American authors I love most, who are by now dead, alas, are Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. And then I love Fitzgerald and Hemingway—especially the Hemingway of the stories...When Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology came out in Italian, suddenly there was widespread interest in North American writing. But even before that Pavese was busy introducing us all to the great American writers."

"When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn't matter much to me. Only, I don't want to think about names: I can see that if I am asked 'a small writer like who?' it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life."

"Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water."

"they laughed a little and were very friendly together, the three of them, Anna, Emanuele and Giustino; and they were pleased to be together, the three of them, thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and of the long, difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.”"

"in my own work...there’s an important sense of the visual, of the visualized. I see it all so vividly. It’s not that I don’t see what I imagine. If I don’t see it then I can’t write anything."