A "Amarcord" with the scent of the Fifties

The hot hand of Alberto Ottaviano traces, starting from the family context, the evolution of Italian society of sixty years ago

A warm hand, that of Alberto Ottaviano, department head for years to Giornale di Brescia, newspaper for which he worked mainly of Interior and Foreign Affairs, as well as books. And his passion for fiction led him to give voice to the memories of a life with stories of a lost home (pp. 144, € 14.00), published by Giuliano Ladolfi small but qualified publisher of Borgomanero, Novara.

In this work Ottaviano back to the years of childhood and early adolescence, tracing memory a sort of "language of the family": a family, his, that becomes the periscope through which to observe the ways of life of Italian society of sixty 'years ago. With the narrative we are, then, in the early fifties of the last century: a house in the old historic center of a city Lombard never explicitly named (but evidently Brescia); a very special shop, where they sold items were packaged and military uniforms for officers; the oratory of the fathers Filipino peace, where Father Giulio Bevilacqua, a friend of Giovanni Battista Montini and future cardinal-priest, he kept his lessons to the young.

With a writing sober and cool, down memory (a prodigious memory for accuracy of details), Alberto Ottaviano ago then relive the daily life of his family: customs, "rites" family, the Christmas holidays, the holidays. They slide .. therefore, in the text, the figures of the parents, the story of his uncles, the stories of the workers in the shop of his father, the friends of the school, the first emotional disturbances. It is a diary of life with the eye always turned to the house of lost time; a narrative sometimes very personal, but with various references to the social and cultural context of those years: the harsh contrasts between Democrats and Communists, the Cold War, the songs of the radio, the first television, the birth of the Sanremo Festival, the boom cinema, the Mille Miglia ...

In short, a pleasant amarcord with the scent of the fifties. Notwithstanding that the evocation of the past is accompanied by some "cursive" Reconsidering the places and the events of that time with the eyes of today, reveals in the background the conscious melancholy for the inexorable action of time.