Someone said: often know more about the history through literature. And it's true. The observation came to us spontaneously reading a fiction book by a journalist now in years, of that generation that is that, born and brought up the typewriter came up to the computer, and that the printers down to lay out columns of lead and clichet then move (gradually, of course!) to the pagination performed on the video.
We say Alberto Ottaviano from Brescia, a life to the local newspaper, that with this "Stories of a lost home" (Giuliano Ladolfi Publisher; € 14.00), takes us along the percorsom of a life, a family, and then to a city, an environment, from the early fifties of the twentieth century to today. And if there was talk of history, it is precisely by virtue of a narrative which also covers the city, with various aspects: social, cultural, religious.
So, not only figures of family and friends, but a hard-working environment, and a strong religious connotation, as it were, also because of the presence of the future, Cardinal Giulio Bevilacqua (friend of Giovanni Battista Montini), the fathers of 'Oratorio, of. Morcelliana - and here we can think of the figure of the "Roman priest" Giuseppe De Luca, a, the publisher tied up, but this, as Kipling would say, is another story ...
It 'a story of memory that Octavian proposes two registers, so to speak: that of the past linked to her memories, and to present a carefully observed, just the costume of the old journalists that rose from the chair of preparing to go "on done, "to see, good looking, and then write. Even the typeface the author has adapted to these two registers: the memories in circles, observations of this in italics. The end result is a fresco, a "Amarcord" to put it to Fellini, which goes beyond the small microcosm citizen to expand our urban world, each of us, because many of us have behind a city, not being Brescia, many elements in common with the "lioness" gave them.
The memory of the past as present (as defined Augustinian) is expressed in these pages with a smoothness narrative copy and by a feeling of the heart that never degenerates into rhetoric. A piece of news that through the prose of Octavian becomes precisely history. And maybe that is recommended reading for young people (or aspiring) journalists: they may learn to observe and ... to write.
Giovanni Lugaresi