Thursday 24 September, 6.30 pm
Once Upon a Time in Italy #2: the 70s. The Moro Affair by Leonardo Sciascia
Domenico Scarpa and John Foot in conversation
Chair: Cecilia Ghidotti
Reading: Chiara Goldsmith
Italy’s seventies were a decade fractured from within, torn between ideology and violence, with its truths left to fester in silence. In The Moro Affair (L’affaire Moro), published in 1978, Leonardo Sciascia gave voice to one of those truths in the very year of Aldo Moro‘s kidnapping and murder. The result is an essay that reads like a novel and did so with a lucidity and moral rigor that marked it immediately as a classic. Part investigation, part reckoning with a nation’s complicity in its own violence, The Moro Affair is one of the sharpest, most unsettling books to come out of modern Italy: landed at the exact moment the decade’s illusions were giving out, while looking so closely at one man’s abandonment, it ended up describing the whole era’s.
What does it mean to reflect upon those events almost 50 years later? How Sciascia’s voice manages to engage with the Italian political landscape today? Starting from these questions, our speakers will take us on a journey through one of most complex periods in Italian history.
Once Upon a Time in Italy: a series curated by Olga Campofreda. From the turbulent seventies – years of political violence, social fracture and ideological passion – through the glossy contradictions of the eighties, the disorienting transitions of the nineties, and into the fragile new landscape of the early two thousands, Italy’s recent history is rich with ruptures and reinventions. Its literature has met each of these turns with singular force, capturing the texture of everyday life, the weight of upheaval, the shifting tides of identity, memory and belonging. This series of conversations travels back through four decades of Italian history, culture and society by returning to those novels that did not simply reflect their time, but helped shape the way an entire country understood itself. Once Upon a Time in Italy is a literary time machine, a collection of postcards from a past that is asking now to join a conversation with the present.
Book HERE
Read the biographies of speakers and curator HERE
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