Unitary language and dialect
Like a reminder of the French Revolution, the idea of a unified homeland began to emerge in Italy at the end of the 18th century, and it was France again, in the guise of Napoleon Bonaparte, that reshuffled the deck by annexing certain northern states. From uprisings to riots, insurrections to wars of independence, the political interplay between neighboring nations eventually led, in 1861, to an Italy similar to the one we know today. But it was still necessary to unite these peoples, whose most notable difference lay in the multitude of dialects they spoke. Until then, Tuscan had been favored by writers - Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the "three crowns", had already favored it - and it seemed natural to retain it as the sole national language. However, in this nation in the making, where most of the people are illiterate, a bridge still needs to be built between the written and spoken languages.
Alessandro Manzoni, who in 1825 published his masterpiece, The Betrothed, a tragic tale of thwarted love. But he was not satisfied with this first version, which he considered inaccessible, his Tuscan being too elitist. So he decided to confront himself with Florentino vivo, the language of Florence, in order to rework his text and model it as closely as possible on what he heard. To this end, with the help of two friends, he "rinsed his sheets in the Arno". A revised, simplified and definitive version appeared in 1840. In 1868, at the request of the Minister of Public Instruction, he chaired a commission tasked with disseminating and promoting the renewed Tuscan language nationwide, in particular through the distribution of school textbooks, since everything had yet to be invented, and it was the new generation that would serve as the springboard.
His novel was to become a symbol of the unification underway, known as the Risorgimento, or "rebirth", which was debated and discussed in Turin's cafés: doubly so, both in terms of language and theme, since Italians had found another thing in common, their attraction to Romanticism. However, there's a gulf between choosing a common language and imposing it - and it was only in 1999 that a decree made it explicit that the official language of the Republic is Italian.
The 20th century
Carlo Levi was born in Turin in 1902. A graduate of the University of Medicine, he preferred to devote himself to painting and, above all, to the fight against Fascism, which was gradually eating away at the country. Arrested in 1935, he was sentenced to exile in southern Italy and house arrest in the small village of Aliano. From these two years, which marked him so much that his last wish was to be buried there after his death in 1975, he brought back a book, one of the greatest and most beautiful classics of Italian literature, Le Christ s'est arrêté à Eboli, available from Folio. In this autobiography, published just after the Second World War, he recounts a neglected region and its inhabitants abandoned to their fate, and in an unprecedented style, he becomes a poet of misery and desolation.
Another account, published in 1947 by his almost namesake Primo Levi, also born in Turin in 1919, also moved readers, although the first print run remained confidential and it would be some fifteen years before his voice was finally heard. Si c'est un homme describes the author's deportation to Auschwitz in February 1944 and survival inside the extermination camp. After his miraculous return, Primo Levi seems to be restarting a normal life, writing this text with the support of Lucia, his future wife, whom he has just met, resuming work and becoming a father for the first time in 1948. However, it was impossible for him to forget, as the world around him seemed ready to do, so he began his activism. His first text was republished in 1958, translated into English and then into German, and he began writing La Trêve (The Truce), about his journey back to Italy, published in 1963. He was listened to and recognized, and at last the press was talking about him, but despite everything, that year was marked by the signs of a depression from which he would never emerge. Primo Levi continued to write, to travel, to give lectures, to ensure that the unthinkable and the insurmountable would not be forgotten. He lost his life in 1987 in what many believe to have been a deliberate fall from a staircase.
Cesare Pavese's death, on August 27, 1950 in Turin, left no room for doubt: the man had committed suicide, as confirmed by the note he left in his room at the Hotel Roma, the last sentence of his last novel, Death Will Come and It Will Have Your Eyes, and a note in his diary that would be published two years later under the title The Craft of Living. A short life, barely 42 years old, and yet an immense, dense and eternal body of work.
