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      • Fiction
        June 2019

        The Seesawers

        by Claudio Morandini

        Italian Alps, 1980. After what it looked like an endless journey, a young ethnomusicologist ends up right where she wanted to be: the little village of Crottarda. When she was little, she used to go there on holiday with her parents, and she never forgot the bewitching sounds that she heard at night during their stay. Those sounds were the shouts that shepherds gave each other in between the crests; and now, moved by her academic interest, she wants to study this ancient, mysterious habit. What she finds out is that the oppressive shadow of the mountain affects the village and the minds of its community, creating a hard hostility towards another village on the opposite, well-brighted slope, as if the conformation of the territory shaped its people’s temper to the bone.Helped by a local, uncanny girl and a speleologist only equipped with his own forehead lamp, the ethnomusicologist tries to decode the shepherds’ sounds and the eccentric routines of the villagers, surrounded by a cryptic, dreamlike atmosphere – like an evocative and somehow disturbing fable.But do these shouts really exist and are worthy of her study, or everything is just a trick of her memory? And are these strange people really what they appear to be, or the distance from the rest of the world made them unfitting to any kind of contact with “someone from the outside”?

      • La nuova stagione (The New Season)

        by Silvia Ballestra

        Legend has it that a Sibyl – an ancient prophetess after whom were named the Sibillini Mountains in the very heart of Italy –, angry at the fairies who lingered to dance with the shepherds, threw some stones at them and those stones then became the village of Arquata del Tronto – stones that would be destined to roll again, sadly, during the earthquake that in 2016 dramatically damaged that region.This is where the sisters Nadia and Olga feel at home, in this land that moves, this countryside between the mountains and the sea. Their father spent his life cultivating the fields here, so their family is still treated with respect. But now everything has changed. Love and work took Olga and Nadia far away, their children are citizens of the world. People want strawberries and plums even in January. It’s a new season. And it’s time to leave the land.The two sisters begin a journey back in time and in memory. It’s also an actual journey that brings incredible meetings with potential buyers, parvenu sharecroppers and emissaries of multinational fruit companies: all male, all ambiguous, all apparently incapable of understanding how badly roots hurt when you need to cut them.Is everything really so immutable in the succession of generations and harvests? Can we still hope to leave the planet better off than when we came into it?Silvia Ballestra writes a novel that is current and ancient at the same time, like the places where she was born, to which she dedicates pages of scathing humor, but also full of the nostalgia and the amazement of someone who feels that a new season is coming. “After what had happened, a new affection bound us to those places. A desire to care, protect and know.” Read the first chapter in English

      • Humanities & Social Sciences

        The black sea of indifference

        by Liliana Segre / Filippo Civati

        Liliana Segre’s testimony and her political message are shared in this essay by Giuseppe Civati that reports her words and her teachings, on the occasion of her appointment as lifetime Italian Senator by Italian President Sergio Mattarella.Segre was expelled from school in 1938. She tried to flee Italy as an asylum seeker but was denied protection and was sent back. On January 30th, 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz with her father Alberto, who deceased in the concentration camp. In the last thirty years she has been promoting an extraordinary campaign against indifference and against racism in any form or aspect.Her undisputed, strong and clear words are a message for girls and boys, her «ideal grandchildren»: we must never lose our rights and respect for people.

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