'La notte di Toledo'

Author: Ferruccio Ulivi

Publisher: Rusconi / 1983

Pages: 206

 

 

The author of the book being reviewed today was a literary critic and writer. He was born in Borgo San Lorenzo in 1912 and died in Rome in 2002.

He graduated as a lawyer in Florence in 1934 and later was professor of Italian literature at the University of Bari, then that of Perugia and later at La Sapienza University of Rome. His main expertise was about the writers of the 18th and 19th centuries with special focus on Manzoni and his age.

He also wrote novels including Le ceneri al vento (1977), the book being reviewed today (1983), L'angelo rosso (1992) and Il messaggio (2002). He also wrote biographies on Manzoni and on D'Annunzio and historical fiction on Torquato Tasso.

He was a friend of some of the most important artistic persons of his time such as Montale, Pasolini, Gentilini and others. He was also a poet of some renown.

The Toledo that the title speaks about is not the famous city just outside Madrid, famous for its collection of paintings by El Greco and for the inimitable coexistence between Catholics, Jews and Muslims that lasted for centuries.

Toledo in this book is a symbol of the drama of humanity, of today and of every time. Man faces the mystery of divine Providence, the problem of being.

Mixing historical reality with fiction, the author undertakes a psychological analysis of the persons he writes about together with an exact reconstruction of these persons' historical context.

"When you will have lived longer," one of the protagonists says, "you will see that life must not be taken seriously. When I wake up at night and ask myself where am I, I do not find anything that I may grasp. This brings me happiness and anxiety because with each day that passes happiness ebbs away but also the pain dies away.

"One day, after such a dream, I found myself with a gun in my hand and had not the angel that watches over me not intervened, by now I would already be dead and buried.

"At the same time I understand that it is only like this that I can approach the supernatural. But life after death continues to refuse me. I find myself suspended between nothingness and what I hope. Infallibly I get the same result. I force myself to continue living."