Getsemani
Author: Giorgio Saviane
Publisher: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore / 1980
Pages: 202
Italian author Giorgio Saviane was born in 1916 at Castelfranco Veneto and died in Rome in December 2000.
He was a professor of aesthetics at the University of Padua and a member of the Academia di Belle Arti di Venezia and later graduated as a lawyer from the University of Padua and moved to Florence to practise as a lawyer. It was during this period in Florence that he began his career as a writer. Then he never stopped.
Listing his books one understands what a prolific writer he was. Le due folle (1957), L'inquisito (1961), Il papa (1963), Il Passo lungo (1965), Le molte giustizie (1967), Di profilo si nasce (1973), Il mare verticale (1973), Euthanasia di un amore (1976), La donna di legno (1979), Getsemani (1980), Di profilo si nasce (1982), Il tesoro dei Pellizzari (1982), Racconti (1983), La casa dei Pellizzari (1983), Il mosca e l'agnello (1984), Cenerentola a Urbino (1985), Il terzo aspetto (1987), Diario intimo di un cattivo (1989), Il gatto Lorenzino e altri racconti (1989), Il narratore e I suoi testi (1990), L'automobile a due ruote (1990), Una vergogna civile (1991), In attesa di lei (1992), Voglio parlare con Dio (1996), Barbetta e l'agnello (1998).
From the very beginning, Saviane adopted an introspective style of writing that characterized all his writings.
Coincidentally, the title of the book being reviewed today is the same as that of a book of theology by Cardinal Giuseppe Siri who twice almost became a pope.
Saviane links the past and the present. His Christ lives among us, or rather like us so as to highlight two important existential phases of our existence - that of love and of pain. There is no depth of human pain that cannot be redeemed and one can discern the signs of hope on the disfigured, tragic and painful face of the humanity of today.
Can Christ be reincarnated in today's world, returning back to the tragedy of contemporary history? Saviane replies not with theological affirmations and hypotheses but with an allegorical legend.
The protagonist is a man, mysterious and enigmatic at the same time, who miraculously cures a spastic thanks to love. But this love is mixed up with pain, love that binds together Christ and Mary, the spastic's sister, love that makes him, spurred by incestuous jealousy, kill her.
And so Christ, unjustly accused of murder, proceeds to walk through a modern Calvary, from the court process to death and resurrection. The same love that pardons the murderer, killed by a policeman in front of the cathedral.
This story, that takes place in an undefined country, is a myth that repeats itself. The only things that exist are love (between Christ and Mary).
Pain can redeem. Each one of us has his Gethsemane. Pain can redeem. This love can reach tragic heights, as at the bloody baptism of the son in his mother's womb, but it can also reach lyrical heights as in the love between Christ and Mary in the bay of Amalfi. And also epic moments as in the railway disaster.
But over and above anything else there is hope when one comes to understand the religious meaning of pain and how it can lead to salvation.