Witness stories
“Stories that talk about us. Chronicles of good and evil” by Walter Veltroni read by Tullio Fazzolari
The true meaning of history is being able to make us understand how we became what we are today. And maybe let us imagine how we will be in the future. To arrive at this result, manuals, analyzes of major events and chronological references are not enough. We also need a good dose of humanity and then we need to talk about single people or single episodes that have somehow characterized our time. Walter Veltroni with " Stories that speak of us. Chronicles of good and evil ” (Solferino, 384 pages, 20 euros) succeeds in a far from easy undertaking by choosing the most significant examples and narrating them with the simplicity of an attentive and curious reporter.
In summary, there is in one book everything in which we can recognize ourselves. Starting with today's fears caused by the pandemic that we believe we have just overcome without however hiding that we will bear the consequences. Veltroni makes Cardinal Ravasi and the philosopher and psychoanalyst Umberto Galimberti talk about the sense of loneliness caused by the lockdown, but above all he gets to the heart by telling the stories of kids like the student Tommaso who in a year and a half has only seen the classroom of his scientific high school for two weeks. And even if distance learning or remote working can have some positive aspects, nothing can completely erase that feeling that isolation gives.
The "witnesses" that Veltroni has chosen for "Stories that speak of us" are many but different from each other so as to constitute an anthology of human events. Unfortunately, judicial errors and injustices of all kinds are also part of our time. This is the case of the eighteen year old from Alcamo convicted in 1975 of killing two carabinieri who is serving twenty-two years in prison and only in 2010 is his complete innocence recognized. Or it is the case of the Roman teenager who is locked up in a mental hospital for forty-two years and subjected to electroshock simply because he didn't speak. Other stories retrace the years of lead and the tragedy of the Holocaust with the autobiographical account of the little girl born in Auschwitz who is now a 75-year-old lady.
In the "Stories about us" well-known personalities appear who have in some way marked our time: from successful women such as Ornella Vanoni and Raffaella Carrà to protagonists of cinema and television such as Renzo Arbore, Gigi Proietti and many others Still. Some are gone, like Totò and Monica Vitti, but it is undoubtedly thanks to Walter Veltroni to place them in a sort of virtual pantheon, recalling their exceptional talent. The stories of famous people that follow each other with an almost cinematic rhythm using both the interview and the storytelling technique. But the thread that unites is always the attention for the single person and in this Veltroni takes up a bit the style that was typical of a great journalist like Enzo Biagi.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/le-storie-dei-testimoni/ on Sat, 17 Dec 2022 08:38:03 +0000.