Primo Levi is considered to be the foremost author of testimonial literature, that is, of self-referential texts that do not recount one’s entire life or the events in which one has participated as a spectator, but rather ...

Following the dramatic end of rural civilization, in postwar Italy a new literary (albeit nonfictional) genre became prominent, namely the memoirs of ordinary people who felt the urge to recount their past, finally giving ...

The article focuses on the historical and social importance of the testimonies of the “forgotten protagonists” of the Resistance, the partisans. Through the reading of some examples taken from the novel L’Agnese va a morire ...

The essay examines Madrid. Mesi di incubo, published in 1937 by Sperling & Kupfler and presented by the journalist Giulia d’Arienzo as her testimony of the Spanish Civil War. The research shows the author’s ambiguous ...

In 1848, Sigismondo Castromediano was accused of ploting against the Bourbon monarchy and was arrested, because of having protested in defense of the constitutional freedoms threatened by King Ferdinand ii. When he was ...

In January 1935, the anti-fascist periodical “Giustizia e Libertà” published the two letters addressed by Borgese to Mussolini, on 18 August 1933 and 18 October 1934, in which the intellectual, who had already moved to ...

From the last decades of the 19th century until the outbreak of the First World War, Italian intellectuals (politicians, tourists, religious, doctors, explorers, officers, journalists, writers) published the report of one ...

The reading of Il ritorno del padre, anthology of tales by Giani Stuparich edited by Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini, shows the centrality of the experience of the Great War, in which Stuparich takes part as a volunteer ...

Édouard Corbière’s Le Négrier (1832) is a great maritime novel that explores oceanic routes and colonial spaces (Martinique, Gabon) in a clear anthropological perspective. The author, who was a captain of pirate ships ...

By turning truth into vision, the Italian writer Roberto Saviano, with the publication of Gomorra. Dans l’empire de la camorra in 2006 (2007 in French translation), a novel that tells the story of the power dynamics of ...