«L’ESALTAZIONE DEL VERO E LA PROSOPOPEA DELLE FORZE INANIMATE»:L’ALTROVE DI ORIO VERGANI

Abstract

The fact that Orio Vergani, journalist, writer and reporter, was, as Montale suggested, "a daily reader of life" is testified to by the "alluvial mass" of writings through which he unravels an itinerary of adhesion to Fascism lived, close to the Second World War, in a problematic way and marked by a pervasive conscientious turmoil in his inventive and diaristic writing. From the recurring knots that permeate the inventive plot of the stories in the posthumous volume "Storie per quattro stagioni" (Stories for four seasons), from 1920 onwards, a restless inner journey is sketched out, culminating, between 1950 and 1959, in the sharp diaristic 'narration' of Misure del tempo (Measures of the time). We will dwell on the ways in which, in the 'fiction' of the stories, the mystery underlying human action dissolves into an alienating 'elsewhere', in an aura of surreal suspension often generated, as in Daphne or Siren, by the cultured transfiguration of classical echoes. A reinterpretation of the artistic tradition, from Casorati to Carrà and Sironi, a 'living' metaphor of the notion of 'homeland' destroyed by the violence of war, also flows back into the diary where the elective dislocation in a memorial 'elsewhere' creates an intentional short circuit with the mature and disenchanted present of the writing, feeding an unprecedented historical and biographical rethinking.