La «segretezza profonda» dei luoghi: Tetto Murato di Lalla Romano

Abstract

"Tetto Murato consisted of a group of houses, courtyards and vegetable gardens, all surrounded by a square wall. One entered through a half-collapsed arch into a maze of vegetable gardens invaded by chickens, walls and buildings''. This is how the place, around which the narrative warp of a novel was woven in 1957, takes shape in all its vivid physiognomy. The title Tetto Murato (Walled Roof) condenses its distinctive trait in the peculiar evocative concreteness of the image. The inventive dynamics of the narrative will be explored, emphasising how the space in which they unfold, the 'Roof', from the very incipit of the quoted passage, is profiled in all its protagonism. We will dwell on the narrative modalities through which it reveals itself not only as the crossroads of destinies, but also as the topographical incarnation, in its internal and external declinations, of a "Resistance without the Resistance", an "intimist Resistance, the only one possible if one does not have Fenoglio's epic dimension", wrote the author herself in 1987, recalling the experience of Tetto Murato in Mari estremi, the text that also reveals its autobiographical origin.