487. My Praying Mantis does the Nun of Monza Credit

 

Event “Meeting with the Authors” Sarmede (Treviso) Eva Ulian with the Moderator Isabella Gianelloni, Alfeo Zanette and volunteers of the “Pro-Loco”

After presenting the book written by Alfeo Zanette on the letters from Italian soldiers in Russia, our Moderator, summoned by the Pro-Loco of Sarmede, said this about my book:

At the beginning I was talking about memory. I was talking about story, truth, pain, and suffering which is something that belongs to each one of us, individually and personal.

Therefore, who can say what the value of one's pain is and that of another? There is certainly a difference from collective pain, but when pain touches us personally, and we experience an ache that is not like that from a war injury, the coldness of the iciness, or the wound of a bullet, but they are different wounds: wounds that leave a mark inside of us. Nobody can weigh the difference of pain on scales because only we know what we feel when great pain touches us. Pain, among other things, questions everything we believe - everything for which we make choices and then when that pain, that suffering touches us deeply the word that perhaps best expresses it, is agony. We feel tormented by pain, and often, when there is great pain we say we are in agony.

Some situations such as those narrated by Eva, who, among other things, in my opinion, had great courage - because it takes courage, you know - to have, and bring to the surface an important personal suffering. And then, the great value of Eva's book is, in my opinion, a value, and I have thought a lot about it because it is a difficult book and not very easy to read, in that things very often are not as they appear.

And again tonight, I don't know why Alessandro Manzoni comes back to mind- we have all read- more or less we all know the story of "The Betrothed" and that of "The Nun of Monza", and while we, from the outside see a convent, a monastery, cloisters, we imagine them as places of peace, of reflection or prayer ... and therefore it does not occur to us that in there instead, things are not always as we think they are. And so it happens that after a nemesis, a reversal of things, it is where the baseness and cruelty of human beings are sometimes unleashed. Because when we take the fact that, if several soldiers went to Russia and found warmth, comfort in the izbas from women, from Russian peasant women who shared with them what little soup they had, we know that human beings are capable of immense outbursts of generosity, but they are, unfortunately, also capable of the worst baseness and of the worst cruelty, and in all this, Manzoni helps us a little.

Manzoni condemned precisely with the great literary ability that he had (unlike us), helped us to better understand the hypocrisy, revenge, the loss of any moral value that can be hidden - right where the opposite should reign - namely a profoundly human vision, of charity towards ourselves and towards others because whoever becomes cruel towards another also inflicts violence upon himself and so loses that part of himself which is good.

In this work Eva has accomplished an action, as I said, certainly complex and painful - but yesterday when we spoke on the phone she mentioned this adjective - it was a necessary action.

By ISABELLA GIANELLONI - historian, lecturer, author

 

The Theatre at Sarmede  (Treviso)