The exhibition on Luciano Bianciardi at the Normale di Pisa
On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, an interesting and well-detailed documentary exhibition is being held at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, curated by Octavia Casagrande on Luciano Biancardi and the Normale of Pisa. “Bianciardi alla Normale”, open free to the public until 16 December 2022, takes into consideration the period spent by the Italian writer, journalist, translator, librarian, activist and television critic in the Tuscan institution, to which he had access by participating in a call for competition of 1945/46 reserved for veterans and partisans.
The exhibition contains precious documents, such as the writings of the admission tests or the minutes relating to the daily life of the school itself and the relationships with the teachers of the time, among which the important figures of Luigi Russo, Delio Cantimori, or Aldo Capitini, which will be fundamental for its future formation. How important will be the different anti-fascist climate that was lived within the school, a political orientation based on a liberal socialism which then found a basis in the future Action Party, which represented an elite alien to the two large communist or Catholic blocs.
Rediscovering Luciano Bianciardi on the centenary of his birth
“Do not study, open up to dialogue with the other”: this recommendation is too much, Bianciardi will make it his own for the whole course of his future life, first when he returns to his hometown Grosseto and will direct the Municipal Library for ten years inventing “bibliobus” (one of the first in Italy), a mobile library created with the aim of spreading culture and reading to as many people as possible, a social use of the book… “if people don’t go to the books, the books will go to the people ”, he loved to say; then when he is called to Milan by the young progressive publisher Feltrinelli to collaborate with the nascent publishing house.
The impact with the metropolis of Milan will be devastating for Bianciardi who is not used to training, culture, education, to sustain the impact with the big city and its frenetic rhythms. But above all, a fierce critic of the unbridled race towards consumerism, cultural homogenization, the manipulation of the TV against the individual, all things that were emerging in Italy at that time and that he was among the first to intuit and theorize, even before Pasolini or Umberto Eco.
Significant to better understand what has been said above are the three novels of the trilogy of anger: The cultural work (1957) The integration (1960) and the masterpiece The harsh life (1962) from which the good homonymous film by Carlo Lizzani with Ugo Tognazzi and Giovanna Ralli of 1964. Writer, intellectual, librarian, essayist, nonconformist, individualist anarchist, builder of utopias and destroyer of clichés and cultural tics at the same time, Bianciardi remains an important figure who cannot be ignored if one wants to better understand Italian culture from the second twentieth century Italian. And exhibitions, such as the one underway at the Normale di Pisa, are important and welcome to get to know him even more.
“Thanks to them [Russo e Chiarugi] the school worked, each of us
he regained confidence with the texts, he learned to study all over again. But most of all
each of us learned something never experienced before, learned democracy; what if
this happened the merit – and our gratitude – goes especially to him. […]
Luigi Russo was able to ensure that the School was continually open to this atmosphere
new, and which indeed gave its contribution to civil life, Pisan and Italian.
I remember his recommendation to some of us: not to study too much, not to
hunch over books, to go out on the streets, to discuss and quarrel with one’s neighbor»
[Luciano Bianciardi, Il Gran Priore, in «Belfagor», 30 novembre 1961]