A Passion for Memory

For the first twenty years of my life, I did not have much appreciation either for personal memory or for history. The memories of my childhood were not all painful, but they were associated with the memory of the death of my mother when I was six. For a long time, nothing belonging to that period could be remembered joyfully. Later on - during my first psychoanalysis - I rescued some of those early memories and valued them. But until very late in life, I could not remember the date of my mother's death. I kept thinking it was 1946 rather than 1947 and I had to check her documents repeatedly to be sure. Before six years of age, I was comforted by a form of memory which was not personal memory but the stories that my grandmother told me: fairy tales, her life-story as well as family stories concerning my great-grandparents, great-uncles and aunts, but also summaries of Italian operas - with music composed by Verdi, Puccini, Bellini. The other person who nourished my hunger for narration was Signorina Nene, the aunt of my best friend Aurelia. She used to narrate to us with great precision, but very probably also with invention, novels and stories she had read, such as Le Comte de Montecristo by Alexandre Dumas or The Nose by Gogol or Jolanda, la figlia del corsaro nero by Emilio Salgari (Jolanda, the Daughter of the Black Corsair, 1905, an adventure novel which was part of a series on pirates in the Antilles). These story-tellings took place on Sunday afternoon, when Aurelia came to visit her aunt, who lived in the same building as my grandmother and myself. A novel would last for several weeks, so detailed was the narration, sometimes interrupted by our questions, eager for more details, to which she knew all the replies. Aurelia's smaller brothers would also be present, but they were silent in awe at the wonderful stories being created by our dialogue. Signorina Nene was not married, but she had an affair with a musician who lived on the same floor as us, a very mysterious man who played at night and slept during the day. She was very fond of cats, and one night, hearing a desperate mewing repeatedly coming from one of the walls in her apartment, she did not hesitate to brandish some sort of pickaxe and break through the wall which had been built to close an old fireplace. Its chimney communicated with the big attic of the house, from where the cat had fallen. It was a very small lively cat, who happily survived to our amazement and delight. These stories embodied a whole world of adventure, wonder and care.

Fig. 1.

The author recording an interview in Turin, 1979, with one of the protagonists of her book Fascism in Popular Memory (1984, transl. 1987).

History was a different matter. I had always hated it, at least the type of history we were taught in school. Dates, facts, great events, the greatness of Italy: text books when I was in elementary school, between the autumn of 1946 and the summer of 1951, were still largely modelled on the Fascist ones. The teaching of this grandiose and triumphalistic history was both boring and incongruous, given the conditions of the majority of the population at the time. My own family, although not poor (my father was a railway employee), had to be careful with money and still in the 1950s, when I was a teenager, could not afford expenses such as buying a pair of skis; I had to rent very old ones, which were not up to the standard of the smart skis of my peers. We lived in a provincial town in Northern Italy, Asti, where everything was a mark of class at the time. The unpleasantness of history learning continued through secondary schools, leaving deep traces: still today, I cannot remember dates and I must often ask my husband, a physicist who might be expected to know less than me about history, such questions as the...