"With him goes one of the men that Italy would most desperately need", writes Alessandro Galante Garrone in the farewell to Emilio Lussu, on March 5, 1975. Words still valid today, 47 years after the death of the Knight of the Rossomori. His life is an exemplary patrimony of ideas and very useful values in a very tormented present in which the war, which Lussu has known well on the Karst and on the Asiago plateau, continues to be a tragic option to which many States, for various reasons , they do not give up. Its extraordinary relevance in the words of his companion Joyce who uses the language of poetry: "Maybe / if I used my eyes well / under closed eyelids I would see you coming from behind the arches and evergreens with an affectionate and amused smile for the joke you made not to send me news / or I take one of your books in hand and give it to a young man so that you can speak to him with the right words and I await the answer / or even repeat something you said before leaving and it falls so aptly as to seem invented in that very moment / there is nothing dark and definitive in your being absent / and mine is not a waiting but not even a loss or a chasm in which you are no longer. Because you are, / you are inside so many things words images ideas feelings aspirations stimuli movements present ".
Two books to reread Lussu
It is also possible to rediscover the Luxian world in two new editorial initiatives that contribute to shedding further light on the hombre vertical, a reference point for anti-fascism. Thanks to the impetus of the cultural association "L'Alambicco", the proceedings of the international seminars hosted in Cagliari and Armungia between 2018 and 2021 as part of the "Lussu Prize" have been published in two precious volumes, which help to rediscover many aspects of his biography. Here in the bookstore "To reread Emilio Lussu" and "Lussu civilis homo" (Libreria Ticinum publisher). The interventions clearly outline the breadth and significance of Lussu's experience, between thought and action (Sassari officer, leader of Sardism and anti-fascist, writer, member of the Constituent Assembly and minister), and its importance in cultures of many other countries.
The rediscovered tale
Among the many traces that bring back to the essence of the "Lussian" lesson, the interventions by Cristina Lavinio and Giuseppe Caboni on a story, undated, little known, left to posterity by the author of "March on Rome and surroundings" deserve to be mentioned. . This is the work "A night bombing" "which most likely dates back - Lavinio specifies - to the period, which lasted three long years (up to mid-1937), in which Lussu was on a break from political activity for health reasons and resumed to narrate, continuing to go back in personal, but also collective time ". On the contents Cristina Lavinio explains that "we find the writer Lussu who knows how to insinuate the comic to the limits of non-sense even in the most dramatic situations". Giuseppe Caboni adds that "from the story, which seems to be from the same period as" A year on the Plateau, a vision of war emerges in moments of rest, other than the fighting, the assaults, and the horror of unjustified and irrational deaths, but also of the episodes of conflicts between troops and generals on the level of war discipline ". Once again the literary qualities are well emphasized. “ A night bombing - says Caboni - is a light story, in which the author's irony and humor are fundamental. I recall the conclusion of the short story. The nocturnal crowd of officers in the basement of the hotel in which they were housed, in Treviso: some barefoot, dressed in brief clothes or even with a mustache ”. According to Caboni himself, the definition of “moral humor, and also of bitter irony, sardonic for some, is correct with regard to Lussu's ironic vein. An irony that highlights the limits, the contradictions of the ambitious, the opportunists, the bullies ". A night bombing , published in 2019 for the "Henry Beyle" editions, was among the papers by Emilio Lussu, already kept by the Institute for the History of Autonomy and Resistance and now preserved in the museum of Armungia, a "Luxurious" place for excellence in which it is possible to know or rediscover the ideas of a man that Italy and Europe, in a moment when new terrible war impulses are emerging in an overwhelming way, desperately need.