“La vita agra” and the dark side of Italian well-being

This 2022 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of many intellectuals and writers who have marked Italy after the Second World War. We are talking about Pier Paolo Pasolini, Beppe Fenoglio and a master of children's literature like Mario Lodi. In the group we also find a writer who is too often forgotten but who was able to tell and embody the contradictions and chiaroscuro of Italy in the 1950s and 1960s as few. We are talking about Luciano Biancardi, born in Grosseto in 1922, witty, ironic and caustic singer of the beautiful country in the years of the economic miracle, that boom that transformed our Peninsula from an agricultural and traditionalist country into an industrialized and modern nation, thanks to a real hangover. sudden wealth and well-being.

The story of those frenetic years is entrusted by Bianciardi to his masterpiece, “La vita agra”, published in 1962 and now re-proposed in audiobook reading by the actor Alessandro Benvenuti (Emons, 2022, also in download).

A largely autobiographical novel, "La vita agra" tells the story of Luciano, librarian from Grosseto who leaves for Milan determined to blow up the "tower" where a mining company is based. The motive is an accident that happened years earlier in a mine owned by the company, an accident in which 43 miners lost their lives due to non-compliance with safety regulations. Once in the Lombard capital, however, Luciano realizes how to make an attack on the mine owners' building would solve little, not would change the social and human landscape that surrounds him almost in no way. Indeed, he finds himself immersed in a frenetic, dehumanized universe, in which everyone runs, struggles, struggles and gets lost and is willing to do anything to secure a social position or a better job, in order to make a profit and with the earnings to be able to buy more and more goods.

As Bianciardi writes, the Italy of the time seems to have already fixed its own destiny: "Those who do not have a car will have it, and then we will give two to each family, and then one each, we will also give a television to each one, two televisions, two refrigerators, two automatic washing machines, three radios, an electric razor, a bathroom scale, a hairdryer, a bidet and hot water. To everyone. As long as everyone works, as long as they are ready to walk around, to make dust, to stamp their feet, to fiddle with each other from morning to evening ".

The protagonist of the Vita agra on the one hand feels repulsion for this world, he would like to blow it up, as designed for the tower of the mining company. On the other hand, he feels drawn to this universe of sequins and lights like a fly is drawn to a spider's web. He feels the growing desire not to feel like an outsider, but to be recognized by the system as one of many, willing to sell his soul for a new model of television or transistor radio.

Bianciardi then explores the human and social consequences of Italian well-being as only Fellini was able to do in his "La dolce vita", a bitter metaphor for the evanescence of the Italian boom. to which he himself knew he belonged. A class that denounced the distortions of the boom in words, but in fact shared its vices and its many material pleasures. A class that loved the applause and the spotlight too much to really go against the consumerist system and put the "bombs", albeit metaphorical, to denounce the barbarization of a society where everything and above all every person had a price.

Bianciardi was aware that independence, refusal to integrate necessarily led the intellectual to isolation and fatally to disappointment. He experienced on his own skin this sense of disorientation that accompanied him until his death, which took place at the age of fifty in 1971 without having seen those words realized, which he placed as a sort of epitaph in his masterpiece: “The revolution must begin in interior homine. People need to learn not to move, not to collaborate, not to produce, not to give birth to new needs, and indeed to give up on those they have ".