Calvino, Fruttero and Lucentini, quoted. Genes in the shade of the Roccamare pine forest

A golden generation has taken the fresh air in the pine forest, in Roccamare, and between dinners, bike rides and trips on a fishing boat, novels and films, stories and articles have been written within a few decades that have forever marked Italian literature. That’s where Italo Calvino he found the concentration to work from the beginning of the seventies until that noon of 6 September 1985 in which he felt ill while working on the “American lessons” – he would die a few days later in Siena – closing the sunniest phase of a precious season for everyone. And that’s where Franco Lucentini And Charles Fruttero they have worked in their very special and symbiotic way on many books, including “Enigma in posto di mare”, a whodunit which, albeit less successful than “La donna della Domenica”, described seaside Italy.

Alberto Riva, journalist and writer, in “Last summer in Roccamare”, released by Neri Pozza on 16 June, offers a well-documented, affectionate and never “museum” reconstruction of that long summer that lasted decades in which being all together on the Tuscan coast seems to have functioned as an inspiration multiplier. The book contains many interviews with the protagonists of that season, such as Rosetta Loy, and their heirs. The author’s nostalgia, more than for the place itself, appears to be aimed at an intellectual rigor that associates the momentum of inspiration with a liturgy of filters and rewrites, exchanges and comparisons, criticisms, rough opinions of friends and non-friends. And if the summer read par excellence is yellow, Riva traces a small genealogy of the texts that have marked the history of the genre in Italy, starting with “Venere privata” by Giorgio Scerbanenco, so close to George Simenon in the creation of an abject and suffering world, in the choices of careful simplification of style for leave free space to the savannah of psychologies. Then there are literary stories that risk getting lost in the pine forest, like that of Mario Tobino, an excellent writer and psychiatrist who ended up on the wrong side of history in the debate with Franco Basaglia on asylums. Furio Scarpelli, screenwriter in tandem with Age, born Agenore Incrocci, great-uncle of Giorgia Meloni, and Pietro Citati, one of the central figures of the book, also pass through the pages of “Last Summer”. What did that generation do when they wrote? He vanished behind the plots, behind the irony, trying to achieve “the great blow to disappear”, that idea that “the successful work that can afford to erase the author” as done for a life by Calvino. “You have to enter yourself armed to the teeth”, writes Paul Valéry in a quote much loved by Fruttero and Lucentini, godfathers of an irony that was a perfect synonym of freedom. In this regard, Riva reports an anecdote about a visit to Rome by Rais Muammar Gheddafi. The two wrote a piece, the Libyan embassy replied piqued, asking for both the head of the two signatures and that of the director. Their response was sublime. “With what semantic means” to explain “the vertiginous misunderstanding” to those who mistake “a normal article of costume for who knows what political maneuver”? Racism is also unthinkable, given that those “fearful precautions against unpredictable susceptibilities, which are the sign of the most subtle and insulting condescension” have not been used. Fruttero died in Roccamare in 2012 and Mentioned since last year lies a few meters from Calvino, under a simple tombstone. As in Brassens’ “Supplique”, they die on vacation, in a cemetery that is even more marine than that of Valéry.