In the heart of Edgardo, kidnapped and forced to cancel himself as a Jew

The story of the little Bolognese, taken from the Mortara family in 1858 by order of Pope Pius IX due to a clandestine baptism, told by Daniele Scalise and now by Marco Bellocchio in Cannes. With the right space for pain

Spielberg thought about it for a long time and then gave up on the project, but in the end the story of Edgardo Mortara – the little Bolognese Jew taken from his family in 1858 by order of Pope Pius IX, in the name of the fact that a Christian maid had secretly baptized him – has become a film. Is titled “Kidnapped”arrives in competition at Cannes on May 23 and the director Mark Bellocchio he freely adapted it from the book by the journalist and writer Daniel Scalise, “The Mortara case”, released in 1997 and just updated and republished in the Oscar Mondadori. On the story that at the time interested the chancelleries of half of Europe and the newspapers of the whole world, which marked the very last and tumultuous years of agony of the Pope’s temporal power and extended its shadow to the polemics over the beatification of Pius IX wanted by John Paul II, by now everything really seems to have been said and written. But the novel that Scalise has also now dedicated to the Mortara case (“A place under this sky”, Longanesi, 252 pages, 16.90 euros) tries to explore for the first time a space forcibly denied to simple and cold historical reconstruction.