No one knows more than the great old men outline the biography of the nation

How distant the transition between the first and second republic seems. On the political-cultural scene, the elderly protagonists of pre-war anti-fascism then coexisted with the protagonists of Berlusconi’s TV, who had just run for government against the ex-communists together with not so much ex-fascists. The highly cultured companions of the Rossellis or Togliattis (officials, jurists, essayists) spoke for the last time to the young people who had grown up in an era that was already post-ideological, one in which the Feltrinelli posters, Scalfari’s Republic and the squares of Santoro were nothing but the other side of Fininvest. In those years a thirty-year-old philosopher, Federica Montevecchipublished in the newspaper Alto Adige-Corriere delle Alpi the memoirs of some illustrious witnesses of the short century: Charles Bo, George Mouth, Antonino Caponnetto, Renato Dulbecco, Julius Einaudi, Inge Feltrinelli, Victor Foa, Daisy Hack, Nilde Iotti, Mario Luzi, Mario Soldati, Elio Toaff, Leo Valiani and Tullia Zevi. It was not about interviews, but about the game attempted by Perec in “Je me souviens” – a collection of memories of all kinds, including the most seemingly insignificant (advertisement, foods, anonymous looks) but nevertheless capable of recalling the flavor of a life. Today the portraits resulting from this exercise have been brought together by Montevecchi in a book published by Pendragon and controversially entitled Fragments of the future. However, it is good to point out that his guinea pigs do not abandon themselves like Perec: in general, in fact, their memories are very “historical”, that is, immediately significant. Therefore the interest of the book also lies in the passages in which, opening a crack in the biography of public figures, they suddenly confess something unexpected, or perhaps, while believing themselves posing, they allow certain ambiguous aspects of the character to emerge.