The adventure of the “Italian Spectator”, in search of subcontracting

At the end of the war, the best of youth found an Italy very different from the one envisioned in the purification bath of the Resistance. The real country was in the black gloom of destroyed cities and, alongside the material rubble, there were cultural and moral ones. Even the meanings wobbled and it seemed essential to restore a shared meaning to keywords such as freedom and democracy. The disillusionment was burning and did not affect only those who wanted the socialist revolution. “The heroism of the opposition quickly dissolved in contact with the disarming and anti-heroic reality of the post-war period in which there was no longer any justification for using the word brother, and the name freedom sounded almost ridiculous, and to speak of creativity or of poetry was not even retrograde, it was inconvenient”. So he writes Emanuela Bufacchi in the introductory essay to his book, “Elena Croce and Lo Spectatore Italiano: a vocation for civilization”, published by Rubbettino. That of the Italian Spectator was the story of a liberal passion lived in a small and high-ranking magazine – of which the precious indices are provided here, a selection of writings and correspondence with friends and collaborators including Italo Calvino, Franco Fortini, Cesare Cases , Pietro Citati, Leo Spitzer, Elémire Zolla. Lo Spectatore was released for eight years, between 1948 and 1956, with the financial support of Comit, the Italian commercial bank of Raffaele Mattioli, disciple of Benedetto Croce and great patron of the time; and had its own surprising political and cultural parable.