The Duce in the fight against romance novels. Vita di Mura, forgotten writer, in the book by Marcello Sorgi- Corriere.it

She, Silvia, is a rich young widow. He, Sambadù, is an engineer born in Senegal but trained in Italy: he speaks our language perfectly, he has made his way, he has a managerial role in a large construction company. She and he love each other, get married, have a son. But in the long run they turn out to be too different, she in particular can’t handle the African root that re-emerges in him, she comes to wonder about the opportunity of miscegenation, of the crossbreeding between ethnic groups of which she has the fruit under her eyes, her son. And eventually the couple split up.

read today, it would seem the plot of a novel steeped in prejudice. From the title: Sambadu, black love. And right from the cover, which depicts a naked, almost caricatured black man dancing tied to a white, blonde woman wrapped in a light-colored dress.

Yet that novel in Mussolini’s Italy, it was considered too advanced. Progressive. Unsettling. Dangerous. Because races couldn’t mix. Worse still if she was a white woman to marry and have a child with a black man. The Duce read the book. He had it read to his brother-in-law and heir Galeazzo Ciano. And he ordered it out of sight. Even if the author was – as Marcello Sorgi writes – the most famous pink writer of fascist Italy. Indeed, even more so.

Today all traces of Maria Assunta Volpi Nannipieri, known as Mura, have been lost. There cancel cultures ante litteram imposed by fascism prevailed. It is one of the many “victories of memory” of the Duce and his regime, of which an incredibly large number of Italians have no negative memory at all. This is also why the new book by Marcello Sorgi is precious, Walls. The writer who challenged Mussolinipublished by Marsilio, who put on the cover precisely that design that today an ideological gaze would consider too “right-wing”, and the ideological and censoring gazes of the time considered too «leftist». So Mura was censored and canceled with the same logic with which she censored herself Black veneer. A song that sounds unbearably paternalistic today; but which in the ears of the Duce somehow invited integration – «Black face, you will be Roman…» -, while in the lands of conquest he had wanted and imposed apartheid.

The author is a political and power scientist, who has been granting himself a license every year for some time. With the same curious and meticulous technique with which he narrates the Palazzo in the “Stampa” – which he directed in the last years of the lawyer Agnelli -, Marcello Sorgi has narrated very different stories that have their epicenter in his land, the most literary in Italy: Sicily. And his tutelary deity is a friend and client of his lawyer father, Nino Sorgi: Leonardo Sciascia, who he himself led to write in the «Stampa», at the time of the direction of Gaetano Scardocchia. Of course, also in Walls overlook both Sicily and Sciascia. But the scene opens elsewhere.

We are in Libya, at the beginning of 1940. War is already raging in Europe, and will soon break out here too, in the desert, with the rash attack by Fascist Italy on the British Empire, which will immediately cost the life of Italo Balbo and then thousands of our soldiers, from the route of El Alamein to the surrender of Tunis. Mura has the same nickname as the Russian Countess Maria Nicolaevna Tarnovska, the protagonist of Circethe novel – based on a true story – by Annie Vivanti, Carducci’s muse. Mura is in Africa to write his next book. She will see an old lover of hers again: Alessandro Chiavolini. He met him at the Popolo d’Italia, the Duce’s newspaper. Together they wrote storybooks for children.

Chiavolini doesn’t have his same talent; but he’s a man, so he can make a career. Mussolini wanted him by his side in his political adventure, as secretary at Palazzo Venezia; and Mura, instead of taking advantage of that unexpected stroke of luck, left him, because she felt neglected. In 1934 Chiavolini fell on hard times, and was liquidated with a gigantic estate in Libya. Then he returned to power, recalled to Rome by Mussolini as minister, but the estate remained, the link with Libya as well. And there Mura will meet that ancient love, and an early end.

Sorgi at this point obviously rewinds the tapetaking us back to our origins, on Lake Varese, which used to be called Lake Gavirate, and making us relive the events that turned Italy upside down a century ago.

The writer will become very popular for the novels and for the Letters column in «Novella», the most followed magazine by women, to which she replies with a dry style that Sorgi compares to that of Susanna Agnelli in «Oggi». Mura will die young, at forty-eight, in mysterious circumstances, but perhaps all too clear. Suddenly, indeed, the book becomes a whodunit. And yellows don’t tell each other; they read.