L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, APRIL 4, 2019 www.italoamericano.org L'Italo-Americano 2 I magine living a hundred years and being able to tell what happened in the last century from the height of an experience that, despite medical advances, few can enjoy. Imagine to have a mind so clear, a way of looking at reality so sharp, a sensitivity so profound to be able to understand how the world moves and evolves, and to distill its moods. A universe of people and feelings that, as you aged — when, perhaps, you finally found the comfort of a world aligned with your dreams of youth — changed language, pace and perspectives, moving boundaries even further. The environment where you grew up, where you became an adult, where you lived your maturity has long disappeared, substituted by something you could have never imagined. Yes, Man landed on the Moon, but in 1969 we could not know what was to happen in 2019, not even that Man, on the Moon, would have walked again, 50 years after that immense "step for humanity," to explore for the first time the unknown side of our satellite, that "dark side of the Moon" sang by Pink Floyd in 1973. And now, imagine you can tell it all through an always refined, always punctual language and with the scrupulous and emotional perception of a poet. A condensate of experience and clear cut perspicacity, all in the snappy pen of someone who really knows his way with words. One more thing: filter everything through the Beats, use the lenses of that teenage angst which, in the US of the 1950s, put the entirety of the American system under scrutiny. But don't think about it as something old fashioned, something no longer useful and belonging to the past, but as a contemporary movement, a revolutionary attitude that is entirely modern because it's the eye looking at it that counts, the force behind it is what makes the difference. Try to read Little Boy, now. An experimental novel bringing together autobiography, literary criticism, poetry and philosophy, following the stream of consciousness of a writing style that has always been above all common places, and has been able to give birth, in the 100th year of its life, to the "latest beat novel" of American literature. Open your eyes: here, in front of you, is Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He celebrates life, that life protagonist of his verses, with a novel where he tells about his 100 years with the eyes of the boy who's always Ferlinghetti: a patrimony of memory, conscience and resistance From the director been inside him. The great elder of the culture of rebellion — profoundly American, but so intimately connected with his own Italian roots — has the wise, farsighted look of whom saw a lot, and well beyond the known routes of conformism. An activist and a provocateur, the Second World War and the trauma of Pearl Harbor are part of his curriculum, along with D-Day and Nagasaki, only a few weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped. With them, also the New Deal, the years of student protests, pacifism, hippies, Kerouac and Ginsberg, Vietnam and Woodstock, Reagan, the Bush era, 9/11, Iraq, Trump. A popular poet, author of Coney Island of my Mind which, in 1958, sold a million copies (and became one of the poetry best-sellers and most significant poetry collections of the 20th century), a journalist, an independent publisher who contributed to the rise to fame of the great rebels of literature including Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and Snyder. A bookseller who introduced paperbacks, affordable pocket editions, into the reading habits of everyone. And then, a narrator and a painter, playwright and novelist, author of articles and essays, a champion of freedom of expression and beating heart of resistance, always peaceful, always fearless. There is a very strong link with Italy, in his life. Even if he never met his father Carlo, who had come from the province of Brescia and died six months before he was born. A link so powerful he chose his "original" surname for his artistic career: as many other immigrants, his family had anglicized names and surnames. A will to be assimilated, but also the consequences of war, from Enemy Aliens to the shame of being Italian. Ferling returned to be Ferlinghetti: a wish to reclaim his own identity mirrored also in his choice to live and work in North Beach, the Italian neighborhood of San Francisco, where his City Lights Bookshops still is, where so much American — and not only American — literary and cultural history passed by. Ferlinghetti is memory and conscience. Not only personal, from the height of his 100 years, but also as an exercise of memory, an invitation to all us adults to look at the world with the romantic and subversive eyes of the "Little Boy" because the world, we can change it even when we are old, even when it wants to throw us in a corner, and yet cannot go on without us. Happy birthday to an artist who walked through our culture and keep on showing us a very precise path, who sees the world as "an amazing place to be born" and poetry as the "shortest distance between two human beings," as the one thing that "can change the world by changing people's conscience, just like every form of art can." Simone Schiavinato, Director NEWS & FEATURES TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS

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