Tramonti e aurore di Alberto Savinio.
Percorso meandrico di un intellettuale europeo del ’900

Collana Saggi e Studi. Dossier III
by Martin Weidlich
with an essay by Paolo Baldacci
Milan, 2017
ISBN-13: 9788899473129
Format 21 x 28 cm
160 pages b/w

This essay is based on the lecture titled Tramonto dell’Occidente. Aurora di una nuova civiltà italiana [Sunset of the West. Dawn of a new Italian civilisation], held by Alberto Savinio in May 1933 at the Istituto Fascista di Cultura in Florence. The text – the content of which is summarised in the Appendix – is influenced by the younger de Chirico brother’s need to once again make himself acceptable to the regime, of which he had been an ardent supporter in its early years, following his six-year Parisian interlude. However it is also used by the author to focus on the uncertainties and oscillations Savinio had manifested along the course of his intellectual journey, which shift sbetween two poles that he himself defined as Ptolemaic and Copernican: openness to the new or closure within tradition? Paolo Baldacci’s introduction explores the affinity between Savinio’s points of view and the theories expressed by Malaparte in Italia barbara and L’Europa vivente, extending the discussion to the role of some other “great intelligentsia” of the Italian twentieth century: Papini, Soffici, Longanesi etc.