Where and when
The author Marino Biondi in conversation with Andrea Pellegrini. Moderated by Michele Rossi.
A Florentine century. Politics and culture from the magazines of intellectuals to the rise of Matteo Renzi is the tribute that the scholar Marino Biondi dedicates to Florence, his city of choice, looking at it from inside and outside.
The full-bodied volume is characterized by the vast index of topics, whose variety expands from magazines to correspondence, from diaries to literature, from poetry to fiction, from economics to politics, from religion to unpublished forms of ecclesial, from the avant-garde to the most institutional of literary societies, from fascism to post-war democracy, from the stories of the Risorgimento and the volatile Capital of the Kingdom to Renzismo, understood as a phenomenon of a political individuality-media in dazzling rise to the top of the nation.
Time to kill. The Great War: literature and historiography is a book on War, but also an extensive analysis of the wars of the twentieth century, including the Thirty Years’ War (1914-1945), with the long Cold War parentheses of spies and novelists, and the wars that without name and precise identification of enemy and front still last today, while our Constitution, in theory, repudiates them. The book explores the metamorphoses and reflections of the Great War in books of memory and testimonies. Among the topics dealt with, the primary issue appears to be the literary sources, which in the form of memory or diary, not to mention the novel of invention, have become dominant in the tale-narrative of war. These sources, however, pose, by their configuration, the problem of veracity, if not of the historical truth or at least of the truth of the lived that transmit after late and complex processing.
Marino Biondi teaches Italian Literature and History of Literary Criticism and Historiography at the Department of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Florence. A scholar of literature and historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the culture of the Risorgimento and modern fiction, he has recently published the volumes Chronicles. From Dante to his contemporaries and Nuove cronache. Antichi e moderni (Le Lettere, 2011-2013) and the monograph Pratolini. A Hundred Years of Chronicles (Le Lettere, 2014; IIˈ ediz., ivi 2015), Boccaccio and Machiavelli. Occasioni di lettura (Helicon, 2014).
Andrea Pellegrini is the author of the novels Lettera dalla Norvegia (Fara, 2006) and Come una madre (Joker, 2008), he won the XXXII Premio Firenze 2014 – Fiorino d’Argento for non-fiction with the volume La seduzione del classico negli anni del moderno. Italian culture and art from 1914 to 1920 (Helicon, 2014). Doctor of Research in Italian Literature, teaches Letters at the Hotel Institute “F. Martini” of Montecatini Terme and has been dealing for years with authors and themes of Italian culture primonovecentesca.