6The Italians By Luigi Barzini
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Luigi’s book is still in print after over fifty years of publication. The book takes a deep dive into Italy’s consciousness and offers readers an incredible insight into the Italy of today. A bestseller in the United States, The Italians arrived in Italy brought by the scandal. After the Rome in confidence of our friend Jean d’Hospital, whose finesse and the art of the lithot had made them shudder, the Italians were waiting, with a rage ready to explode, this book that one of their compatriots did not even dare to procure them directly. The Italian version came out a few weeks ago; the press was reserved. A controversy broke out in the name of national self-love, and suddenly Gli Italiant gained a hundred thousand readers in a short time. Luigi Barzini, its author, had just proposed to the self-criticism they dreamed of and which, from foreign writers, would have been unbearable. When, after his studies in the United States, Luigi Barzini, son of the director of the Courier of America, returned to his native country, about 1930, he discovered a society already engulfed in fascism and, for his eyes, Anglo-Saxon, no only anachronistic but indecipherable. The question posed by his book, “Who are we? Do we live, and at what level?” Remains marked by the initial astonishment of the educated young man who paid in dollars. Today he responds to the Italian, with a free, vivid painting, where the anecdote does not stifle the composition. And, not without subtlety, he starts by making a chrome reproduction. Click the next ARROW to see the next photo!
