A precious book in which a clear and calm open wisdom is manifested, oriented on a historical reality or on times still close to our present, as on relevant figures of literature or on the changing language. Paolo Di Stefano (who is also responsible for the afterword) had the merit of collecting a series of articles by Cesare Segre (1928-2014) published between 1988 and 2013 in a book, with the right title of Civil Diary. A book that therefore goes beyond the literary critical field for which Segre’s importance is rightly known. Here we are then to the historical references, to the clashes between Islam and the Christian world, to the time of Mussolini’s fall experienced by the boy author, to the meeting between Pope Wojtyla and Rabbi Toaff, to the Shoah, with reference to the personal history of the author himself, as in the last, splendid chapter.
On another level, here we are with the modification and even degradation of our language, with the attention to dialects even in poetry, with the increasingly massive presence of American English in Italian. And then Segre’s speech on school education and the lowering of young people’s preparation is always relevant. It is important to understand the critical acuity of the gaze and the always active and reactive intelligence that a great intellectual like him was able to offer even in areas other than those of his
nature and of his own specific activity as a philologist, critic and theorist of literature which we miss so much.
Maurizio Cucchi
