Double appointment for Ithaca from the Alta Langa to the Italy of Giolitti and Craxi

SUNRISE The Ithaca cultural association is organizing two events these days: the first will be this evening, the April 20th at 11 am, in the Town Hall of the Municipality of Alba. Suzanne Hoffman’s book will be presented, entitled Love and war in the Alta Langa (Araba phoenix editions). Also speaking will be the publisher Fabrizio Dutto, the author and wine entrepreneur Maurizio Rosso and the writer Teresio Asola.

The second event will be Monday 22 April (in the conference room of the Banca d’Alba, in Via Cavour, at 6.30 pm) and will have the title “from Giolitti to Craxi – the difficult road of reformism”. On the stage Paolo Borgna, formerly a magistrate and prosecutor of the Republic of Turin, today president of Istoreto – the “Giorgio Agosti” institute of history of the Resistance and contemporary society.

Giorgio Scagliola, president of Ithaca, explains: «Retracing the years of the “Giolittian age” – from the beginning of the century until the Great War –, Borgna will reflect on the historical era in which Giolitti had attempted to forge an alliance between the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie and the working aristocracy of the North: it had legitimized the unions by taking them as interlocutors, abandoning the Crispi policy of police repression of demonstrations”.

Then he adds: «Giolitti had then introduced important reforms to protect disability and old age, holiday rest, the work of women and minors, accidents at work; he had established (in 1906) the body of labor inspectors and nationalized the telephone companies and the railways; he had admitted socialist and Catholic cooperatives in the tenders; finally he had introduced (in 1912) universal suffrage, albeit only for men, announced a progressive tax reform and prepared the ground for the reduction of working hours to eight hours a day”.

«Well, the question we will reflect on will be the following: why, in addition to the irreducible (and understandable) aversion of the reactionary right, did Giolitti suffer (almost always) the aversion of the more radical socialists and even of the Catholic forces? The alliance between these two worlds, Borgna reasons, would probably have avoided Italy’s entry into the war in 1915 and therefore, certainly, the subsequent advent of fascism which inflated its sails thanks to the malaise of a country that was economically exhausted at the time, morally sick, socially divided,” he concluded.

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