On Friday 3 May at 6pm at the Pin, in the Pinetina of the public gardens of La Spezia, Marco Ferrari’s book “To the revolution on the Two Horses – Return to Lisbon 50 years later” will be presented. Gabriella Tartarini and Mario Sommariva, President of the Port System Authority of the Eastern Ligurian Sea, will speak. On this occasion, the gathering and exhibition of Due Cavalli vintage cars will be held by Citroën Frigi brothers of Via del Molo and the CSA Club (Citroenisti Spezzini Uniti). The initiative is promoted by the Pin and the Ricci bookshop with the patronage of the Municipality of La Spezia and the Port Authority. Marco Ferrari’s volume was published by Laterza on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. Exactly half a century ago Victor and Vasco left Paris for Lisbon to witness the triumph of the only revolution of their existence. At a distance of 50
years they return to the streets of Lisbon in search of a new dream to start over.
It is the story of a generation that chases the possibility of a different world aboard a Due Cavalli Citroën, the car symbol of the protests and demonstrations of the Sixties and Seventies. On April 25, 1974, a date that now seems light years away, an extraordinary event occurred in Portugal: to the tune of “Grândola, Vila Morena” by José Afonso, a group of army officers started an uprising that put an end to the longest-lived dictatorship in Europe, lasting forty-seven years, 10 months, twenty-four days and twelve hours. The flowers in the barrels of the rifles, symbol of the Carnation Revolution, were a moment of hope for an entire generation which, after the Chilean coup of 1973, the ferocious repression in Greece, the failure of the Prague Spring of 1968 and the war of Vietnam, finally saw his ideals triumph. There were many, like the protagonists of the book, Victor and Vasco, who left from all over Europe to witness, at least once in their lives, the triumph of the revolution. But every journey, even or especially if done on a legendary Citroën Two Horse, without navigator and off the motorway, is an adventure, a journey made up of encounters, inconveniences and surprises to “bury tyrants with laughter”. The volume by the La Spezia writer Marco Ferrari contains the first edition of the book, from which the film of the same name, winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, was based, and the sequel, half a century later with the same protagonists and an afterword in who is reminded of how that revolution was marked by music.
