Twenty years after the publication of Edmondo Berselli’s cult book, published by Mondadori, in Modena we are asking ourselves: is “That great piece of Emilia” still a model? Indeed, this is precisely the title of the event on Monday 13 May, at 6pm, at the church of the Madonna del Voto, in via Emilia centre, where the Italianist, poet and literary critic Alberto Bertoni and the economist and politician will discuss Romano Prodi. In the meeting, moderated by Ugo Berti Arnoaldi, Andrea Quartarone will read some passages taken from “Quel gran piece dell’Emilia”.
The initiative is organized by the Amici di Edmondo Berselli association and is part of the “A large bookshop in the square” exhibition promoted with Coop Bookshops and the Municipality of Modena.
In the book, the organizers recall, Berselli gave us a disenchanted and ironic portrait of our territory or, better, as we read in one of the many reviews, “a devil-may-care raid through the red region”.
“Emilia – claimed Berselli – is a land with indefinite borders, it is the South of the North and the North of the South. But perhaps it is a political laboratory where old pragmatic communists wandered for whom socialism was ‘capitalism managed by us ‘. It is a land of nihilists and empiricists, crazy and creative, capable of ferociously dedicating themselves to the satanic pleasure of engines, between Ferraris, motorcycles and the smell of burnt petrol”.
“This book – stated Berselli – tells of a country that is a fragment of Europe, a slice of the world that could still prove to be a political model and is undoubtedly a psychological model”.
After twenty years, what remains of Berselli’s portrait of Emilia? Can we still consider it a model? Can we still see it as a prototype of that civilized Italy that we would like to prefigure the future of all of us? Or to put it in Berselli’s words, can we still say that “Emilia, this ultimately little-known lady, is a good match for our country”?
