L’AQUILA – So, without a question mark or exclamation mark, leaving the choice to the reader. ‘La cultura ci salverà’, the first literary work by Salvatore Scappucci, born in Barrea and transplanted to Teramo, is, first of all, a ‘pamphlet’, full of passion, fervor and polemical ideas on where our land is slowly heading. Without neglecting the how.
The author of the dissertations is ‘Mario R.’, who, sometimes directly, sometimes through his close friend and alter ego, to whom he delivered his precious manuscript a few moments before taking his own life, analyses the current situation in Italy, the protagonist of the story.
As the pages turn, the pamphlet increases in size, to become a real book.
As a ‘social investigator’, as he likes to define himself, like a new Sherlock Holmes, Mario R. cannot give up the temptation to reveal his discoveries which focus, describing and cataloging them carefully, on those that the author defines ‘Italianisms’.
Italianisms are, however, only the point of arrival of a path which, as mentioned, sees our country as the only protagonist.
The Italy of yesterday which taught the internal world; today’s Italy, dull and decadent, inexorable victim of its contradictions, “of sterility, the result of the cultural deprivation of the majority of its citizens, of the banks, of politics driven by strong powers, which presents the absolute absence of guides who can rise to the role of masters of thought”.
And yet, despite everything, there is a solution, or rather, according to Mario R., more than one.
Only culture will be able to restore strength and vigor to a dull country. With or without a point, question or exclamation mark.
The interview
