NATALIA GINZBURG’S LEXICON

“When holiday time came, my father rented a house, always the same one; for years now, he no longer wanted to change place. It was a large house of gray stones, overlooking a meadow: and it was in Gressoney, in the hamlet of Perletoa.”

The writer is Natalia Ginzuburg in “Lessico famiglia”, the novel published by Einaudi, now a classic of twentieth-century Italian literature, which earned her the victory at the Premio Strega in 1963. The house of gray stones is that of my uncles.
My uncle remembered playing with Natalia as a child. On that lawn there are the footprints of my sister’s, my cousins’, my own races, the games with Thor, Giorgio’s German shepherd, the returns from the many trips to the mountains. Those that Natalia, her sister and three older brothers were also called to do, behind a gruff, authoritarian and emotionally impenetrable father, so similar to a known father.

Natalia was born in Palermo on 14 July 1916, into the Levi family, Jewish, cultured and anti-fascist. The father, a hard and integral voice, is Giuseppe Levi, scientist and university professor (his student was Rita Levi Montalcini), the mother, a light, curious and sweet spirit, is Lidia Tanzi, older sister of Drusilla, the “fly”, wife of Eugenio Montale.

The light of “Lessico Famigliare” lights up on the paternal exclamations: “Don’t do bad thanks!”; “Don’t be dirty!”; “We didn’t come to Bergamo to campaign” (to lure our children back from idleness). The other figures move around the continuous paternal reproaches, in a novel that is a journey into the history of a family, but also into the political and intellectual history of our country. It is not strictly an autobiography, it does not want to be, as the author herself has had the opportunity to say in several interviews, if anything it is as if all the words, the expressions that have crossed the life of the Levi family had begun to urgently claim the need to emerge, to be brought to light and Natalia, whose personal history she leaves in the background, is the voice of all those ways of saying, but above all she is a penetrating and never judgmental gaze, which translates into a spartan and intimate, loyal and melancholy. The family lexicon is a mixture of lemmas and attitudes, of expressive and gestural rituals, in which the family recognizes itself and is capable of reawakening a subtle intimacy between brothers and sisters, even if distant, throughout their lives.

“Here is Maria Temporala”, this is how the mother defines Natalia, the youngest, reserved and shy daughter; not a particularly bright student, but hungry for books, curious and attentive, capable of retaining and making resonate what life, family and above all words have brought her. Natalia became passionate about writing as a child, she wrote poetry, she didn’t think she was talented, but writing was a necessity for her. She published her first novel with Einaudi in 1942, “La strada che va in città”, under the pseudonym Alessandra Tornimparte, to escape the racial laws.
The Einaudi publishing house played a very important role in his life: he began working there in 1945, alongside Massimo Mila, becoming a reference figure for Italian fiction, when Pavese dedicated himself to other series, translating Proust. She herself describes the post-war Einaudi environment as a “collective happiness”.

After all, she grew up in a cultured and lively environment, politically committed to anti-fascism. Lessico Famigliare talks about an open house, where even the best-known characters appear without coat of arms, human and immense in just a few places. This is the case for Filippo Turati, who finds refuge in the Ginzburg house before emigrating to France as an anti-fascist exile, for Adriano Olivetti, whose gaze changes in intensity when he is busy going to someone’s aid, for Felice Belbo, Cesare Pavese and Leone Ginzburg.

“We got married, Leone and I; and we went to live in the house in via Pallamaglio.” A sentence, nothing more. It’s not just modesty, it’s knowing how to guard the most expensive things, while allowing the world to grasp its light.

Cesare Pavese, Leone Ginzburg and Giulio Einaudi were the protagonists of a particularly intense and fruitful phase for culture in our country. They met at the Massimo D’Azeglio classical high school in Turin, they were students of Augusto Monti; from their friendship, together with Norberto Bobbio and Massimo Mila, the Einaudi publishing house was born in 1931, which changed the pace of the entire world of literary production and diffusion in Italy.
A man of letters, scholar and teacher of Russian literature, Leone Ginzburg contributes in a fundamental way to the formation of the Einaudi catalogue. His anti-fascist commitment cost him several arrests and exiles, until 1944, the year in which he died in the Regina Coeli prison as a result of the torture he suffered.

If with Anna Banti we met a woman who invented a stage name for herself in order to be recognized as a personal identity distinct from her husband, in a cultural environment dominated by men, Natalia Ginzburg made the surname that binds her to her first husband a declaration of how to be in the world.
A being in the world that for her is inseparable from writing.
“This is my job and I will do it until I die” (Small virtues, Einaudi, 1962)

She writes, Natalia, all her life. He writes novels, essays, articles. His is a sincere and coherent dialogue with the truth, not as an end, but as the very nature of writing: fiction cannot exist. This thought is so radical that it makes her shy away from the theatre, interpreted as a stage for lies. It will be the meeting with Pierpaolo Pasolini that will explain to her how to get around that fiction and open up a world that previously seemed impossible. Thus, Natalia also writes comedies, mirrors that reverberate reality, words that can make it visible.
Until his death in Rome on 8 October 1991.

I close the “Family Lexicon” and put it back on the shelf of dear books. Reading it was also a journey into memories, not only Gressoney, but also Turin, where the Ginzburg family lived for a long time, precisely in streets close to those in which I grew up: a Turin center of thoughts, courage and new visions of the world, which it would have been wonderful to know and which painfully has never recurred again (not hiding the weakness of my generation).
I also think back to the Strega Prize won by Natalia Ginzburg: in the eighty years of life of the Prize, only 13 women have been awarded. The mind goes to the girls and boys of Piccioletta Barca, not always model students either, but minds alive with curiosity, perhaps there are those who have the dream of becoming a writer. In Piccioletta Barca they learn the hunger to read, to find life in the word, to cultivate their passion with determination and care and I like to dream that, perhaps, one of them, one day, will have their name written together with that of Natalia Ginzburg among the winners of the Strega Prize.