TURIN. Many years have passed, but in Turin many remember the watershed represented by the March of the Forty thousand, which in October 1980 put an end to the bitter dispute that for over a month had pitted workers and trade unions against Fiat.
It was an epochal episode, however you judge it: it marked the end of the vigorous workers drive, which for over a decade had monopolized the Italian agenda in the economic, social and even political fields; but it was also a strongly symbolic passage from the seventies to the following decade, which would have seen a completely different vision of the world take hold. Yet, from that period, which for a month and a half held Turin with bated breath, at the level of mass culture there is almost nothing left.
It is therefore singular that in 2022 it is a novel (so far the only one, it seems) to stir in those turbulent and divisive days. And it is even more curious that it is a Genoese writer who was just a child at the time. “Quarantamila” by Cristiano Ferrarese, published by the Asti publisher Scritturapura, is a novel imbued with that throbbing and militant atmosphere that one breathed in the autumn of forty-two years ago. In an almost inverted perspective, the world of the factory, the working-class city and the very hard social conflict are not the background to the plot, they “are” themselves the plot. And instead, the small stories of the protagonists – the young worker Josif, his father on strike, his girlfriend committed in a shop and Mr. Luigi, that is the man who organized the famous March – become a narrative accessory of History with the “s” capital letter, which unfolds in less than a month and a half, from 5 September to 16 October.
“I knew the facts of 1980 – explains Ferrarese, who now lives and works in England – but the spark that led me to write about them was” GB 84 “by David Peace, a book in which the days of the English miners’ strike in the 1984. I immediately thought that the equivalent in Italy was the 35 days of Fiat and I began to think of a novel about Turin in 1980 ». Ferrarese has not chosen an equidistant position: the writer’s heart beats with that of the worker Josif, yet he also tries to present the point of view of “Mr. Luigi”, the symbol of Fiat paintings, in which it is easy to guess the real figure by Luigi Arisio, one of the organizers of the March of the Forty thousand. “A novel – observes the author – must not be an ideological exercise where there are only the good ones, so for me it was essential to also tell the other point of view”.
The ending is well known and Ferrarese schematizes it without compromise: the working class lost, Fiat won with the support of the middle class and the silent majority. “I don’t think it could have gone differently – he concludes – perhaps the defeat could have been less painful, but in the end it was not only the workers who paid for it, but also many of those who participated in the March of Forty thousand”. –
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