In India they call it karma. Many Westerners confuse it with destiny, but the word indicates the remuneration of shares, the golden rule: everything you do will have effects and will be returned to you.
Today, Saturday 2 April, at 12 the Municipality of Asti will name a Giuseppe Crosa the roundabout that connects via Mons. Marello to via dell’Arazzeria (in front of the former Salera), a few tens of meters from what was once his home.
Where is the karma? For many years Giuseppe Crosa, professor of literature and historian, gave his contribution to naming city streets as part of the Toponymy Commission.
Crosa was born in Asti in 1923, a year later Beppe Fenoglio, of which he was a fellow soldier, first in Ceva and then in Rome, until 8 September 1943. Graduated in Literature, he began his career in the Italian Cultural Institutes abroad, first in Madrid and then in Buenos Aires, where in 1961 he was appointed professor of Italian literature at the University of Salvador. He then went on to direct the Italian Cultural Institute of Montreal in Canada and finally to teach Italian literature at the prestigious Rosenberg Institute of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Of his experiences he narrated in the book “A cultural worker abroad”. Back in Asti he taught at the scientific high school «Vercelli» and at Utea. In the 1980s Crosa focused his interests on the territory, studying in particular the forms of the Asti dialect, publishing with the journalist Primo Maioglio, “Words and sayings of the” astesan “dialect“. He also dealt with local history by taking care of the re-edition of Ludovico Vergano’s «History of Asti» in 1990. Work from which he set out for new studies that merged into the weighty volume “Asti in the eighteenth-nineteenth century” (1993) edited by Gribaudo and SE.DI.CO. by Lorenzo Fornaca. He collaborated in magazines such as “Il Platano” and “Studi Piemontesi” and from 1995 to ’97 he edited the column “A name, a street” for “La Stampa”. After a short illness, Giuseppe Crosa passed away in May 2001.