Without really knowing her, I have always respected her. I read a few poems when I happened to find one of his now very rare collections. I knew of the attention that Adriano Olivetti reserved for her: I think he found in her, in her social commitment permeated by an intense secular spirituality, something of those female figures whose thought was at the center of her intentions: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Of course, I esteemed her: but did I understand her? Now that I read and reread his Poems and stories, finally dedicating the right time, an ambiguous feeling of enthusiasm is born in me, immediately tempered by malaise. Enthusiasm, for the intimate recognition of an unsuspected literary value, a stylistic carpet in which the lesson of crepuscular and Pascoli is tied to the great European poetry of the twentieth century, to then melt simple and pure in the song of his land “gentle as love of a teenager “; malaise, due to late recognition, significantly late.
Why did I not immediately understand the value of this country poetess? Why is this lack so painful to me? Because I find in myself an evident symptom of the intellectual decadence of the Canavese: I allowed the fear of disappointment to establish itself in me, the fear of provincialism which is the first evidence of provincialism. In the Madonna and Child Jesus, in the mothers and peasants of Giulia Avetta you can breathe the world – as in the corners of the earth sung by Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen – because on her desk as a poetess, mayor and teacher, as on all the desks of the Canavese people who reflected in those years, there was Comunità, the most stimulating magazine produced by Italian culture and largely conceived here. We are orphans of those atmospheres. Now, on the contrary, the bad grass of the uncultivated and superficial province grows in us, that of envy and jealousy, which bind each one to his own mediocrity and his own backyard, instead of helping each other to recognize the best and to abandon the worst, growing us and making our land grow. –
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