A generation in revolt. It also happened in the extreme south of the peninsula. Sixty years ago Catania lived around a group of young intellectuals, Giampiero Mughini among these, an autonomous and original path of modernization and cultural growth similar to that which was changing the country, Europe. Since the beginning of the 1960s, a collective linked to the seventh art came to life in the Etna city, the “Centro Universitario Cinematografico” (CUC), essentially one of those “Cinema Clubs” scattered everywhere, in which films were screened and then discussed. of art: “A movement from which the best of Italian directors and film (and also literary) critics emerged”, writes the historian Nino Recovery, also a protagonist of that Catania season.
Magazine Young Critic, whose first issue came out in December 1963, was born from the experience of the CUC, knowing how to anticipate the student movement in Italy on a theoretical level and hosting within its pages some of the themes and protagonists who animated that protest. In its ten years of activity it was linked to the charisma of Giampiero Mughini who guided its genesis and affirmation.
The historian Marcello Flores placed the Catania magazine, together with the Piacentini notebooksamong those “that accompanied the rise of ’68 and its subsequent transformation, trying to broaden the cultural dimension and in turn being influenced by it. These are certainly the most useful cases for historical analysis, especially in a political- cultural which seems to be that of ’68 international and not just Italian”. The editors of the magazine represented a youthful left outside the parties.
A figure of absolute importance was that of Franco Fortini: “He was the master, the priest of our generation”, declared Mughini. A magazine that initially took its first steps through cinematography and then moved its fields of interest towards domestic and foreign politics. “They were several magazines in one”. Everything was made more complicated by being conceived and produced in a city “on the outskirts of the empire” like Catania, as the editorial staff relied on Giampiero Mughini’s private homes in via Cilea until autumn 1970. then to Rome.
The magazine also gave voice to figures not yet celebrated, such as Leonardo Sciascia e Ferdinando Scianna. “We were children of ’56. We were taking the first steps in a furious rejection of the Stalinist experience. We felt we had to go back to Marx, to the sources, as always happens when one culture attacks another. And we attacked Italian realism, historicism, Mario Alicata and the cultural politics he interpreted, the centre-left which seemed to us to be a cowardly division of the workers’ movement. The Central Committee of the PCI, the “national ways” (of which we understood nothing), the Reforms. And this in a political context where just by proposing a Reform, governments sank”, the reference horizon of the magazine was defined by Mughini himself in an emblematic and representative editorial of that period “Ten years of all-round intellectual militia” .
“The social imprint and the primarily cultural starting interests of the editors can be explained in the sociopolitical context of a singular and “imperfect” city like Catania which, during the 1960s was taking on the dimensions of an incomplete megalopolis and – despite being full of potential and ambitions – was preparing to become “torpidly fat”. The people of Catania born after the Second World War did not have large factories behind them, like Fiat in Turin, nor the large agrarian bourgeoisie, like the editors of Piacenza notebooks”claims scholar Anna Carta.
Yet, in a city very different from the reality of the industrial triangle, there was an intellectual container capable of giving voice to instances of mediation and debate, in what will be remembered by the historian Giuseppe Giarrizzo as “the most important youth magazine of those years in Catania”. On December 15th the University of Catania (Department of Political and Social Sciences) will retrace those years on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Nino Recupero, one of the most authoritative interpreters of a season of inevitable transformations.
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– 2024-05-12 22:18:35
