Activity

But from all these components fused together into one single burning vitality, what emerged was the partisan spirit, that is to say that ability to overcome dangers and difficulties on impulse, a mixture of warlike pride and self-irony as regards that very warlike pride, a sense of being the real i…

4) In defining my youthful ideas I used the terms anarchism and Communism. The first stands for the need for the truth about life to be developed in all its richness, over and above the deadening effect imposed on it by institutions. The second represents the need for the world’s richness not to be…

So we grew up jealously guarding a cult of individuality which we thought was exclusive to ourselves, despising the youth of the big cities whom we considered a spineless lot; we were ‘hard guys’ from the provinces, hunters, snooker-players, show-offs, proud of our lack of intellectual sophisticati…

I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that now many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education ‘so as not to give them complexes’, ‘so that they don’t feel different from the others’. I believe that this behaviour displays a lack of courage which is t…

As a child listening to the adults’ discussions in our house, I always felt that it was taken for granted that in Italy everything was going wrong. And during adolescence I and my companions at school were almost all hostile to Fascism. But it is not at all inevitable that just because of this my r…