[...] I have to say that Las Vegas has not been a disappointment: it is all just as you have read about so many times, with wedding chapels in the middle of the gambling-dens and the farce theatres with their advertisements for the quickest marriages (this is even more brazen than I had imagined: these little churches are really fair booths built like candy boxes with little statues of Cupid in front; they have names like The Stars’ Wedding Chapel and their billboards have Hollywood-style close-ups of happy couples kissing), but what is genuine here is a huge authentic sense of vitality, crowds of people with loads of money constantly on the move. I have to say I like Las Vegas; I seriously like the place. Not at all like the gambling cities in Europe, actually the complete opposite thanks to its plebeian, Western feel, and very different from places like Pigalle. Here you sense tremendous physical well-being, this is a productive, brash society enjoying itself as a community, between one plane and the next, and here you can genuinely sense that the pioneers, gold-diggers, etc. have shaped this absurd city-cum-gambling-den in the desert. I am aware I am saying things that are incredibly banal, but I am travelling through a banal country and I cannot find a better way to cope than living and thinking about this in a banal way. (I won’t tell you how all the local colour – Western, pioneer, gold-rush, and beyond that Indian and Mexican – is the object of tourist exploitation and rhetoric, and is chopped up into tiny souvenirs in quaint little shops, all enough to make you feel sated with it for the rest of your life.)

[...] in these few days I have not been able to approach any scientists, something that I regret but also perhaps it’s better that way because from the few and far between glimpses I have had I have formed the idea that scientists are the only group which can lead to something new in America, because many of them possess alongside what is predictably the most advanced technical expertise a highly sophisticated knowledge of the humanities, and above all they are the only intellectuals with any power, and with any say; this idea of mine, I was saying, I fear very much could be undermined by further meetings with them. [...]

[...] The fact is that the blacks have their own Mardi Gras, in their own neighbourhoods, and nobody is willing to take me there because of the danger that a large number of drunk blacks represents; however, from what I hear, there are often white tourists who organize expeditions to the black areas to see the black Carneval (but without getting out of their cars, of course): the route they take is always along streets that no one ever knows in advance. Well, on my first evening, particularly as luck had it that I found myself without a companion, I got bored and ended up going from one burlesque joint to another, drinking awful whiskey and trying to start discussions with the girl dancers about unionization, but they were only interested in making me buy them drinks, the usual racket, and so on. [...]

[...] I was also invited into the villas of the upper class; in fact the most luxurious and aristocratic house that I have been in in this country was certainly here (built a few years ago but all in plantation style and all its accessories authentic), visiting a woman for whom I had a letter of introduction; not having a clue who I was, she invited five or six corporation presidents, who made me listen to the most reactionary discourses that I have heard in the whole journey: enough to make you despair, because the American ruling class understands nothing but power-politics, is a thousand miles away from starting to think that the rest of the world has problems to solve, that Russia offers the way to some solutions and they don’t. The usual pronouncements for and against Nixon were made in these terms; and a man from Investments and Securities supported Nixon because at this point in time you need ‘a tough, ruthless guy’. In any case, the Southerners talk too much, just the way we imagine they do; when I left, with me in the limousine to the airport there were some men coming back, I think, from a local Democratic Party convention; and what do you think they were talking about? They were against the Yankees and the Easterns [sic] who are stirring up the blacks, because where they live there are very few blacks, but we’d like to see them here where the blacks outnumber us forty to one etc. etc., all the things that you usually hear white Southerners say. [...]

When I set out for the United Sates, and also throughout my travels there, I swore that I would never write a book on America (there are already so many!). Now, however, I have changed my mind. Travel books are a useful, modest and yet self-contained way of writing literature. These are books that have a practical use, even though, or precisely because, countries change from year to year and in fixing them as you have seen them you record their changing essence; and in such books you can express something that goes beyond the description of places one has seen, a relationship between yourself and reality, a process of knowledge.

Negative aspects of travel? Everyone will say that it distracts you from that horizon of set objects that constitute your own poetic world, it disperses that absorbed concentration which is a condition (one of the conditions) conducive to literary creation. But in the end, even if it is a dispersal, what does it matter? In human terms, it is better to travel than to stay at home. First of all live, and then philosophize and write. Writers above all should live with an attitude towards the world which effects a greater acquisition of truth. That small something which will reflect this on the page, anything, will be the literature of our time, nothing else.

Men always count more than ideas. For me ideas have always had eyes, nose, mouth, arms and legs. Political history for me is above all a history of human presences. Just when you least expect, you realize that Italy is full of wonderful people.

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 road towards anti-Fascism was already marked out. At that time I was very far from seeing the situation in political terms, as a struggle of one ideology against another, and from working out perspectives towards a solution for the future. Seeing that politics is an object of contempt and obloquy in the eyes of the best people, the most spontaneous attitude for a young person is to think that it is an area that is irredeemably corrupt, and that one has to look for other values in life. The distance between judging Fascism negatively and having a political commitment to anti-Fascism was so great it could not be conceived of today.

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 totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? And in any case who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one’s own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.

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 sophistication, contemptuous of any patriotic or military rhetoric, coarse in our speech, regulars in the brothels, dismissive of any romantic sentiment and desperately devoid of women. Now I realize that what I was constructing was a shell in which I intended to live immune from every contagion in a world which my pessimism led me to imagine would be dominated forever by Fascism and Nazism. It was a form of refuge in an obstinate and reductive morality, but which ran the risk of exacting a high price: refusal to participate in the course of history, in the debate on general ideas, areas which I had given up on as lost for ever, in enemy hands. So we accepted, more through lack of experience than lack of courage, external forms of Fascist discipline which were imposed on us, just so as not to get into trouble, whereas I never became involved – again because of this kind of contemptuous refusal to participate – in the political discussions which I nevertheless knew were happening in the Fascist University Youth (GUF) movement, even in the nearby provincial capital. (And this was wrong, because through that kind of environment I would have entered into contact earlier with the young militants of the anti-Fascist organizations and I would not have come to the Resistance unprepared.)