Grand Hotel Scalfari Confessioni Libertine su un Secolo di
Eugenio Scalfari has been for several decades the editor of Repubblica, one of the most important italian newsmagazines. His personal history, considering that now he is 95 years is told in first person so preciously that I am more than sure you will remain enchanted by it.
An only child, in a family devastated by a father intrigued by losing his time and money playing too much, and later winning his demons when he will start a prestigious work at the Casino of Sanremo, Liguria, Scalfari tells with freedom that years, his friendship with Italo Calvino, in the same high school. Calvino: someone who decided to live in a world populated by fantasy and fairy-tales more than staying in a reality of aboundance, as remembers Scalfari was the after-war in Italy.
Although at first religious, he simply lost his perception about God and the idea of His existence growing up; famous was the correspondence exchanged with Pope Francis and the friendship born between these two men (other two in grade of being friends although their ideal differents were our President Sandro Pertini and Pope Johannes Paulus II).
Scalfari remembers at long his friendship with Italo Calvino and with many more collaborators as Citati was, for and of Repubblica. You'll love the stories of these friendships.
Intellectuals he desired to have close to him when at Repubblica because they made the difference, because, also if sometimes their political ideas were not the same ones of Scalfari, he simply appreciated their minds.
Politically Scalfari has been a man of the right and later of the left. During the fascism he was a balilla. Later he became a man of left.
Surrounded by intellectuals, passion for writing and reading became soon a work for Eugenio Scalfari. He wrote for magazines of right as well; after all they paid good money and it was important.
What maybe shocked me positively, being a reporter, has been this: once in Repubblica Eugenio Scalfari worked for keeping happy also the rest of his journalists. Who worked for him had to be happy. And to me this passage of the book has been shocking, because I haven't never thought that an editor wants the happiness and joy of his journalists. Then I imagined the joy and contentment of that staff; when in a workplace there is harmony and a happy atmosphere, there is substantially everything.
Scalfari created with the time, with great collaborators, an idea of innovative journalism; left was plenty of enthusiasm and potentialities, but also researched; there wasn't a section of sport, and when created, sport was not treated as commonly is in most newsmagazines, but trying to research also in this sector of the existence, an intellectual key for reading the reality.
His friendship with Indro Montanelli, but also his devotion for D'Annunzio, a cult he cultivated thanks to the friendship of the poet with his father will be important pages.
At the end a strong analysis of what it is journalism now.
Scalfari starts from the past, and when Repubblica became the first italian newsmagazine, followed by Il Corriere della Sera. The advent of the internet has put the sector in a serious, absolutely dolent turnmoil, because what it was true before, with the advent of the net, it wasn't anymore true. People, no, better, readers, became confused by the news they could read thanks to the net, and at the moment the situation of newsmagazine is not at all cheerful. Million of copies of newsmagazines were sold just few years ago in one day, but these numbers are just memories.
Scalfari thinks that books and newsmagazines, the first ones the only ones not killed by the internet, won't die. He adds more: that now we are all living in a moment of serious decadentism; and decadentism doesn't never bring good things. Sure: there will be a new re-birth because soon or later people won't accept anymore this situation of mediocrity.
The informations given in the newsmagazines can't be anymore the old one of the past; if there is an interesting news, given by the net, people are informed. What a good editor and his staff should do, affirms Scalfari is to "open" the news, for finding as many elements of interest as possible for the readers.
"Where once there was the power of journalism with its greatness and miseries, now I see many dishoriented gangs" adds Scalfari.
It's sadly true.
Beautiful, beautiful book, a biography and a spiritual testament of a man who has always made great journalism, and that can give directions for the future to come.
Written with extreme clarity, class, style.
Highly recommended!
I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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