Oh, I have always loved to treat the thematic of Le Grand Tour and I reviewed several books on the topic: what was exactly this long trip attended by people of culture, pretty wealthy immediately after their studies and before to start their active existence in the field that they had chosen? Well, a trip including a lot of European countries, done for discovering the beauty of a culture in a special moment of the existence: when there wasn't still a partner, or a family: when young age would have preserved the enchantment of a dream.
It was a wonderful opportunity and these men thanks, later to their tales, to their books written because inspired by places, and people and parfums and food they tasted during their holiday have been the first Touristic Office in...Words and the first promoters of new, exciting adventures that deserved to be lived by other people.
It was thanks to them if later always more people became curious and decided to explore a Continent, the European one, plenty of surprises.
I remember when Marie-Louise one of my correspondents from California afforded here. She told me that it would have been a joke the visit all the European capitals, because, she remarked, Europe is very little.
When I received this book published by Grasset, Le Grand Tour Autoportrait de L'Europe par ses écrivains,
that I wanted to read from several months, the war between Ukraine and Russia, long more than 8 years had known an escalation putting all Europe in an agitated mood.
No one wanted this war in Ukraine and Russia, not common people for sure. My ukrainian friends are in sufferance also for their Russian friends and relatives; my Russian friend thinks that we hate them because of this war adding that they didn't want this war. No one is hating anyone! I asked to my Russian friend of not hating me because of what it is going on between UE and Russia and sanctions affecting more common people than the wealthy ones.
No one want to be hated because of the gestures of the government where she lives in, I understood it during these weeks.
And I cried and I cry. I can tell you that, dear reader, I cried and I cry, because of internal lacerations, because I love my Ukrainian friends and my Russian friend: because all this story is absurd and pretty upsetting: because there is still a rampant pandemic and our governments have wanted this: it is too much. A war is an act of crime but no one is innocent, I am sorry.
All people and governments involved in this horrible game are profoundly guilty for what it is happening; as it happened in the past.
Let me just remember what happened in some parts of Italy during the last world war conflict: in our city, Gubbio, a partisan entered in a cafè called Nafissi or Caterina on 20 june 1944 killing a German officer and leaving another one more dead than alive: they were two Germans officers in peace: there wasn't the exigency of killing. There wasn't the exigency of killing.
Germans started an immediate round up: they captured 80 people: the bishop Beniamino Ubaldi wanted to donate his existence avoiding the departures of that innocents, but Germans wanted more and more blood. They asked to the captured people of digging 40 graves: then they choose once done it, 40 people, setting free the other 40 ones: the chosen people were killed. The person who killed the german officer left the city pretty quickly, in opposite case no sure what would have happened to him as well! without to return anymore.
In Rome same story: partisans put some bombs that killed wagons of Germans: Germans rounded up hundreds of people, more than 300. One of them was a student: the family of that boy discovered that the book where he was studying in, was still open. This ones are Le Fosse Ardeatine, Rome.
Do we want to speak of Sant'Anna di Stazzema? where 560 innocents souls, including many children were killed? In this case it was a terroristic attack wanted by some german brigades, with the help of italian locals. Innocent people.
Wars are always cruels! There is never, never an exception to it!
Back to the book:
This book has been studied and wanted because France is at the moment at the guidance of the European Union. It contains 27 chapters written by 27 writers of every European State included in the Union.
As said Kundera, Europe is a concentration of differences in an, after all, little space.
French people wouldn't never imagine a deflagration like this one; a new war in Europe, when Macron started the six month of presidency.
A big problem that must be resolved pacifically.
Reading these writings, I focused my attention on States of the East of Europe considering the mess that it is going on there: it is more than obvious that no one has still metabolized the Second World War Conflict.
No, because it was dishuman and brought internal lacerations not sorted out.
Where you can find voices speaking of the Second World War? In every chapter of this book, more or less.
Polland: the writer admits that the last Varsaw was much more beauty than not this one, completely rebuilt after the latest world war conflict: it was completely destroyed during the war. In Roumanie the URSS would have wanted to change their tongue, of latin origin and pretty old, so old that Ovid, during a trip wrote that he could understand them. The writer touches also problematics like historic revisionism and exhile, a thematic this one, treated a lot.
The finnish contributor underlines the list of banned books, and an information much more under control when part of the Russian state.
Lituanie has three important cities, and the contributor gives a wonderful idea of a state with a suffering past: Vilnius the current capital, where people are poliglots, with several different religions and creeds: Kaunas the so-called "capitale provisoire" had lost many jewish people during the last world war conflict, while Klaipedia is more similar to a Scandinavian city. It's a gem of a portrait that I am sure you'll love very much.
In other States during the last World War conflict was created a ghetto for Jewish people.
The Italian tale focuses on the Manifeste of Ventotene and the character of Ernesto Rossi (and Altiero Spinelli.) Their manifeste was largely known thanks to Ada Rossi, Ursula Hirschmann, Gigliola and Fiorella Spinelli, The writing Pour une Europe Libre et Unie has been released in 1944 and it is considered a founder book on the European Union.
Every tale, and so every European State is rich of considerations, most important events that touched it, written in a sensorial, joyous, thoughtful way, trying to listen to the past,, present problematics of a beauty of a multiform variegated universe as Europe is.
Highly recommended book.
I thank Grasset for the physical copy of the book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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