15	POPULAR NOVEL

I well remember July 14, 1948, because my sister was on vacation in Cetraro the day Antonio Pallante opened fire on Palmiro Togliatti. Disturbances at Rome, deaths at Naples, Livorno, Genoa.

Here in Turin a group of workers held Vittorio Valletta, the CEO of Fiat, prisoner in his office. The army was getting ready to step in. The next day, June 15, the telephones weren’t working and the trains weren’t moving. Italy was split in two at Bologna. Then De Gasperi and Pope Pius XII telephoned the Italian cycling team competing in the Tour de France. Gino Bartali was twenty-two minutes behind the yellow jersey, but in the mountains that day he broke away from the field and went on to win the Tour. A huge demonstration planned for five-thirty in the afternoon in Piazza Duomo at Milan was transformed—when the radio announced that Bartali had won—into a huge national festival. Everyone was talking about Bartali. Togliatti and the revolution could wait. I began to understand vaguely what sort of country I was living in.

The postwar period was in full swing. We lived in Via Don Bosco, in a small building right above the offices of the Partito d’Azione. We had succeeded in getting them to let the third floor to us, underneath were the offices, the bar, in sum the clubhouse of the Partito d’Azione. My sister was employed there. She “carried Ferruccio Parri about on her shoulders,” she used to say, meaning that she attended demonstrations carrying the placard of the party. The Partito d’Azione, of course, lasted about one day. Having studied accounting a bit and being a good typist, she went to work in one of those businesses that aren’t around any more, firms that provided security for rail transport. Later she worked in a less shady place, a shipping agency.

The apartment in Via Don Bosco was small. We found another, bigger one in Via Carlo Alberto, facing Palazzo Campana, the historic seat of the faculties of law, education, and letters and philosophy, where I would later attend university and become a professor, and president of that last faculty.

I read Jack London and wrote my first and only novel, sixty single-space typewritten pages. I didn’t yet have my own typewriter; my sister got someone to lend me one. It was the story, set in a mythical Cetraro of course, of two boys who set about making a model airplane. I had already published a poem at my own expense in an unlikely anthology from the publisher Gastaldi called Poeti italiani per l’amore e la bontà (Italian poets for love and goodness).

My novel was supposed to be published in the Gazzetta dei Piccoli (Children’s gazette), a supplement to the Gazzetta del Popolo. This was a liberal paper I read for years in defiance of La Stampa, the Agnelli-owned paper. The Marquise Paola Bologna edited the Gazzetta dei Piccoli, which aped the Corriere dei Piccoli. I was already very enterprising. I had written to her and she had replied, “Come and see me.”

The building in Corso Valdocco also housed the editorial offices and printing works of the Communist Party newspaper, L’Unità. Those were the first newspapers that I saw and sniffed close up.

At our meeting the marquise promised to publish my novel. But two weeks later her paper closed, and I joined the countless ranks of unpublished writers.