Presentation of Giampaolo Cassitta’s book, "Once upon a time on Asinara“ (Frilli editori)
Once upon a time on Asinara.
The story of a life.
Each of us has memories and colors hidden in the drawers of the mind. Together they form a real tide that, when it ebbs, leaves room for ancient, distant, almost forgotten things: they are symbols of a passage.
Telling and telling about oneself is trying to search in the inner spaces of memories; it means not losing memory, seeking the sense of the limit, of the end, in order to shape stories and dress them in new clothes. If we forget our history, our moods, the scents, the emotions, everything is lost and disappears forever. If it is true that we pass lightly on the earth, leaving not even a trace of that gentle passage means, in some way, never having been born.
So, to narrate. To survive and to evoke the enclosure of our social living, of our ties with others, of meetings on life’s roads with other words, with baskets full of opportunities gathered in the garden of stories.
Duccio Demetrio, great educator and professor of general pedagogy and adult education at the University of Milano Bicocca, states that: “if we refuse to listen to our memories, if we are afraid to remember, if we hate writing about ourselves, then, inevitably, the gods will be killed forever.”
Remembering is not important, but necessary. Within the phases of life we gather many emotions, sometimes opposing, that tell us the thread of our destiny. In mature age everything is present: from childhood, to maturity, to choices of responsibility; from love, to the body’s decline, to the gradual loss of strength. All this we can define as “sacred time” and everything must be brought back to the surface, everything must be revisited and proposed again. Everything must be gathered and jealously preserved.
From the joy of narrating is born the project of the fairy tale of a life: the story of a man told from birth to adulthood. A man who is 90 today and has had a very great and endless love: Asinara. In this mythological story one walks in the sea, among winds and war, among hopes, illusions and disillusions. The story of this man could only be a great and endless fairy tale and could have only one title: “Once upon a time on Asinara”. His narrating self, gathered as a true testimony, accompanies us on every page of the book: from 1933 to 1986. We will dig deeply into his story, into his memories that will slowly become, as if by magic, the memories of those who read and those who listen to this long tale between war and soldiers, between winners and losers, between pity and sadness, between prisoners and prison guards, between a lighthouse that is the metaphor of all our lives.
