Presented the book by Gianluca Medas, the untamed knight.

Sassari, municipal bookshop in Piazza Tola. Festival Ammajare off.

The art of storytelling, of carrying history through the streets of memory, of spinning fragments of remembrance and turning them into a powerful, immense tale, like that of an untamed knight who bears the name Emilio Lussu.

Gianluca Medas, with his beautiful and magical reading, managed to take us back to 1926, when — after an attack in Bologna against Duce Mussolini — a dispatch was sent to all the prefectures of Italy asking, indeed ordering, that people show in a strong and resolute way against the so-called terrorists of the State.

The attack had been carried out by a minor armed with a pistol. The shot only grazed the Duce, and the attacker was immediately slaughtered with knife blows by the fascist thugs present in the square. Thus Mussolini became a hero, and the fascists felt authorized to persecute their enemies.

Among these enemies was Emilio Lussu: captain and hero of the First World War, Sardinian, lawyer, deputy and anti-fascist.

On the night of 1 November 1926, five hundred squadristi gathered in Cagliari, under his house. They wanted to kill him. It was he, instead, who struck one of the attackers, causing his death. Arrested, he was first convicted and then acquitted. But that acquittal did not please the authorities, who decided on his confinement to Lipari, from where, in 1929, he managed to escape together with Carlo Rosselli.

Hearing again those noises, those coarse shouts, those summary trials; smelling again the odor of blood that crossed a dark period of our country, helps us understand today as well.

Sometimes a book, a story, have an infinite and terrible power: the merit of making us think. And that is no small thing.