Elisabetta Sala: Children of Yesterday

Elizabeth Hall
Ed. Ares, Milan 2024
pp. 309

“Figli di ieri” is a coming-of-age novel because it encompasses the childhood, adolescence and youth of Tino, the protagonist, and it is also a historical novel because it is set between the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies, a world totally different from ours, with the kids of that time who were totally different from those of today. Those were the years of protest and, even if the author has largely set her book in Milan, the city where she lives and teaches in a high school, it could also be set in any other city that was the protagonist of the more or less violent protests of those years. All the ingredients are there.

It's 1965 and Costantino is a 10-year-old boy who attends elementary school in Monno, a small village in Val Camonica, where he, with his family, spent his days happily and dreamed of becoming a superhero. After all, he had the same name as Costantino the Great, a true hero. “And that name seemed to him to be a premonition of the great deeds that he, Gazzoli Costantino from Monno di Val Camonica, was destined to accomplish in life.”

One day, however, that world, where “everything seemed happy, young, healthy” making him believe that “Heaven wasn't supposed to be much different”, Tino, with his family, had to abandon it to move to Milan. His parents, in fact, had been left without work that they would have found there, in the Lombard capital. Milan, however, “it was smoke and noise. It was a chasm that swallowed up the colors of the mountains, the smell of fresh hay, the milk taken from the stable and even the Adamello in all its splendor, when it was colored pink by the setting sun, together with the four stone houses among which he was born and lived”.

A greeting to the friends of always, Giulio, Berto, Pier Paolo; the promise to see each other again after 10 years, in 1977, in their den under the big beech tree; the hope of Tino that “the city could be a good starting point for a glorious enterprise”; the accommodation in a building in Milan with the discovery “that a palace was a bit like a town, where everyone knew everyone's business. […] Even the life of the children was similar” and then, the disorientation of the first day of school. “It was intimidating just looking at that big building. Grey, for a change.” The stifled giggles of his new classmates greeted him as he said “good morning.”

The first Christmas arrived in town. “He would have given all the decorated shop windows in the world in exchange for a snowball fight under the bell tower of Monno.” The third year middle school exams arrived and the choice of high school arrived. Tino opted for the classical high school.“He wanted to study that past for which he felt a strange, poignant nostalgia. That past that he had just had time to glimpse before asphalt and cement erased it forever.” His new classmates at the Beccaria high school were almost all children of doctors, lawyers and teachers. His parents were happy of having chosen a “serious” school for Tino: in this way, perhaps, he would have been protected from the strikes and protests that had begun to take hold almost everywhere.

He began to hear, at school, the students that “they talked about the fight against injustice, about equality, about the rights of the poor and the weak, about class struggle.” One of them, Piero, fifteen years old, who wore a military green parka and was endowed with a brilliant eloquence, represented, within the school, a sort of protest leader. “A bit like King Midas, Piero had the rare gift of turning everything he said into gold.” It was then that Tino discovered politics and entered adulthood, while the period of attacks began in Milan. And so, Tino found himself participating in collectives and demonstrations, together with his “comrades”. “Saying ‘comrades’ is better, because it means that you share an ideal of life. ‘Friends’ is a bourgeois term, weak”.

In the summer, however, Tino returned to Monno to meet his old friends again. It was “a scraping away of the golden patina that had covered him for nine months and finding himself again", as if it had never left. “Milan was the complex land, the place of opportunities, of experimentation, perhaps even of mistakes: it was the crown of a plant tossed here and there by the wind. Monno was the roots of that plant, stuck in the soil once and for all”. Milan was also the pickets in front of the school, the emancipated girls. But not all of them. There was one, Sara, who seemed to totally reject the wind of novelty that was blowing in the city. “While everything was a whirlwind around them, between new ideas, battles, friendships, slogans, and while from pre-adolescents they became young adults, only Sara remained the same, increasingly different from all the others”. Perhaps this is why Toni was struck by her. For him, Sara represented a mystery that, little by little, he tried to unravel. This girl, in fact, “which at first seemed so easy to fit into a scheme, always had something missing”.

1972 brought the novelty of the arrival of Professor Anselmi to the school, “he entered the classroom like a tornado.” “Tall and athletic, in his thirties, Anselmi wore a short, unkempt beard and round, intellectual glasses.” He immediately proposed to his students a film club with a debate attached, a classic of those years. And then, later, he inaugurated a cultural club for the students, where he “he opened the meeting by giving a theme. […] He recommended an article, a book, a poem, which they then ran to look for, drinking like flocks from a stream on a scorching day. Every now and then, however, a fire would light up inside him that would lead him to give short speeches. Everyone listened to him with bated breath and could barely keep from applauding”. The professor, an excellent storyteller who, from his comfortable chair, divulged revolutionary ideas, even violent struggle, to adolescents in search of their own path: this too was a classic of those years, where intellectuals pontificated in university and high school classrooms, while kids massacred each other in the streets, with wrenches, and not only that. A real beating, with sharp bars and wrenches, in fact, was what a friend of Tino suffered. “Pacifism was a chimera, a chatter that people filled their mouths with to calm their ferocity. […] We were at war and no mistakes or hesitations were allowed. Even less was autonomy of thought allowed”.

An era, the one described by Elisabetta Sala in this novel, where kids met in person, and not on social media, and, sometimes, they clashed. Those kids took risks, which were part of growing up, doing somersaults, like the boy on the cover of the book, and, sometimes, they remained unscathed, landing on their feet ... sometimes not.

Gianlorenzo Capano