Ignazio Silone, "Pane e vino"

“Wine and Bread” by Ignazio Silone, aka Secondo Tranquilli (1900- 1978), published in the final Mondadori edition in 1955, is part of the southern narrative of the 1930s, very different from the realist one of the end of the 19th century, that is, that of Verga, Capuana and de Roberto.

Alvaro, Brancati and, in part, Silone, accompany their cry of social protest with a movement of nostalgia towards a world that is disappearing. The city, in this case Rome, represents reality, the truth, while the Abruzzo countryside of the peasants still has late romantic, lyrical connotations, and it is populated by nineteenth-century figures and crossed by a panic and mystical sense of nature.

Where, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reality loses its meaning, it becomes a symbol and decadence, the work of the southernists oscillates between naturalism and symbolism. We can say that Verga passes through d’Annunzio, that the Malavoglia are imbued with the lyricism of the “Novelle della Pescara”.

“The priest was late in returning to the inn. He sat down on the grassy edge of the road, oppressed by many thoughts. Lost voices could be heard in the distance, the calls of shepherds, the barking of dogs, the soft bleating of flocks. A faint smell rose from the damp earth. Thyme and wild rosemary. It was the hour when the peasants would return the donkeys to the stables and go to sleep. From the windows the mothers called their late children. It was an hour favorable to humility. The man returned to his home, the animal in the plant, the plant in the earth. The stream at the bottom of the valley was filled with stars. Of Pietrasecca submerged in the shade, one could distinguish only the cow’s neck with the two large arched horns on the top of the inn .”

It is our belief that passages like these can neither be explained nor taught, the reader must hear them by himself, within himself.

“Wine and bread” describes the anguish of the left-wing intellectual who sees the collapse of all ideals, reduced to party schemes and rules, as evil as the power of the government that exploits and oppresses the population, the peasants, now renamed “rural”. The difference between the protagonist Pietro Spina and the other literary figures of rebels, imagined by authors contemporary of Silone, is inaction. Spina is forced into inactivity by his illness, his revolt is entirely internal, it lies in the passage from one name to another, from Peter to Paul, Don Paolo, (not surprisingly both names of apostles) and then back again to Peter without notice. Peter is the revolutionary, Paul the fake priest, desperate, but authentic, in search of God. His rebellion is internal, moral, intellectual, for this “Wine and bread” is configured as an uncertain text between an action novel and one of ideas.

The figure of Luigi Murica, the young communist infiltrated among the fascists killed by the militia, has strongly Christological connotations. An entire chapter, the penultimate, is dedicated to his martyrdom which recalls the crucifixion, where the wine and bread are those of communion and represent, as it is explicitly said, unity, fraternity, solidarity between men.

Cristina Colamartini, the aspiring novice with whom Pietro falls in love, portrays innocence, the lamb torn to pieces by the wolf, and her death has decadent and sensational traits.

Matalena, Cassola, Sciatàp, Magascià and all the other protagonists, are realistic but also symbolic figures, drawing on the naturalism of Zolà but also on d’Annunzio, Mistral and the same Verga of “Storia di una capinera” and “La lupa”, beast evocative of lust, of repressed drives.

“He showed on the beast’s scruff the sign of love, the deep bite of a female. The love of wolves is serious. Banduccia knew how to recognize the howls of wolves from afar: the cry of danger, which the wolf throws when attacked with weapons; the scream of the flesh, which means that he has found some beast to eat and calls his companions, because the beasts do not like to eat alone; the scream of love, which means that he would need a female and is not ashamed to let it be known”.