Otello Chelli's "Rizio"

Rizio belongs to the “Morgiano lineage”, he is young, handsome, poor. Rizio is a hard and pure Communist, with a noble, supportive, almost evangelical soul. He lives in the slum, built on the lawns of the Nuova fortress following the bombing that devastated Livorno. Well-liked by the leaders of the party, he is making a career as a politician, maintaining independence of judgment and personal conscience. He runs into Valeria Righi, a leading exponent of the Christian Democrats. Valeria is older than Rizio, she is a fervent Catholic, anti-Communist, married with children. But she is beautiful, sweet, innocent, as pure as the young Labron. They fall in love and life overwhelms them.

Rizio, by Otello Chelli, is a real historical novel, set after the war, with real events and famous characters, such as Enrico Berlinguer and Ilio Barontini, mixed with other fictional ones.

The best part of the text is not the plot, it is not the political inspiration, it is not even the great love described with the emphasis and language of the past. The moment in which Chelli reaches its apex is, as always, in the heartfelt description of his neighborhood, La Venezia district, of which I already talked about when reading his “People of Venice”.

Venice district represents, for Chelli, what, for an elderly man who is still in love, is the aged bride. Only he, in the depths of his memory, can see her as she was, a young girl in bloom, without wrinkles or cracks. What he tells with heartfelt tones is the Venice district before the bombings, the magical place where he grew up.

“I lived my first ten years in a fairy tale, the district of Venice, surrounded, as you know, by a network of canals where boats sail and are moored, those barges that, dragged by a man armed with a long pole, slipped silent, loaded with goods to and from the port. “

It should be noted on the sidelines how the atheist Chelli manages to describe religious sentiments with almost more emotion than those who are really religious but perhaps in a predictable way. It is about that longing for the supersensible that unites non-believers with a poetic and not a purely materialistic soul.

That “boy was a man different from all the others, he seemed an ancient, he identified and inserted in his universe the signs provided by the Creation and had transcendent relationships, he did not know with whom.”

Love is also a means to reach transcendence. Pure, sublime,made of a carnality devoid of any baseness. It is the mystical union of two bodies, but above all of two souls, capable of overcoming any obstacle, of surviving beyond death.

Politics is also understood in this same way: as an eternal and titanic struggle between Good and Evil, as a hand-to-hand combat to the death, but also as pity, justice, compassion. It even contemplates the esteem of the enemy, when he is moved by the same, albeit opposite, ideals.

“In this time I have met men of such stature, even among those of the majority, who in the not too distant future will not have successors worthy of so much value and this makes me fear for the fate of our country. “

Beyond the beliefs of each, how to blame him?