Vittorio Cian

Vittorio Cian (C.E.1862 – 1951), Italian literary critic and politician.

How do I read?

 * First of all, a statement. I think I am a rather irregular reader, that is, not too methodical and far from a slave to strict habits; but in my irregularity, which is quite normal, because I am not mistaken, I am different, from almost all scholars. Anyway, here are my confessions. I read in the most varied ways, depending on the moment and occasion, the mood and nerves and therefore the mood; according to the seasons, as well as to the contingent conditions of life, for which I find myself now in the city, now in the country, today on the train, and tomorrow in my study, or in a more or less private room of a public library. Finally, they vary according to the material that can be read, the one that more than anything else perhaps decides the way and, I would say, the rhythm of reading, determining the degree of intellectual tension, that is, of adequate attention and recollection, still marking the pace, which can be a very slow pace, like a run or a flight. But I think all this happens to almost every scholar. (p. 74)
 * During the months of the school year, my readings have what I would call essentially "professional" in character, which requires me to have a certain way of reading, since they are books pertaining either to the university course or to the theses to be examined, to the articles to be written or to the work on the loom, to the book material indispensable for fulfilling that other duty of "keeping ajoined". In these cases, I read as a scholar can read, pressed by the tyrannical need to quickly test, with an unpleasant strain of nerves and brain, the printed paper that the post office spills every day on the desk of the director of the Historical Journal, of a teacher and a little, also, of a politician: books, pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, who claim their right to a reading, even if this is often reduced to a furtive and fugitive glance, or to a melancholy postponement to better times. (p. 75)
 * The best times, those of true reading, serene and collected, disinterested and, I would almost say, carefree, [are] the months of the holidays, when I am given to read in front of a wide open window, which grants me, in a delightful silence, the enchanting view of a green background at the bottom and a blue one at the top, and, between the two, the undulating line of the wild mountain. In those days I savor reading even more pleasantly, if done with voluptuous slowness, in the open air, on the grass and in the friendly shade of chestnut trees or the two old stone pines. Memories and hopes... (pp. 75-76)

The culture and Italianness of Venice in the Renaissance
I do not know in what other city of Italy, as in the Venice of the Renaissance, popular education, even compulsory, was taken care of – here perhaps before elsewhere it became secular – and various institutions of charity and welfare provided for the well-being and elevation of the whole citizenry. Here a special school was set up to train young people destined for the Ducal Chancellery; Here he frequently bequests for the establishment of scholarships, by Venetian nobles. (p. 24)
 * The accusation that is not wrongly levelled at the Italian humanistic culture, of having alienated letters from reality, of having diminished their original power, of having subtracted so many forces from life, including political life, exhausting them in vain retching of aestheticism and literary mimicry, this accusation does not affect Venice except to a small extent. What was the rule elsewhere was the exception here. The new studies that in other regions aroused fanaticism and fatal fetishisms, here were appreciated only to the extent of the benefits they could bring to the homeland. Professional humanism, which was an end in itself or a means of profit, did not exist here or was a very exceptional case. (p. 27)
 * Girolamo Donato, returning from Rome, where he had been ambassador to Julius II, lingered on the way to transcribe ancient Roman epigraphs; but when a pontiff, perhaps Alexander VI, dares to ask him in an ironic tone, whence the Venetians had received the privilege of the empire over the Adriatic Sea, he, the profound humanist, the eloquent orator, will not hesitate to retort with Venetian wit: "Show me your Holiness the instrument of the patrimony of St. Peter, and on the back you will see recorded the concession made to the Venetians of their dominion over the Adriatic." (p. 30)

The Risorgimento’s voices

 * [...] the Cavour was very different from what some liked to paint himself, such as the Brofferio, who dared to affirm that "he had no trace of letters". In fact, how wide that powerful mind was, open to every sense of modernity and culture, would suffice to attest to an anecdote that I recall here because it is very little known. In April C.E.1960, when he went to visit the Medici-Laurentian library in Florence, in the face of so many wonders of our classicism, both of antiquity and of the Renaissance, the great minister issued this sentence which he dedicated to the very new reformers of studies: "The Latin is like the bread that gives consistency to every food of national dignity, if we are to be of the Latin race." (p. 4)
 * The priestly robe or character, the halo of exile, the fame of eloquence, of doctrine, of austere virtue, the resurgent echoes of the Primacy, all conferred upon him Vincenzo Gioberti, on his pilgrimage [through the cities of the peninsula], as a missus dominicus, an apostle of the holiest of causes, the preacher of the most blessed of the crusades, the peacemaker for the noblest of wars. (p. 8)
 * The extraordinary qualities he possessed [Vincenzo Gioberti], explain the undiminished glory that surrounded and surrounds his name; The serious defects which he revealed explain that severity, great to the point of injustice, which some still judge, as I said earlier, his work as a politician. Certainly, this mighty apostle of the Italian cause did not – and could not have – equal to the practical qualities of a man of action and of statesman, the sense of reality that culminated, insuperably, in Camillo Cavour. He allowed himself to be guided or misled, at times, by feeling, by his own imagination and by pride, which at that time made him rigid and intolerant, almost as if by a theological habit of his mind. But in contrast to these defects, there is, above all else, a passion which dominated him all, which was his strength and his life, which purifies him and elevates in our eyes, the passion of his country. (p. 10)

Note
^ Profile: Vittorio Cian ^ Antonio Gramsci, Il capintesta, Avanti!, 20 January 1916; For a University Mandarin, Avanti!, May 17, 1916; Home Front Bulletin, Forward!, July 6, 1916

Related entries

 * Ettore Cozzani