Manifesto
No, that’s not an album title (well, it is, actually, but that’s not what is being referenced here). Historians have called current living conditions in Italy the most austere since the Second World War. If what they say is true, it’s fair to assume that this period of deprivation and frustration will be followed by widespread revolution: community organization, popular demands, and political upheaval.
Every good revolution starts with a manifesto: a series of imperatives delineated by parties interested either in supporting the status quo (silencing opposing voices) or shuffling the deck. Andreea Angelescu, Carolina Manfredi, and Audrey Santerre know a thing or two about that. As part of a unit on WWII and following a reading of Italo Calvino’s Sentiero dei nidi di ragno — his first book and a reflection on the Italian Resistance told from a child’s point of view — students were asked to write a manifesto from the point of view of an organized subset of the Italian population during the Second World War. They had previously studied the example of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto del Futurismo: one of the foundational texts of the Fascist movement. Today’s three guest bloggers provided well-researched texts reflecting the concerns of the partisan movement, women within it, and women openly against it. We’ve published their texts in full below.
Buona lettura!
