Igino Ugo Tarchetti

Igino Ugo Tarchetti lived between 1839 and 1869. He is, therefore, a Risorgimento writer who was sidelined because he advanced a fierce critique of war and a clear recognition of the value of desertion and conscientious objection. The novel, partly autobiographical, relates the trials of Vincenzo D.: > one of those minds that cannot choose between prosperity and conscience, and are ever wretched creatures . The narrative is structured into three parts. The first part concerns the protagonist's childhood and adolescence. Abandoned, he grows up in an orphanage, where he meets Margherita, the great love of his life. It is a bombastic and rhetorical section, dominated by a romantic and spiritualistic view of life and the world. It is an unmitigated exaltation of love and nature, taken as an idyllic realm. A typical dialogue runs as follows: Margherita asks: > Where are we going? To love each other. And what are those fireflies doing? They love each other. And all those stars? They love each other. God, how beautiful the night is! It is love that adorns it . By page 71, the temptation to abandon the book is strong. The second part recounts the military life of Vincenzo D. Just as the two lovers resolve to marry, Vincenzo is called to arms. In pages of great efficacy, the narrative chronicles the individual and social transformation of a person forced to endure military discipline. Anyone who has completed military service cannot fail to recognize themselves in the author's words: > the drills, the march, the measured and mechanical motion, the deafening cadence of the drum, the novelty of the uniform, the harshness of command, and the discipline daze his mind, divert it from serious and sustained reflection, create new needs, new ideas, new semblances. The good have become bad, the bad worse, the worse wicked . Vincenzo's military life takes a turn when he is summoned to fight in the Crimean War. The very casus belli invoked by the author is of such futility that it constitutes in itself a critique of the absurdity of armed conflict: a Russian prince refuses to pay a visit to the Turkish minister and strolls through the streets of Constantinople with "whip in hand." This section of the book features the description of the Battle of the Chernaya: it feels like watching a modern special-effects film and, at once, a battle from the *Iliad*. Mangled bodies, severed heads, blood, and devastation are depicted with such chromatic force that one visualizes them as if in a painting. The narrative reaches its peak impact when nature itself (here no longer benign, but man's adversary) takes part in the battle: > the sea casts back upon the shore the masts, the rigging, the corpses. A gigantic wave, which seems to reabsorb into itself all the other waves of the ocean, draws near slow and majestic to the shore. A long line of shipwrecked men appears atop it, thrashing their chests and arms: they feel the ground beneath their feet, but the wave pressing behind them surges forward, breaks over them, sweeps them away, and drags them back onto the high surface of the sea . Yet Vincenzo manages to survive, having not yet killed anyone, buried as he was beneath a heap of corpses. Upon regaining consciousness, he faces an enemy soldier and, much like in Fabrizio De André's *Canzone di Piero*, he is forced to kill him, only to rush to beg his forgiveness and realize that the slain soldier > was handsome, with a beauty at once virile and gentle; he had blond, ringleted hair, a broad and serene brow . On the verge of death, the soldier asks Vincenzo, "Why did you kill me?" At that point, the protagonist resolves to desert and claim his freedom: > I had thrown down the gauntlet to humanity; I had nothing with me but my conscience: how was I to sustain that struggle? The third part is the descent into madness, rooted in the homicide. By now, the narrative devolves into philosophy and a collection of aphorisms, in some instances nonsensical. A trenchant declaration against war and, above all, against military life clearly emerges, while a pantheistic worldview now prevails. The whole degenerates into a confused political manifesto. The author relies on a narrative framing device (Vincenzo D. recounts to the writer, who in turn recounts to a friend), which, rather than enlivening the reading, contributes to weighing it down, as the tale unfolds entirely in the first person in the form of a narration: a narration that often serves as an occasion for tedious philosophical digressions that drag down the narrative pace. The bombastic, emphatic style, heavily laden with adjectives, frequently makes for a turgid read. Why not read it? It is sufficient to visit a public library and confine oneself to the pages depicting military life and the great Battle of the Chernaya (forty pages in all).