Friday, September 18, 2009

Giani Stuparich

An anguished memory of the Hotel Balkan events (see yesterday's post) is narrated by Giani Stuparich (Trieste, 1981 - Rome, 1961) in "Trieste nei miei ricordi".
"I'll never forget that summer afternoon in 1920 when the Balkan was set on fire. [...] In the tragic spectacle of that afternoon I sensed something appalling: the boundaries of that square opened the way to a deadly vision of decay and ruin, as if something much more ghastly than war itself was threatening the foundations of our civilization [...]. The fascists were responding to the cruel events of Split, where officers of the Italian ship Puglia had been beaten up and Gulli, the commanding officer, had been fatally wounded. I had believed that a civilized country had higher aims than that of being violent with even more arbitrary violence, blindly hitting out at innocent people in order to punish the offenders and making a whole nation responsible for the insane acts of only a few of its members. If the Balkan was actually a den of conspirators and Slavic murderers, as was alleged afterwards to justify "the people's anger", if it really was a threat to the quiet city life, couldn't a governor with all the legal powers and local police at his disposal, have expurgated it and made it harmless?
But the truth was that violence, as a brutal method, was in the soul and in the intentions of a group of men that tended to leave the confused mass in order to seize the State power".

4 comments:

amatamari© said...

Splendida

Angela Robak said...

Beautiful and very sympathetically treated piece of sculpture. Such a sad story,though. I suppose with this forum (city Daily Photo) it is easier to take photos of the upside of Life. Thank you for reminding us that real life isn't always so.

Diederick Wijmans said...

A wonderful sculpture remembering those sad moments. Thanks for sharing this with us.

prashant said...

Beautiful and very sympathetically treated piece of sculpture.
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