Dalle macerie. Cronache sul fronte meridionale

Alessandro Leogrande was a great intellectual of our time. He wrote to fight against borders and shipwrecks, caporalato and ignorance, bad faith and injustice. This volume collects all the work he dedicated to Taranto, his city. A perfect city, as Pasolini called it in 1959. New Taranto, old Taranto and around the two seas.
“The steel center cost almost four hundred billion lire. It ended up occupying first 600 and then 1,500 hectares, an area twice the size of the entire city. From then on it was the city that grew and shaped itself around the factory. It was the times and rhythms of the factory that marked the times and rhythms of the urban fabric.” A city that today is also the dormitory of Ilva workers, the cathedral in the desert that makes its workers the guinea pigs of new labor relations, in which the social divide is widening, while rights are increasingly difficult to defend.
“Whether the factory remains in place or is closed down,” Leogrande wrote, “whether it is sold off to an Italian string of companies or to some rising Asian multinational, Taranto must still get out of the ‘steel monoculture’ that has done nothing but feed from its own bowels over the past half century.”
“Only the telling of the margins and fragments makes it possible to open a rift and understand something. To understand how old things and new things intersect with each other.”