Discovery of the World: A Political Awakening in the Shadow of Mussolini

By Luciana Castellina

Coming of age and political consciousness in turbulent times.

Luciana Castellina is one of Italy's most prominent left intellectuals and a cofounder of the newspaper il manifesto. In this coming-of-age memoir, based on her diaries, she recounts her political awakening as a teenage girl in Fascist Italy—where she used to play tennis with Mussolini's daughter—and the subsequent downfall of the regime. Discovery of the World is about war, anti-Semitism, anti-fascism, resistance, the belief in social justice, the craving for experience, travel, political rallies, cinema, French intellectuals and FIAT workers, international diplomacy and friendship. All this is built on an intricate web made of reason and affection, of rational questioning and ironic self-narration as well as of profound nostalgia, disappointment and discovery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso
• Release date: May 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781686591

Luciana Castellina

Luciana Castellina has been a leading figure of the Italian Left since the 1960s. She co-founded the Partito di Unit� Proletaria per il communismo (PdUP) and the Movimento dei Comunisti Unitari (CU). She was a member of the European parliament from 1979 to 1999 and has been at different times the editor of Nuovo Generazione, il manifesto and Liberazione.

Reviews for Discovery of the World

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The distinguished left-wing journalist and politician Luciana Castellina was prompted to write this book late in life when she came across her teenage diary for the years 1943-47, opening with an incongruous scene where the news of Mussolini's fall from power comes through as she is playing tennis with his daughter at the holiday resort of Riccione (they had been classmates at school in Rome), and closing with her decision to join the Communist Party in October 1947. She takes us through the diary — sometimes quoting herself, more usually paraphrasing — commenting with ill-concealed amusement on her middle-class, teenage naivety and slow progress towards understanding the dramatic historical events she was living through and gaining some sort of political enlightenment, something that only really came to her when she answered a call for young people from around the world to volunteer to help rebuild Tito's Yugoslavia, and found herself building a railway line in Bosnia. One of Castellina's grandfathers came from a prominent Trieste Jewish family — she describes how life suddenly changed for her Jewish relatives after the German occupation and how her mother had to fill their Rome house up with clandestine old ladies from Trieste.The title is very apt: this is a fantastic book about the process of growing up and coming to understand what kind of world we are living in. Not many of us go on to live our adult lives with her kind of commitment to changing that world for the better, but I'm sure we all have a moment somewhere in our lives when we feel we could do that.