Travel: a mental map and a world that one might say has vanished

Genius, obsessions, preferences, habits, friendships, loves: rummaging through his library, indulging the disorder of a mental universe of paper never definitively catalogued, digressing, remembering, forgetting, Gianni Sofri has written a book about himself that speaks of other things, in his own style or technique—which one might describe as that of the humble narrative—unfortunately not imitated often enough (Sellerio, 300 pp., 18 euros, in bookshops from 6 October). A splendid memoir, fresh from a powerful and profound old age (Gianni was born in 1936). This “Tempi lunghi, ampi spazi” stems from an avowed curiosity about the lives and stories of others, and one might suspect that a biography – especially if fragmentary – is always less ordinary and predictable than a life itself. On the other hand, the author’s profession or vocation is that of a historian, initially specialising in the Italian Risorgimento. He is also passionate about maps, the vast expanses of the geographical atlas and journeys around the world (other vocations and professions in academia and publishing). History grounded in the earth, time traversing space, the landscape. The book attempts to begin with a bookshelf on the very first page; the ambition of memory is a journey around one’s own room, following the adventurous model of Xavier de Maistre, and we find ourselves immediately in China, in 1973, at the time of the faltering and bloody Cultural Revolution. It is a year after Nixon and Kissinger’s surprise visit, a couple of years after Marshal Lin Piao’s fatal crash in Mongolia – he was President Mao’s closest comrade-in-arms (Lin Biao, the new transliteration). The visit, organized by a Maoist publishing house, carries a touch of the grotesque alongside something humble and endearing: the gift for the distinguished guests is a stone for each of them. A China that no longer exists—and perhaps existed only in the European dream of those years of confused avant-garde. 

Even the conclusion, following a tormented yet admiring tribute to the renegade Arthur Koestler—for Gianni is a communist to his very core, with strong humanitarian and Catholic leanings— but with a mind that keeps sentiment in check in favour of experience; even the ending is once again Chinese, extending to South-East Asia and India, recounting the formation and legendary exploits of the revolutionary elites of the 1920s and 1930s, bringing this meandering yet intimate narrative to a close with intense emotion, and an almost epic touch in its evocation—through Tim Harper’s classic ‘Asia ribelle’ by Tim Harper, of the majority of the planet’s inhabitants rising up against the rule of the colonial empires, led, misled and inspired by Ho Chi Minh, M. N. Roy, Gandhi, Nehru and Chou En-lai, not to mention all the other vagabonds, exiles, fighters and statesmen of the world revolution – a motley crew of adventurers, militants, idealists and assassins who liberated half the world on this side of the ‘colour line’.

Gianni Sofri led a life of discipline and study; study and his methodology are the only true lesson he is willing, with restraint and discretion, to impart. Yet he was a versatile scholar, fickle in his affections – the opposite of a pedant, fortunately for him and for us – a passionate explorer in pursuit of his own intellectual instincts, which led him – for reasons not entirely clear, as he himself admits – to acquire a profound and intense knowledge of the history and geography of the East and Africa. The Normale di Pisa, his academic background, his mentors from Delio Cantimori to Franco Venturi, from Arsenio Frugoni to Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves and Arnaldo Momigliano, his close partnership with Carlo Ginzburg, his forays into bibliomania and bibliophilia, the unbridled imagination fuelled by his book collection, by the determination with which he safeguards and perseveres through every change of residence, every shift in technology, beyond the computer and the use of Google. Everything in his account is linked by politics and international solidarity – the hallmarks of a world that one might say has all but disappeared – ways of feeling, of thinking geographically and of living with grace: the gentle grace of spirit embodied by Gianni Sofri; the political world as it is and as one would wish it to be.