Personaggi resistenti. L’immaginario letterario e cinematografico della lotta antifascista

An energetic woman in occupied Rome (Pina from Rome, open city), a child who joins a partisan brigade for fun (Pin from The Path to the Spiders’ Nests), an “ugly” twenty-year-old partisan with “remarkable” eyes (Milton from A Private Affair), a Jewish girl who plays tennis in her garden (Micòl from The garden of the Finzi-Continis), a sixteen-year-old forced to deal with the post-war hardship of former combatants (Mara from Bebo’s girl). On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the Resistance, these powerful narrative and cinematic inventions continue to represent in our imagination the idea of the anti-fascist struggle in its mythical and anti-mythical aspects, collective and private, in its projection toward the future or its retreat into the past. Pina, Pin, Milton, Micòl, and Mara, the Resistance protagonists in this volume, are an essential point of comparison for those who have sought to recount the Resistance in the 2000s. While public discourse has not always succeeded in portraying the partisan struggle in a pluralistic way, literature, film, and comics have succeeded, providing us with a diverse constellation of characters who will be entrusted with the difficult task of continuing to depict the civil war when there are no longer any witnesses capable of remembering it.