The Italian publishing phenomenon that humorously resurrects the shadows of the Years of Lead terrorism.

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When asked about his future as a teenager, Dario Ferrari (Viareggio, 43 years old) replied that he wanted to be a messiah. Not because he had excessive ambitions, but because it was an effective way to end the conversation without having to respond with the truth: that he had no idea. Today, he thinks it’s great that a young person just out of high school has the same doubts. “When my students tell me they don’t know what to do with their lives, I think it’s wonderful. It’s an excellent starting point because it allows them to explore possibilities,” says the writer and high school teacher. Libros del Asteroide has just published in Spain his novel Recess Is Over (translated by Carlos Gumpert), which became a genuine publishing phenomenon in Italy.

Uncertainty is the starting point of this satire featuring Marcello, a 30-year-old man who has been unable to make a single important decision in his life. He repeats to himself as a mantra that he has plenty of time to “be complete” (alluding to the famous phrase by Italo Calvino, “sometimes one thinks they are incomplete and is just young”). The reality is that he is a professional procrastinator, taking over a decade to graduate in Letters. When time begins to press, and his father pressures him to take over the family bar, he wins a scholarship for a doctoral program at the university.

Recess Is Over starts as a sharp critique of an academic world that is ruthless towards outsiders who, like Marcello, do not play by the rules. A world that Ferrari knows well, as he too, like his protagonist, completed three years of doctoral studies at the University of Pisa. “It was clear to me from the beginning that I wasn’t going to stay in that world. I did nothing to achieve it, and no one took a particular liking to me to mentor me. But it was a mutual agreement divorce; no one suffered,” the writer affirms.

Nonetheless, those three years studying post-structuralist French philosophy were well spent. “Since no one had much hope in my work, they let me travel a lot. I spent some time in the United States and in Paris, with no one expecting anything from me.” The stories and conversations he experienced during his doctoral phase were one of the main inspirations for the novel, although Ferrari never wanted to focus his story on this aspect.

His starting point was, in fact, the Italian terrorism of the 1970s. The need to investigate that dark decade in Italian history, which culminated in the assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, gave rise to the parallel plot of Recess Is Over. “As a history teacher, I realize that when we arrive in class at the years of lead, there’s something I don’t manage to convey to my students,” he explains. “I couldn’t understand how the desire to free oneself, to overcome exploitation, ended up with blood being spilled in the streets.”

“I wondered if I really had the right to write a historical novel about this period. I am not an expert, nor a witness, nor a historian. So I decided that this story would be told by Marcello, someone who doesn’t fully understand it either and who has even more limited tools than I do.” When choosing a topic for the thesis, Professor Sacrosanti—whose name leaves no doubt about the power he wields at the faculty—assigns him to investigate a certain Tito Stella, a virtually unknown young writer-terrorist who died in prison. The character, born from Ferrari’s imagination, moves in the periphery of armed struggle, far from the big cities like Rome or Milan where terrorist groups usually operated.

Conflicting Generations

When Marcello starts rummaging through Tito Stella’s letters, the contrast between the two generations becomes evident. And although the differences weigh more heavily than the similarities, both characters, separated by fifty years of history, share a disillusionment about the future. Tito was taken by terrorism and prison. Marcello and his university classmates, by power struggles and the crushing precariousness of the academic world. “I am convinced that Italy is not a country for young people. There is a very clear attitude towards them: they are told to stay in their place and wait, hoping that something will happen someday. But for many, that something never comes,” Ferrari acknowledges.

When the book was published in Italy, Ferrari was prepared to face criticism from both worlds. It came mostly from the academic world, eager to decipher who the professor at the University of Pisa was that inspired the character of Sacrosanti. “I haven’t received criticism regarding terrorism, neither from the right nor the left. I don’t know if that’s good or bad,” he jokes. Probably, he acknowledges, the casual tone of the novel and having placed the story away from the main scenes helped him avoid criticism from those who were involved in politics during those years.

Two years later, Ferrari still hasn’t resolved the issue of how to talk to his students about terrorism. And it’s not because they lack interest in history. “They find it easy to understand why someone would be willing to die in the 19th century for a constitution, or to fight fascism. But they can’t grasp how, fifty years ago, someone could kill another person out of the almost delusional conviction that there was a civil war underway,” he explains. He also acknowledges that this is a widespread problem.

— Can we talk about an open wound in Italy?

— I think we rather chose to repress it. We wanted to quickly close that experience. And that’s something we do frequently in Italy. Even with fascism. We tell ourselves it was just a parenthesis, a temporary deviation that we can pretend didn’t happen. But it was 20 years of history that we are still dragging along.