Giana Anguissola, "Violetta la timida"

Giana Anguissola (Travo, Piacenza 1906 — Milan 1966) begins writing at the age of sixteen, collaborating with the “Corriere dei Piccoli” on which she publishes novels and short stories. Her most famous novel is “Violetta la Timida” from 1963, which wins the Bancarellino prize.

Violetta is nicknamed by her classmates “meek violets”, she walks with her eyes downcast and her ears perpetually on fire, because she suffers from “acute coniglitis”, what today probably a psychologist would define social phobia.

One day she is called by the school principal: the journalist Giana Anguissola herself is looking for a girl who is good at composing and she is, she is studious, creative, intelligent, ambitious, but clumsy like all shy people.

Anguissola — who from that moment on Violetta will call Mrs. A. — asks her to write pieces for teenagers in the “Corriere dei Piccoli”, recounting her own simple life as a normal girl, between home, school, parents, grandfather Oreste, the fat and clumsy friend Terentius, the unpleasant companion Calligaris, the first parties among little girls. Realizing immediately how shyness and anxiety affect every performance of Violetta and condition her life, Mrs. A. advises her, or rather requires her, to do everything that scares her, facing the obstacles, freeing herself from the chronic avoidance syndrome.

Thus it will be that Violetta, from being inhibited, will almost turn into a bully, founding the “club of the timid” (today it would be a Facebook group) to help those who have her own problem. Here is an army of unsuspected ones — including her friend / aspiring boyfriend Terentius —that joins her club and invades the city, an army willing to do anything to overcome anxieties and fears.

Apart from the improbability that this miraculous recovery takes place, especially in the case of social phobia, if the book captured us at the time for its funny, easy, ironic style, today’s reinterpretation offers us an insight into the educational world of the early sixties, who considered itself modern and progressive but was, in reality, still rigid, influenced by the Catholic Church and the ministerial programs of the then ruling DC, a school where religion was spoken almost every day, where stories of saints and martyrs were told.

In the brief introduction to the author’s life and work in the Mursia edition of 1970, we read, in fact, that in Anguissola:

The uplifting intent is evident and scattered everywhere, especially at the end of each chapter, which she presents as a life lesson.

However, that was a clean world, full of hope, where everything seemed to move towards an improvement in society, where the adjective “modern” was synonymous with progress and civilization. The economic boom was matched by ever higher expectations, mass schooling, means of transport for everyone, holidays, refrigerators, cars, supermarkets, industries that hired daily, emigration from the countryside to the city. (And the difference between city and countryside will be the topic of the sequel, “Violetta’s extraordinary holidays”).

I like to turn to that distant and vanished world every now and then and remember it as the only season of total hope experienced by my nation.