Let us hope that the verdict on none of the great souls who have preceded them ever falls to posterity. Usually posterity is not equal to the judgment, and sometimes not even to the inheritance. Above all when it is not a question of some Napoleon or other, one of those who worsen history instead of improving society, but of loftier and purer people, more courageous and generous, who then, when they die – as the proverb goes – are the best of those who depart. Usually they are artists or sages or saints, and sometimes they are marked by a blend, as harmonious as possible, of the three vocations of life and faith. Aldo Capitini was a religious man, an educator and a poet. A figure of national importance and international standing but – in the smallness of the city of Perugia and for the span of the short century just past (still “in the running”, moreover, given that the new millennium is struggling to assert itself) – Capitini was the chief protagonist of culture and politics, besides having been – and still being, with every certainty – the most intelligent and good of all of us, his fellow citizens.
After his death, marked at the cemetery by a few dozen people and a scanty handful of students (in ’68, the year of grace of the students!), the city was uncertain as to what to say and what to do, conscious of the importance of this son of hers, but also mindful of not having been too close to him. Or perhaps it would be better to say, not too “open”. And yet, almost at once and for all the decades to come, it did not stint on honours and celebrations, remembrances and distinctions, dedicating to him schools and streets and statues and villas, each time trying to explain to itself and to others, “Capitini, who was he?”
To this question there has never been a strong and shared answer; instead it has always been preferred to reiterate the query and thus to renew ceaselessly the discovery of the most famous unrecognised man of the city and of the whole region. Each for himself and none for all, everyone has boasted of knowing, or worse has gloried in recognising, something particular, unpublished and finally personal. Thus, amid anecdotes and parables, fragments of history and of philosophy, comments of politics and elements of religion, one ends up pouring onto Capitini, the open one, the closed character and the standoffish manner of his city and his people. Thus his surprising readiness to meet everyone, to frank discussion, to shared action, disguises itself as reticence and is handed down as though it were a secret. Thus his simplicity becomes arduous complexity, his clear observations are approached as contradictions and, of necessity, only the scribes feel authorised to speak of him. And sometimes the Pharisees too.
And beginning with the Pharisees, one cannot but underline how the peace march, Perugia – Assisi, of 1961, was his only initiative to have enjoyed fame and therefore continuity, albeit in the diversity of its forms and sometimes of its contents too. Today things and cards have changed, and perhaps it is right that it should be so, but we have reached the point of a paradoxical reversal – as if one were proceeding from Assisi to Perugia – since by now the whole of Aldo’s garden is unhesitatingly attributed to the friars, naturally after separating the wheat from the tares (the burden falling to the readers to establish who sowed what). Within living memory, one also recalls (before the friars, in the days of the comrades) a march for once entitled not to peace but “For the Regions” – obviously in electorally suspect times. The word “openness” too passed rapidly from sainthood to the infantry, becoming the qualifying adjective of the statute of the Region of Umbria, just as the noun “participation”, with its rare moments and its miserly instruments, never fails to link itself back to Capitini as its glorious forebear or inspiring bard. By contrast his C.O.S. and his C.O.R. had no following or revival; his newspapers and his initiatives, when they did have a following thanks to the obstinate tenacity of nonviolent minorities, had no support. I also recall a belated imprisonment of Pietro Pinna, already elderly but not yet filed away as a “conscientious objector”, to which the only reaction was a mimeographed leaflet distributed by four or at most six hands, under the windscreen wipers of parked cars (entitled, as usual, “Who is Pietro Pinna?”).
But continuing with the scribes – and thus counting myself in without further ado – there is the matter of the preservation and dissemination of his works, which, in the case of Capitini, truly have the broad and
full sense of action. Even when one speaks exclusively of his writings: a boundless output of articles, interventions, letters, which form an ordered and tireless nebula of acts that envelops and finally explains his major books, those devoted to the systematisation and deepening of his thought. To reduce it to philosophy is as wrong as to reduce it to politics. To break, that is, the relationship between reflection and intervention means failing to understand the most authentic and effective contribution of Aldo Capitini, or worse, refusing to accept his lesson. That this should happen is, at bottom, predictable in times when Memory mocks Compresence, but it becomes unforgivable when the severing of the bond between thought and action is undertaken – certainly inadvertently – even by those who have taken on the task of giving continuity to his work, or rather, more presumptuously, of enhancing it into a voluminous (albeit interrupted) “opera omnia” and redeeming it from the minority status and the fragmentation in which it had chosen to generate and to spend itself.
The Foundation that deals with the immaterial heritage of Aldo Capitini was born at once under the sign of a dissent and, at the same time, of a conciliation. As is natural and all too human, the closest and dearest friends always take part in the contest of esteem and affections, after the loss of the highest and deepest point of reference and of feeling. Alongside the Foundation there was therefore born an association named the Friends of the Foundation, out of distinctions and with distances too personal, and all too legitimate, to leave room for curiosity or a right to inquiry. And yet, it is a fact that makes one reflect on the centrality of Capitini, who was evidently the very opposite of centralism, that is, radiating and paradoxically centrifugal. And still more thought-provoking is the constant distancing of his many friends and admirers, all or almost all partly in disagreement and, on the whole, always in discussion with Aldo: clear proof that he was a great friend but, above all, a true “master”.
After the generation of the friends, the Foundation wished to give itself another life but not another way. Following the commemorative anxieties of a community that never understood him, as proverbially happens to all prophets, and underestimating the fading of the affective and spiritual (and even political) bonds that had inevitably nourished his contemporary friends and direct followers, it risks becoming more and more an academy. What is more, with a disadvantageous vocation, this time centripetal, also in the sense of an activity to be consumed preferably on site, to be devoted to the university and to the city of Capitini. But the university and the city were never his, despite his own wishes. Honours not granted and loves not returned – not, at least, with the same intensity with which they were alive in Capitini’s soul – marked his exceptionality and, in the end, his solitude. And, judging by what one sees, they continue to mark it. Thus, in the recent celebrations of the seven-hundredth anniversary of the University of Perugia, an almost deserted municipal hall attended the day dedicated to Capitini, with the Mayor who, in the end, kept asking himself, frankly bewildered and moved, who on earth this man was.
Deep down, this question is sincere, and it serves to keep alive the curiosity, if not the admiration, for the best of us all. I recall – just to add an anecdote myself – that in that same Sala dei Notari, at the time when it was still the hall of the free assemblies of the city and the university, Capitini had climbed onto the stage and spoken words so forceful as to make the Rector of the day walk out with his entire retinue. It was the not-too-distant 1965, and the left-wing students had organised a debate following the staging of Rolf Hochhuth’s “The Deputy”, the drama that made public the accusation against Pius XII and his silence on the extermination of the Jews. I was barely a high-school student, and it was the first time in my life that I had seen this little man with the thick glasses and the high-pitched voice and, amazed by his power more than by his knowledge, I asked the older ones who this man was. What, you don’t know who Capitini is? they said to me, adding nothing, as if not knowing him were a disgrace.
There, ever since then I have remained convinced that it is a disgrace not to know Aldo Capitini, but it is also true that each one must come to know him for himself and yet for everyone. Let us therefore be wary of anyone who explains him to us or spins a tale about him (as I have just done myself). Let us instead go back to reading his writings, but without forgetting to open ourselves first to understanding and then to pass without hesitation to discussion. An intense discussion among ourselves but, above all, with him. It is not difficult: Aldo is compresent and – as I have already said – has the habit and even the desire to speak with everyone.

Piergiorgio Giacchè was professor of Anthropology of Theatre and Performance at the University of Perugia. Among his publications: Lo spettatore partecipante. Contributi per un’antropologia del teatro (Guerini e Associati, Milan, 1991); L’altra visione dell’altro. Una equazione fra antropologia e teatro (Ancora del Mediterraneo, Naples, 2004). He is a member of the editorial board of “Lo straniero”, a journal founded and directed by Goffredo Fofi.