Adelphi is republishing the complete works of Leonardo Sciascia, but alongside the three expected volumes (two already released) is also bringing out more subtle volumes: the beautiful collection of literary writings End of the carabiniere on horseback, at the beginning of last year ; and now the last book out alive Sciascia, A future memory (if the memory has a future). Curator of all these books is Paolo Squillacioti, who is one of the best philologists novels of his generation and we see: in the sense that his annotations to the texts are exemplary, and very useful when it comes to literary essays, indispensable even when it comes to the articles collected in A future memory, which refer to things and people that many may have forgotten.

These thirty-one articles, published between 1979 and 1988, mainly concern the Mafia and the Tortora case (but Sciascia has time to react to Sofri's arrest in the summer of 1988, and - in a note on the Espresso - a say convinced of his innocence, and there is also a long article in the book on Roberto Calvi: suicide, according to Sciascia, not killed dead). Among the articles on the mafia, those in controversy with Nando Dalla Chiesa are known, who had not liked the fact that Sciascia had criticized the way his father had lived in Palermo, "without protection and precaution" (Dalla Chiesa, according to Sciascia, "He had of himself and of the adversary literary and however 'backward' images"); and those about the "anti-mafia professionals" are well known, followed by controversy with the Anti-Mafia Coordination and with the journalists Eugenio Scalfari and Giampaolo Pansa.

But we can not read or reread A future memory to remember what happened in Italy in the eighties: the perspective of Sciascia is too partial, and to those who do not know or remember the events to have lived them should be advised, first, a good book on the Italian history of the second half of the twentieth century. Nor is it read to decide, after thirty years if and when Sciascia was right, although it is clear that he was often right (certainly on the persecution of Tortora, certainly not, but it is a personal opinion, on the antimafia and on the role and conduct of the judiciary: "I often suspect that the machine of justice is moving in a vacuum or, worse, rolling those who, by distraction of their own or by others' push, find themselves touching it"). Why then?

Ideological armor
For those who have read so many books without really being experts at anything, the essays of Sciascia represent a kind of compensation: the promise, or proof, that an intelligence and a higher culture can have a deeper and truer vision of things of that permitted by specialism. Of course, Sciascia was not the only intellectual of the late twentieth century to talk about the things of the world by looking at them from above, from the speculum of literature and philosophy; but unlike Pasolini and Fortini, Sciascia did not have, to protect him, the armor of an ideology.

This means that no preconceived idea conditioned his movements by giving a course to his ideas: which is particularly appreciated in anisological times as these should be. Sciascia does not read reality through the Marx or Adorno filter: he uses Manzoni, Pirandello, Brancati, Savinio, Stendhal, and uses them not to reproduce their vision of the world but to absorb something of their wisdom. He does not believe that Manzoni is right when he speaks of Providence, he believes he has it when he recognizes in Don Abbondio an emblem of Italian transformism and cowardice.