‘America, the pursuit of happiness’, signed by Margherita Sarfatti, was withdrawn from trade in 1937 with the racial laws, traces of that book have been lost. Sixty years after the death of the Venetian intellectual, who had created the myth of the ‘Dux’, the journalist and writer Gianni Scipione Rossi removes him from the damnatio memoriae with the critical essay ‘L’America by Margherita Sarfatti. The last illusion ‘, in bookshops from 28 October for Rubbettino Editore. Margherita Sarfatti has no longer been Mussolini’s lover, for some years. Yet he still deludes himself that he can influence his political choices. It was March 21, 1934 when he embarked in Genoa on the transatlantic ‘Rex’ for the United States. He stays there for three months. He wants to immerse himself in the nation “bigger than the real”, to get a personal idea of it beyond the stereotypes. Welcomed as a highly respected guest, she lectures, speaks on the radio, tries to explain fascism to the Americans and, above all, to President Roosevelt, who receives her in the White House, despite the declared anti-fascism of his wife Eleanor. Upon returning, Margherita tries to convince Benito of the need to forge relations with Washington, in the name of a common civilization, rather than with Hitler’s Berlin. But for the dictator, America “counts for nothing” and he is convinced that, if a new European war were to be unleashed, it would remain neutral. While Mussolini’s pro-Nazi choice is consolidated, Sarfatti therefore entrusts a last desperate and naive attempt to change the course of events to a book. Of those American months Margherita remembers the discoveries made in the “new world”, distant and yet close to Europe and Italy. He appreciates, between lights and shadows, the lifestyle, modernity, the growing role of women, even the department stores, as well as the grandeur of nature, without hiding its problems and defects. A complex world, difficult to understand, warns Sarfatti. On the other hand, he writes, “those who do not undergo the suggestion of jazz, those who do not know the black psalms, those who do not enjoy and suffer from the rhythm right into their bones and marrow, can hardly understand America: I do not think they can love her “. Sarfatti, on the other hand, falls in love with it, also intrigued by that “right to the pursuit of happiness” enshrined in the American Constitution. But perhaps, notes Rossi, vice president of the Ugo Spirito and Renzo De Felice Foundation and member of the Steering Committee of the Abruzzo Institute for the History of the Resistance and Contemporary Italy, “he would not have found the happiness he was looking for in the US”. In America almost everything is fascinating: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, the skyscrapers, the Sierras, the Yosemite valley, the West, the desert, the prairies, the Oceans. But, Sarfatti writes, “here is the sea of my home, the Adriatic; small, but suitable for me; small, but pleasant; small, but mine; therefore I am happy with it, I love it and would not want to change it”. At the end of 1938, however, he will have to choose exile, in South America, because the United States will not want to welcome the former “queen without a crown”. (d Veronica Marino)
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