Agnese Pini: “That winter afternoon where I discovered that my father had been a priest”

On a winter afternoon, A curious girl rummaged in a drawer in the parents’ room while the big ones are shopping. Not too hidden, find a photographic album with a red cover: the sheet. There is his father dressed as a priestwears the green and gold sacred vestments, inside a church. It happened to Agnese Pinidirector of Nazionale Nazionale (the group that brings together the day, the nation and the rest of the Carlino), recently appointed president of the Longanesi publishing house. The director told the story of her family in the book Truth is a fire (Garzanti).

Until then, in which He was 13 years oldhe had always known that his family was composed of the parents Adriano and Mira, Graduates in Literature in Pisaboth teachers, and by the older brothers of her, Barbara and Flavioadopted in Peru. The same evening of the discovery, while everyone was in the kitchen for dinner, Agnese Pini asked the question: “Dad, is it true that you were a priest?”. In the book he says he saw his father’s face “in shattered, the red cheeks, those narrow eyes and those lips narrow and without a smile, lips that precede the crying”.
The reaction of the girl at the beginning was refusal: “I didn’t want to be the priest’s daughter”. He wanted to resume life before, when his father was only a professor of letters with dark hair and thick glasses, who taught in the Institute of Accounting in Carrara. Then he tried to reconstruct the story of his father and, therefore, also of his family. At 16, in the summer, He decided to enter as a voluntary archivist in the Sarzana seminar librarywhere the parent had studied: “I thought of my father, in those corridors, at my age of that time: 16 years of age, 16 years old”.

In the book he also traces peasant childhood of him, spent in Novegina, a village that no longer exists, and then the masses in the parish of Vezzano in the province of La Spezia. He had known his future wife at the University of Pisa, faculty of letters, during the preparation of the university thesis. The writing of the book for Agnese Pini was a discovery not only of the story of his father but also of his. He explained: “I immediately thought:” I don’t want my father to be a priest, I would like a normal father, like everyone else “, because at thirteen years of age you just want to comply”. But then he prevailed over time, the desire for understanding: “I felt the need to answer the key question: Why did my father left everything? Why did he abandon a vocation that he felt so strong? The answer, which may seem trivial, but that for me was not at all, is that he did it for my mother’s love. Not a temptation, as is often said by blaming the woman to be “temptress”, but a deep love. And so now, with this book, I was able to tell my parents: “Yes, now at 40 I understood it: you have chosen for love”».