Attraverso l’immaginario: figure e percezioni della ‘nera’ di Buzzati

[Machine translation] The tragedy of the night meter Giuseppe De Blasi, the robbery of Via Montenapoleone, the arrest of the Cavallero gang: the cases that the chronicler Dino Buzzati presents to the public of readers of the Corriere della Sera in the articles of the Sixties that we chose to examine as significant samples1 embrace the city of Milan in all its topographic and social extension and involve a varied human phenomenology in which the weight of the crowd does not deprive individuals of their clear contours. Streets, apartments, barracks, bars, courts, illuminated by livid lights or shrouded in nighttime gloom, constitute the pieces of a scenario of real events and characters returned with photographic precision and respect for the brevitas required by the journalistic genre. The representation of these chronicles, however, is far from impersonal: on the contrary, the presence of the writer's ego, of his ethos that judges, comments, ironizes or sympathizes, pervades every line. A narratological analysis attentive to the procedures for setting the narrator's voice and focusing can verify how the writing of the 'black' translates the visual, memorable or imaginative perceptions of the witness into verbal figures, and how vice versa the act of reading restores the vividness of the images to the writer's words, in a circularity consubstantial to Buzzi's multifaceted creative personality.