Il mondo come teatro. Storia e storie nelle narrazioni di Ernesto Ferrero

[Machine translation] Ernesto Ferrero (1938-2023) became known to the general public with the novel N., Premio Strega 2000, which, through the ten months of Napoleon's exile in Elba, explores the intertwining between great history and small individual stories. His entire work as a narrator and essayist demystifies that theater of fictions and instrumental deception to which Official History is so often reduced. Working on the border between different genres and languages, and focusing on the quality of writing that refers to the magisterium of Calvin, Primo Levi and Sciascia, Ferrero has investigated the relationship between the face and the mask, art and life, the individual and the mass, through the extreme cases of excessive men: the monstrous Gilles de Rais-Bluebeard and Francis of Assisi in a hallucinated Middle Ages, Napoleon, Salgari, the American trickster who enchanted the Italians of 1924. With a series of punctual probes, the essay reconstructs this original journey, inserting it into the larger framework of contemporary culture.