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"Luciana Castellina is one of Italy's most prominent left intellectuals and a cofounder of the newspaper Il manifesto. In this coming-of-age memoir, based on her diaries, she recounts her political awakening as a teenage girl in Fascist Italy--where she used to play tennis with Mussolini's daughter--and the subsequent downfall of the regime. Discovery of the World is about war, anti-Semitism, anti-fascism, resistance, the belief in social justice, the craving for experience, travel, political rallies, cinema, French intellectuals and FIAT workers, international diplomacy and friendship. All this is built on an intricate web made of reason and affection, of rational questioning and ironic self-narration as well as of profound nostalgia, disappointment and discovery"--… (more)
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One of Castellina's grandfathers came from a prominent Trieste Jewish family — she describes how life suddenly changed for her Jewish relatives after the German occupation and how her mother had to fill their Rome house up with clandestine old ladies from Trieste.
The title is very apt: this is a fantastic book about the process of growing up and coming to understand what kind of world we are living in. Not many of us go on to live our adult lives with her kind of commitment to changing that world for the better, but I'm sure we all have a moment somewhere in our lives when we feel we could do that.