Love between man and woman: everyone has been looking for it, since the time of Adam and Eve. Has anyone ever found it? Reading our literature one would say yes. But today things seem to have gotten particularly complicated. How many people today experience the pain of separations and divorces? How many of these then no longer believe in love?
What does our literature teach us about the world where love still worked?
Female emancipation, a crisis of male identity and the collapse of the family raise many questions. The first of which is: can love still exist between man and woman? Italy has always been the homeland of love. Dante and Beatrice, courtly love, Romeo and Juliet and all the rest they give to the Italians a responsibility. The responsibility of carrying the love between man and woman in the present time. What does our literature teach us then? What does it show us about the world where love still worked?
- Literary loves are all extramarital. Dante and Beatrice, Laura and Petrarca, Paolo and Francesca. All in love and all married ... with someone else. If by love we mean carnal passion, the one confined to the horizon of emotions, literature teaches us that it exists, yes, but only out of wedlock and only for a short time. Perhaps this should make us wonder what we really mean by the word "love": passion, butterflies in the stomach, burning fire or something more delicate and discreet, quiet and modest? And which of the two do we expect from marriage?
- Marriage has little to do with passion. It is enough to read any classic to discover that marriage is historically a contract that two people make. We got married to run a business - the family in fact - based not on kisses and caresses but on exchanges of money and division of tasks. It is not for nothing that marriage means "mater munus", function, duty of the mother and is paired with "pater munus", that is patrimony. Marriage was essentially a pact by which a man guaranteed economic security to a woman, who made a commitment to have and raise children. Not the meeting of two bodies that pursue pleasure together. For that there have always been the figures of lovers and "knights servants" to Byron.
- Men and women are different. In the dynamic of literary love there is always a disparity: the man tries to conquer, the woman does everything to defend herself. A man was successful when he conquered, a woman when he resisted. This is why traditionally a man is considered successful if he has many women and the woman vice versa. Today it seems the opposite. Yet the final result does not seem to gratify anyone.
- Love means sacrifice. Let it be the story of Romeo e Giulietta or that of the Promessi Sposi the indication is the same: love requires a sacrifice. The greatest sacrifice: that of oneself and of everything around us. We think well if we have really sacrificed ourselves in love before starting to complain about the other.
- There is always room for love. At every age there are new colors that the meeting of men and women can discover. From the youthful loves of Moccia to the elderly ones of "Love in the time of cholera" by García Márquez. As adolescents passion drives, as adults reason, as elderly affection. Could love be what is underneath all this flowing?
Everything else needs to be discovered up close.
