In the volume Story of a Southern teacher who was the mother of Aldo Moro (Bompiani 2022) by Renato Morofull professor of Contemporary History who teaches at the Department of Political Sciences of the Roma Tre University, the author, direct nephew of Aldo Moroas the son of his brother Alfredo Carlo, recalls the figure of his grandmother Trust Shins, champion of women’s emancipation, teacher, lecturer and thinker. The book won the FiuggiStoria award in the Men and Stories section.
“I would like to understand, with my little mortal eyes, how we will see each other later. If there was light, it would be beautiful. My love, always feel me with you and hold me close”.
In his last letter written in the prison where the men of the Red Brigades held him after kidnapping him on March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro (Maglie, 23 September 1916 – Rome, 9 May 1978), then President of the Christian Democrats, wrote very sweet words to his wife Noretta, knowing his hours were numbered.
Seeing the movie”Night exterior” directed by Marco Bellocchio, based on the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, starring an extraordinary Fabrizio Gifuni who seems to enter into the soul, thoughts and reasoning of the Christian Democrat statesman, to those who witness the drama taking place, not only the younger generations, but even those who lived through those tormented Years of Lead feel like discovering the man Aldo Moro. Not only learning and remembering his political legacy, his intellectual and fine jurist skills.
This volume is a first step in this direction, because it tells the story of Aldo Moro’s parents, Trust Shins (1879-1939) and Renato Moro (1876-1957), making them re-emerge from that “deep well of the past” as Thomas Mann would have written, where they had been locked up until recently, in those old yellowed papers, which are nothing more than the archives of each family. Fida and Renato come from the petit bourgeois world of the early 20th century, a traditional and provincial universe but in evolution. Both are children of masters and from Southern Italy, she Fida she comes from Calabria, she was born in Cosenza on July 14, 1879, where she spent a difficult and lonely childhood. Renato was born on 15 October 1876 in Ugento, a town at the tip of the Salento peninsula, into a family of small landowners.
“The first bond that united us was the ideal inspiration of humanitarian good”.
Renato and Fida share a humanitarian passion, in fact the school is perceived by these two young pioneers as a mission, an unmissable opportunity to reunify Italy, after all reunified for a few years. If it is true that the social elevator in the third millennium in Italy no longer exists, in the reformist Italy of Giolitti in the early years of the twentieth century, Renato (“delicate and gentle”, “terribly shy” but determined and with granite willpower) and Fida are sure that the studio is able to emancipate the poorest classes of the South and give them a civil conscience.
If Renato was a school inspector, becoming over time a representative figure of public schools at a national level, Fida, a decisive figure in the formation of Aldo Moro, to whom the politician was always very close, after an experience at the local level as a journalist and lecturer, she will give up working in favor of her boyfriend’s will.
“Did I meet you, did you love you right away? No: however, I saw that you distanced yourself from the generality, that you were a solitary man by choice, that you had had to experience the most burning burns in life. I immediately admired your goodness and kindness, I wished – as for all young people I see suffering – that you were happy, that a woman would brighten your path”.
Great love and great intellectual understanding, therefore, between Renato and Fida: their engagement lasted three very long years and it is through the letters that she wrote to him (those from him to her have been lost or perhaps destroyed) that the author exalts the multifaceted personality of this teacher from the South, educator, scholar and thinker, animated by lively and eclectic interests. She is a “new woman”, who in the early twentieth century was able to take advantage of the opportunities offered by school and the world of work to gain dignity and independence. Fida, like many women of the early 20th century, found in her pen a precious tool for emancipation and the conquest of her own right to speak. Passionate, committed, lively woman, rich in culture and spirituality, the photograph of Fida Stinchi on the cover of the volume gives us the face of a young woman between twenty-five and thirty, with a sweet and intense expression, a round face, mouth and well-marked nose, black and fluffy hair, wearing a dark, elegant but severe jacket, the neck of which is wrapped by the high collar of the shirt fastened with a brooch. Immortal portrait of a modern and progressive young woman, with a profound religiosity and whose vivid and intelligent gaze clearly reveals her effort at self-realization in a male-dominated society, firmly convinced that:
“Woman had to find in herself the strength to elevate herself and to conquer that equality that was unjustly contested”.
“Story of a Southern teacher who was the mother of Aldo Moro” by Renato Moro