"L'ALBERO DEL RICCIO"

(THE TREE OF THE HEDGEHOG)
presentation of the new edition of the book of Antonio Gramsci.
 
The 65th anniversary of the death of Antonio Gramsci is the occasion in which the association Onlus "Antonio Gramsci House Museum" reprint the volume "The tree of the hedgehog" with preface of Bianca Pitzorno and illustrations of Marino Zucca.
The volume is introduced in the context of the Cultural Month.

The new edition of “The tree of the hedgehog” constitutes an important achievement for the association Antonio Gramsci House Museum, that has his head office in Ghilarza, in the house where Anthony Gramsci lived when he was a child and matured experiences that were at the base of his ideas as a man and as a citizen.
This new edition puts again in circulation a text, disappeared for a long time from the bookstores and that cannot be found even in the libraries, that has had the worth to approach the adolescents to Antonio Gramsci, in coincidence with a fortunate season of studies and debates around his thought and his work. 
His pages have traced an unknown image of Gramsci: fanciful child, friend of the animals, animated by the wish to satisfy curiosity and to give answer to so many questions; builder of wheelbarrows and boat, he knew perfectly the whole nautical nomenclature; interested to the studies, that according to Gramsci is fundamental to improve the human being; man that is intellectual, political, teacher, and at the same time careful guide to the growth of his own distant children; prisoner that doesn't renounce to say what he thinks about themes so important to him.
This book born, on concession of the Editori Riuniti (Reunited Publishers), when the debates on our author and on the greatness of his thought and his work are only a memory. 
Him since he was a child he faces situations of life that mould his character and when he will be an adult they’ll induce him to fight close to the weakest for the affirmation of the equal human dignity. His ideas, his engagement beside the workers, his actions of struggle make him inconvenient for the fascist regime, for whom is an enemy that have to be destroyed physically and intellectually. Is remembered the sentence of the president of the special court "... for twenty years we must prevent this brain from working... ".
Condemned to incarceration, away from the struggle and from the family affections, sick and lonely, he isn’t won from his condition of prisoner. He offers to the whole humanity an idea of freedom testified by his writings and his the letters; it doesn't abdicate the activism that has characterized his way of living; he is tireless in expressing his thought on the themes of the time and in maintaining contacts with the world of the men that is beyond the bars. World to which is given a universal inheritance, that every man should exploit today.
For adolescents that begin their life and begin to compare with its difficulties, Gramsci can be a great example, to teach to live every aspect of the quotidian life with coherence, with the consciousness that diligence, determination, effort, and sacrifice strengthens the man and helps him to live in harmony with the world.
Gramsci’s message on the study as hard work, seriousness and engagement, is still actual, in a time – our time - in which are the success, the money, the physical beauty are the only values.
In republishing “The tree of the hedgehog” we dedicate it especially to the adolescents and the young people, because in many letters contained in this book, Gramsci express a real pedagogy, that maybe should be considered old; instead we consider his ideas still actual today, because the letters that the prisoner Anthony Gramsci sends to his children or to his nephews are a real hymn to creative imagination, a quality typical of  the children, but also that feature that more then others faculty of the adolescent age risks to be smothered from the technological games that the modern society makes propose to them.