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Giorgio Voghera

I am a dinosaur. A scrawny and malnourished dinosaur, maybe, a dwarf specimen, but a dinosaur nonetheless. […] I don’t belong to my generation, but to the generation of my father. There were very few, among my peers, I managed to communicate with. Most of my generation bowed to Fascism (at least until the imminence of its collapse); if only I could have, on my business card I would have written G.V., antifascist. Not insurance broker, not writer, not socialist, not free thinker, not Italian, not Jew, not Triestine: maybe Martian, and, most of all, antifascist. Mine was not a political persuasion, or a belief, it was an allergy, that congested my brain day and night and did not manifest (I feel shame in saying this, but it’s the truth) in any practical action: just hate, fear, and an odd clairvoyance, that made me foresee the most terrible catastrophes (still lesser, though, than those that actually happened).

[From Giorgio Voghera, Il direttore generale, L’asterisco, Trieste 1974]

Giorgio Voghera was born in Trieste in 1908, son of two middle-class Socialist sympathisers. As an 18-year-old he was hired by RAS. He worked for this company until his retirement in 1962, with the exception of a ten year hiatus during the racial persecutions and the Second World War. Behind this apparently ordinary biography, however, hides one of the finest observers, as well as writers and essayists, of last century’s Trieste.

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