Books and Museum, March 23, 2025. March of resilient women writers
(Pasquale Giustiniani), Books and Museum session dedicated to various authors and writers of La Valle del tempo editions, Naples
1. From engineering to social and economic phenomena. 
Engineers describe resilience as a mechanical property, defining it as the energy absorbed by a body, as a consequence of elastic deformations. Resilience should not be confused with tenacity, which is, instead, the energy absorbed by a body before breaking. Translated into anthropic terms, we are more tenacious the more we are able to withstand (reacting) the difficulties and hardships to which existence subjects us. The term of engineering origin, resilience, then had great economic and political fortune, when the PNRR - National Recovery and Resilience Plan - was launched, also in Italy. It adapts to our peninsula the instrument or device, adopted by the European Union, within the framework of the Next Generation EU, namely the Recovery and resilience facility (RRF), designed to address the challenges related to the pandemic crisis and the consequent slowdown of the European economies. In essence, the term "resilience" is used to indicate a new financial instrument, aimed at supporting the recovery in the Member States - governed by Regulation no. 2021/241/EU - with an initial allocation and continuous updates. Italy, as is known, is the country that has received the largest allocation. A specific Table, available on the Internet Portal (https://temi.camera.it/leg19/pnrr/obiettivitraguardi.html), illustrates, for each of the six-monthly implementation semesters of the PNRR, the amounts of the six-monthly installments to be paid by the European Commission, together with the total number of milestones and objectives for each semester, the achievement of which is conditional on the disbursement of the corresponding installment. Ultimately, these are advances on loans: from the point of view of the states, there will, in fact, be payments depending on the type of financing received. Individual countries can in fact access the funds through two financial instruments: loans (grants); subsidies (loans). While the term recovery - within the acronym PNRR - aims to highlight the positive impact that the Plan's interventions should have in the coming years from an economic and financial point of view, in the form of greater social well-being, better quality of life and public services, greater competitiveness of Italian companies on international markets, the term resilience, on the other hand, wanted above all to represent the commitment to react to the negative effects of the pandemic by all the actors involved, therefore by individual citizens, administrations and public bodies, the business world, by adopting a positive, proactive and proactive attitude. The term has been exported to various fields, to mean the ability to react in the face of crises. On the occasion of the Summit of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, on 16 May 2024, entitled "From climate crisis to climate resilience", Pope Francis stated: "The climate crisis requires a symphony of cooperation and global solidarity. The work must be symphonic, harmoniously, all together. By reducing emissions, educating lifestyles, innovative financing, and using proven nature-based solutions, we are therefore strengthening resilience, especially drought resilience." By then, the term resilience had entered the jargon of the magisterium as a synonym for cooperation, a common effort to react, and global solidarity.
2. Resilient women in the pages of la Valle del Tempo. 
The session of Books and Museum today examines some literary and artistic products by women authors; and it does so explicitly in the month of March, also to particularly remember National Women's Day: celebrated for the first time on February 28, 1909 in the United States at the initiative of the American Socialist Party, this date was chosen in memory of the strike of thousands of New York shirtmakers who, the year before, had forcefully demanded better working conditions.
The texts we are talking about today in the Sunday session of Books and Museum, tell reasons, stories, female and male incentives for a thoughtful reaction to the negative effects of existence and human relationships. ((⏱️=1000))The short stories by Floriana Coppola, finally all collected in the same volume, take us to the heart of what we call restlessness or disturbance. The book ends with some verses, which speak of life that rises again, despite everything: «on the unmade bed as if it were a cobalt blue sky((⏱️=400)) I am alive in your dirty sky((⏱️=400)) in your eyes as if inside a sky-blue prison» (page 201). Those who venerate, more than the printed books, the people who tell, will also read with pleasure the photos and stories of Giuliana Molinaro and Antonio Jacopo Molino, who bring Luigi Molinaro del Chiaro (among other things, a friend of Benedetto Croce and Niccolò Tommaseo) out of unjust oblivion: ((⏱️=400)) «a cultured, curious man, lover of Neapolitan tradition», who «left so much to Naples, to Italy, to the many emigrants abroad who appreciated him especially in America, Argentina, etc.» (page 19).
The dialogues, between free verses and excluded words, by Rita Felerico, not without notable photographic references, also tell and use verse to express a strong feeling of rebirth, reaction and recovery, which was experienced in the cells of the women's prison in Pozzuoli. A feeling accompanied by a «passionate desire to react to the sad and anguished sensation of having become ‘impotent’, in choices and actions, in a society that has erased every word or feeling that smells of humanity» (page 6).
Fabiana Frascà’s scattered poems express, in turn, the conviction, which was already Goethe’s, that “only when forced within constraints does the master reveal himself” (from the initial epigraph of the anthology). Among the “Last”, as some significant verses sing, we are faced with the proof of the movement of resilience that moves the feminine poetic soul, certain that the Human also manifests itself in «Who will dissolve peace within the world/ but will come out without any more counts, fearless in front of the end of the world» (page 99).
Even in the praise of Penelope's canvas, the same poet, in a single interrupted song, which was highlighted in fragments (as Antonio Spagnuolo writes in the Preface), highlights her inner self, giving voice to a resilient woman of myth and narration: Penelope, or the woman who represents the "intimate and interior time and in some way represents the eternity of the dualism that governs the world ... the male and female modus operandi ... Eldoradi and Charybdis" (page 7). 
The photos, in turn, accompany the narratives dedicated to Pizzofalcone by a large group of Authors, also proposing to an inhabitant of the Neapolitan neighborhood to enter the images of Nando Calabrese; meanwhile, Diana Pezza Borrelli tells of the many different people who populate those streets and our roads, hoping for comparisons and intersections between: «“different” in culture, faith and tradition» (page 83). Valeria Jacobacci’s “historical novel” enters, and takes us into the sixteenth century, the soul and journey of Settimia, a friend of Cardinal Farnese, who in the publishing house’s study browses “dangerous” pages and outlines the cardinal’s doubts and promises: «What does it matter to become pope? Alessandro asks himself this while walking in the gardens, in the silent cloisters, in the frescoed rooms of the Palaces, letting his gaze wander over seas and mountains during his travels» (page 143). Carla Coppola takes us on a journey into the world of disability, giving strength and hope «to those who, like her, have been victims of nature… and must defend their rights so as not to feel marginalized and discriminated against or seen with “pity”» (page 87). Fosca Pizzaroni instead collects and relaunches the women of the Southern Resistance. Resistance, which Hanna Ardendt considered her “treasure” . In these pages, the “denied partisan”, with a specific focus on the territory of Terra di Lavoro between 1927 and 1945, is presented and saved from oblivion, not without the precious list (almost 50 pages!), which exhibit the essential traits of the dozens and dozens of women, combatants and non-combatants, fallen in the liberation struggle, both unrecognized and recognized by the specific Commission operating at the Council of Ministers (pages 249 to 295).
3. Conclusion. Looking at Emily Dickinson, Stella Grillo sang: We get used to the dark when the light is off; after the neighbor has held the light that witnesses her farewell, for a moment we move uncertainly because the night remains new to us, but then our sight adjusts to the darkness and we face the road with our heads held high. So it is with vaster darknesses – those nights of the soul in which no moon beckons us, no inner star shows itself…