Ashes

By David Bidussa*

For the second time in a few months, the “Pecora Elettrica” bookstore in the Centocelle neighborhood in Rome has been set on fire. This time it was the evening before its new reopening.
“Nothing like arson embodies total destruction. Earthquakes, as natural events, or the destruction of a city, as a historical phenomenon, leave ruins behind and from these ruins, the story can be reconstructed. From ashes, nothing is reborn, if not the phoenix of myth. This truth was well-known by the elites in power at all times” (Leo Löwenthal, Book Burnings, Treccani 2019).

*David Bidussa is a historian of social ideas.