Il Taccuino

This text is a magazine-style miscellany (feuilleton/journalistic prose with satirical and essayistic sketches) written in Italian and set largely in postwar New York. It opens with a comic allegory: on 29 December 1948 the readers of the Italian-language magazine “Divagando” are imagined as a rain-soaked procession of subscribers, writers, and even furniture packed into crates, as the editorial office relocates from the Rockefeller Center “honeycombs” to a smaller house near Times Square (166 West 48th Street). Named staffers (Elisa Odabella, Maria Crocetti, Mario Ruggeri, Ugo Altalena) finish packing and sorting old letters.

The piece then shifts to polemic and cultural commentary. In “Popov contro Marconi,” Lalli recounts Marconi’s biography and achievements only to denounce, with irony, a Soviet decree claiming the invention of wireless telegraphy for the Russian scientist Aleksandr Popov; the broader theme is propaganda’s “theft” of historical glory. “Scenario” offers a social portrait of New York’s Bowery “bums,” classifying three types and ending with a lyrical scene of them watching sunsets at Battery Place.

A long “Taccuino” continues in brief vignettes: Father Divine’s movement, the 1947 blizzard paralyzing the city, consumerism and advertising, changing food prices, film gossip (Magnani/Rossellini/Bergman), jokes about dictators, and reflections on modern haste, memory, and immigrant life. The overall arc moves from a local office move to an expansive, ironic notebook of mid-century urban and political life.