Family Background and Humour in the Writings of Rinaldo De Benedetti, with an Interdisciplinary Analysis of “Racconto occitano” about Castelmagno in the Alps around 1910

Abstract Rinaldo De Benedetti, also known by his pen names Sagredo and Didimo, was mainly known because of his long career as a science journalist in Italy. He managed to write and publish even under the racial laws, with the connivance of a publisher in Milan. His being in a mixed marriage probably enabled more successful survival tactics. Rinaldo De Benedetti also was a literary writer, publishing as such in old age, and his memoirs have been published posthumously. His childhood in Cuneo, as the son of a secular Jewish family, comes across in his memoirs. In particular, we translate and discuss aspects of a short story of his (which has only previously appeared in a communal publication), set around 1910 and whose protagonist was a relative Amadio Momigliano, faced with the mayor and councillors of Provençal hamlet of mountaineers in Piedmont’s western Alps, who came on visit on a Saturday of all day, decided to become Jewish because the parish priest, opposing their drunken dancing in front of church on the day of the patron saint, had challenged them to do that much. Momigliano alerted the diocesis, and the parish priest was ordered to condone dancing. That episode is part of a long campaign against dancing, which in that period in France pitted the clergy against some mayors. Whereas in the Kingdom of Italy, before World War I, there was a decades-long struggle pitting, e.g., bishops and province prefects (it was precisely in Piedmont that the archbishop of Turin was imprisoned in 1850 and then exiled to France), arguably the awkward episode described in “Racconto occitano” is better explained with reference to the state of affairs at the municipal level in France, as far as clerical but also anticlerical Brittany.