Together with the author Luigi Manconi, Paolo Hendel, and Adriano Sofri, we will discuss the book La scompartsa dei colori (Garzanti). The conversation will be moderated by Chiara Tamburello.

The Book:
Becoming blind is a harrowing experience. It means losing one’s connection to the world—its dimensions, colors, promises, and surprises. It also strains relationships with others and with things: caresses that miss their mark, glasses that fall, the inability to write a dedication, or to read a face. Over the course of more than fifteen years, Luigi Manconi—a sociologist and political activist—went from severe myopia to low vision, partial blindness, and eventually total blindness. His is the story of a loss and a slow descent into a darkness that, however, is not a “well of unbroken gloom,” because “blindness is not black. It is milky, sometimes hazy. And at times, it even reveals flashes of luminescence.”

This book is a testimony of awareness and discovery, a chronicle of a new world full of echoes: the sounds of a basketball game, the notes of a song, a voice dictating a text or giving a command to a virtual assistant, or that of an actor narrating an audiobook. It’s about tactile sensations: the warmth of sunlight on the skin, hands brushing against walls for orientation, uncertain grips on objects, shins bumping into corners. And above all, memories, because with the loss of sight comes the interplay of memory: premonitions of adolescence and faces that remain frozen as they were thirty years ago. And then the fundamental question: what does someone who cannot see see?

Manconi’s narrative intertwines despair (“the thought of whether or not to throw myself out the window”) with a constant streak of humor, irony, and self-irony. It is a reflection on accepting the limits imposed by fate and a tribute to struggle: the antidote to blindness—“which is, above all, immobility”—is precisely struggle: “movement that gathers and mobilizes energy, generates knowledge, pursues goals, and exercises intelligence.”

The Author:
Luigi Manconi, formerly a professor of Sociology of Political Phenomena and president of the Italian Senate’s Human Rights Commission, served as a member of parliament for three terms and as Undersecretary of Justice. He was the first Human Rights Ombudsman for the Municipality of Rome. In 2001, he founded A Buon Diritto onlus, which he still presides over. His books include Poliziotto Sessantotto. Violenza e democrazia (con G. Lettieri), Il Saggiatore 2023; Il senso della vita. Conversazioni tra un religioso e un poco credente (con V. Paglia), Einaudi 2021; Per il tuo bene ti mozzerò la testa. Contro il giustizialismo morale (con F. Graziani), Einaudi 2020. È editorialista di «la Repubblica».