“Behind the scenes of history”, with Piero Angela and Alessandro Barbero walking through time

What is progress? The ability to build a better future. Behind the scenes of history is a journey through time, a dialogue between two superstars. One is Piero Angela , journalist and beloved face of Quark , who passed away in 2022; the other is Alessandro Barbero , the medieval history professor who collaborated with Angela for a long time on Superquark . Together, with the curiosity and intelligence that made them iconic, they accompany readers to discover the past but from an unusual perspective: that of everyday life. How did people live in ancient times? How did the human species evolve? And what can we learn from those who came before us? First published in 2013, the book is back on newsstands and in the online shop with Repubblica from today in a special edition (272 pages, €9.90 plus the price of the newspaper).

Angela and Barbero begin when the supermarket was "nature". They follow the trail of a tribe marching through Italy 10-15 thousand years ago; a group of nomads forced to live in "temporary camps" because they needed to follow the course of the seasons. How strange to think with Angela that once in Rome, where more than two million people live today, itinerant populations were made up of "no more than a few dozen individuals".

Villages, stable settlements, were born together with agriculture: it is by cultivating the land that the population grows, new jobs are invented and the foundations of the future are laid.

But travel remains essential. In an era of flights connecting every part of the world, it is curious to read that in the past the roads were crowded with wayfarers: it was normal to travel 20 or 30 kilometers, there and back, "to go to the market in the nearby city". "The distance that a car today covers in an hour, 130 kilometers, a pilgrim on foot would cover in a week", reveals Barbero.

In the age of fake news, the volume also helps to dispel some false myths. The Ius primae noctis ? An invention. The chastity belt? A legend. Did people really live a less frenetic life in ancient times? In reality, Angela and Barbero explain, there were "fewer defenses against unhappiness". Because one thing has never changed: even in the past, men wanted to improve their lives, be admired, be successful.

There are also many curiosities about the lifestyles of our ancestors. For example, the absolute lack of privacy: there were no corridors, so to go from one room to another, even in the homes of the rich, you had to go through other people's rooms. The spaces used as bathrooms? Non-existent. Even in Versailles . While women, in their free time, removed lice from each other: an idea of ​​hygiene very far from the contemporary one.

Great stories run through the pages of the book: Catherine of Siena who argues furiously with her father to have a room all to herself. And, in the end, she gets it. The family of Joan of Arc who, when at 17 she runs away for the first time intending to save France, thinks of drowning her. The seventeenth-century story of Antonia Chiarini , an orphan from Bologna who earned her living making buttons: persecuted by three policemen who accused her of prostitution, she found a judge who believed her truth. And also that of Giovan Battista Boetti , an eighteenth-century Dominican friar who became a leader of the Muslim revolutions against Russia.

At the end of the journey through time, what remains is the power of inventions. But if in the nineteenth century progress was seen with enthusiasm, in the twentieth century, with wars and the atomic threat, with fear, in the time we are living in "the change is so fast that it makes us feel disoriented". The remedy? Study, be curious, with the aim of overcoming the backwardness that has always penalized Italy. And to do so, fortunately, there have been and there are excellent teachers.

The book

Behind the scenes of history , by Piero Angela and Alessandro Barbero (272 pages, €9.90 with Repubblica )