Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
Giovanni Rossi was an Italian anarchist who promoted an experiment in socialist life by founding an alternative community in the countryside of Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century. The experiment, however, was short lived and lasted only from 1890 to 1894. After the collapse of the community, Rossi remained in Brazil until 1907, working as an agronomist. In the meantime, he wrote a novel, Il Paraná nel XX Secolo, in which he describes the future of the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, imagined as one of the greatest world powers at the end of the twentieth century, along with Belgium. The future of Paraná combines advances in technology and social life and resembles Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published a few years before. In this article, I want to present a study of this novel, relating it to some of Rossi's main commentators and to more general studies about utopian and anarchist thought.
Keywords: Giovanni Rossi; Cecilia colony; utopia.
A NEW WORLD
By the end of the twentieth century the southern Brazilian state of Paraná would become one of the greatest world powers, along with Belgium, having replaced the burdensome bureaucracy of government with the spontaneous associations of individuals. That is how Giovanni Rossi, an Italian anarchist, novelist, and founder of a utopian community, foresaw the future in a short novel - Il Parana nelXX secolo (Paraná in the twentieth century) - written in 1895 and published in 1897 in Utopie und Experiment, an anthology edited by Alfred Sanftleben, a Swiss libertarian activist. This novel was far from popular, unlike an earlier work, Un comune socialista, that ran to five editions and, according to the Italian historian Paolo Favilli, was the only title of among around fifty from the Biblioteca di Propaganda Socialista to go out of print in the 1880s.1 Even today, IIParaná nelXXsecolo is not widely known beyond a small circle of scholars. Nevertheless, the novel is an exemplary nineteenth-century utopia and it is important for the reassessment of Rossi's ideas following the ending of the anarchist colony that he founded in Brazil a few years earlier.
Il Paraná nelXXsecolo is a first-person narrative told by Cardias, an Italian anarchist who lives in Brazil - the character is actually Rossi's...