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Preface

I don't have the presumption to call myself a writer, much less a historian. Quite simply, I am a history buff and I feel irresistibly drawn to those legends on its fringes that enrich our culture with moral and ethical teachings that have undoubtedly helped shape our European identity and our Western civilization.

Writing amuses me, excites me, deeply involves me ... I often realize how my characters take over and direct the story in directions that I had not foreseen, as if they had truly taken on their own identity and initiative and had emancipated themselves from my protection. When this happens, I remain attached to the keyboard and cannot detach myself from it until the action is over, because the characters insist on going all the way ... But afterwards, going to sleep, I feel satisfied as much and more than when I get back from the house. 'having climbed a mountain.

Sometimes I don't write for weeks, or even months ... Then suddenly, during the night, one of my characters literally comes to pull my sheets to tear me away from my laziness, and tells me in detail an episode which I had never thought of it before, and that it fits perfectly into the historical framework that I have patiently studied while digging the net or leafing through a book.

... And then suddenly I go back to writing, suddenly, as if dragged by an energy that doesn't even seem to come from me.

Who knows, maybe they are really the ghosts of people who lived over a thousand and five hundred years ago, and who jostle and paw to escape oblivion: people who had found the strength and dignity to oppose a decadence that seemed unstoppable, and who had decided that the torch of civilization should not have gone out.

I do not know if the stories told in this book are very close to the reality experienced by these people who sowed the seeds of the Europe in which we live today and which - forget what was there before - we do not even fully appreciate.

However, I did my best, trying to collect what has been ascertained from history and to connect known, probable or controversial facts, and to connect them by imagining figures that surely existed in some way, even without achieving sufficient notoriety to be noted by the few historians of their time. Because in that dark age, in which the torches of civilization were going out one after the other, education was the first victim and people capable of recording events with writing had disappeared first.

There are few notes left by the chroniclers that still exist, often isolated and in contrast with each other, and the memories passed by word of mouth and modified through the generations to become legend.

I have tried to make the result as plausible as possible, offering possible answers to questions that have not yet found any and which represent hateful gaps in the knowledge of our common past. The result, I hope, is a possible version of how things actually went; a version that I tried to make as credible as possible by respecting the established historical reality, even in the awareness of my lack of title to affirm a new one.

I insist: I am not a historian, nor a writer. I am a soldier, and I have spent my life serving my country in the belief that its values ​​deserve to be defended. But I am also a curious person, and these values ​​that I have sworn to defend I have also wanted to study, analyze, and discover their origins.

Civilization, freedom, justice, progress ... These are not just abstract concepts that must be taken for granted as they are useful for defining our society. These are achievements that were very dear to our ancestors, and which must be defended not so much because they make our life worth living, but above all out of respect for those who fought to acquire them and to pass them on to us as an inheritance.

Searching for the origin of these values ​​led me to deepen the study of history, which already fascinated me as a soldier due to its military dimension ... And all my research has always led me back to Rome.

Rome, which had evolved from city to world, and finally became an idea: an idea so strong that when the state to which it had given its name had crumbled, the people who had found themselves living in the territories that once they had called themselves Romans had continued to chase it and try to make it their own.

The idea of ​​the state as a citizen's good was born in Greece and was institutionalized in Rome, and nowhere else ... It has survived consuls, Caesars, Augustus, emperors and kings, and has come down to us intact as citizens of all the eras have fought, each in its own small way, for this idea to survive, bringing with it all its original values, enriched by the experience of the centuries and refined over time, but always intact in their original nature.

In particular, the form with which these so important values ​​have come down to us derives from the events that occurred when the torches of classical Roman civilization went out and the darkness enveloped our lands, clouding the minds and freezing the souls of those who found themselves. to live in the darkest times in history.

When the world was called Rome, people lived in urban condominiums or country villas incredibly similar to our modern homes, with heating and toilets; there were public schools, social assistance, banks, courts and lawyers, postal services, sewers and aqueducts, public swimming pools and gyms, a road system that remained in force until the twentieth century and a legal corpus in many ways still valid today.

In the Middle Ages, all of this had disappeared. Legal certainty, social order, architecture and engineering, the management of the economy at the state and private level, medical knowledge and culture ... All lost in the darkness of ignorance and fear, replaced by oppression, by superstition and fear.

Everything, except that idea of ​​Rome.

That idea for which at a more or less conscious level, all the peoples who in various ways had known the Roman world in the past have continued to fight, in order to return to that level of life that the West had known when he called Rome.

It was a tough fight. Peasants, clerics, warriors, traders and sailors, nobles and peasants, little by little have rebuilt what had been lost. The rediscovery of lost classical documents led to the revival of culture and technology: thus we had Romanesque culture, the Renaissance and Romanticism ...

It took over a thousand and three hundred years to return to the level of prosperity of the empire, but we succeeded. The Europe that came out of the darkness was different from the one that had fallen there, but it was his daughter, and in its diversity, even stronger.

He made terrible mistakes, but he knew how to redeem himself, and today it is our home.

A house that, looking at the past that our grandparents had to face, we should be proud.

A tough struggle, of course: it lasted from the 5th to the 20th century. But the hardest moment was the beginning, when everyone was stunned by the collapse of civilization, when everything had collapsed in the span of a generation that had seen running water dry up, sewers irremediably clogged, schools and courts closed, empty the markets and the cities, and eventually the barbarians descend.

That last generation born under the empire and raised in school, and then disappeared into the darkness of a fallen world where his children could never see school, is the one that had to suffer and struggle more than any other: the precipitated generation into the abyss of the Dark Ages, and which first had to begin to climb back into the darkness.

In the darkness, and with no one taking note so that his efforts were remembered.

The story of that generation is what I want to honor with this tale.

Orio Giorgio Stirpe