Memoirs of Hadrian (by Marguerite Yourcenar)

Overview

The twentieth edition of "Per Un Pugno di Libri" is proceeding unstoppably, with this Saturday's debate between the Liceo Scientifico "Galileo Galilei" of Erba and the Liceo Classico "Marco Minghetti" of Bologna on the masterpiece of the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar: "Memoirs of Hadrian". Published for the first time in 1951, Yourcenar herself wrote that the book is anything but a history essay, much less a novel, but rather a long letter (divided into six parts) that the emperor Hadrian, now old and ill, writes to his adoptive nephew, also a future emperor, Marcus Aurelius. The great intellectual sensitivity and intensity of Marguerite Yourcenar's analysis have made Memoirs of Hadrian an absolutely modern book, despite the fact that it addresses and speaks of the mentality of a man who lived two thousand years ago.