I was born in 1937, and my birth was the focal point in the life of my father, the forgotten Italian writer Giuseppe Jorio (1902-1995). I had been estranged from my father since my early twenties, and only discovered the full story of my family in 2013, when I came in possession of my father's collection of diaries, letters, documents and manuscripts of his unpublished works. What I learnt was that, before my birth and when my parents were childless and their marriage at breaking point, my father had an extramarital relationship which ended after his lover became pregnant and they decided that the only solution was abortion. In Italy at that time abortion was illegal, and there was no divorce. My father then patched up his marriage in order to have a child, which he now desperately wanted, in a legal situation. That child was me.
An Author on Trial
In several entries of his diary my father declares that his lover was the love of his life, and regrets that he hadn't been able to marry her. He also describes how at times the sight of me disturbed him, because he couldn't forget the child whom he and his lover had "killed".
During World War II my father, already the author of two successful novels, decided to write a novel, based on that story, to which he gave the title Il Fuoco del Mondo (The Fire of the World). In 1948 he decided to self-publish it. The book was still at the printers in unbound sheets, when it was sequestered by the police and my father was prosecuted for obscenity. In 1954, after five trials in six years, all without a jury, my father became the first writer in post-war Italy to be convicted for obscenity, and the only one to receive a prison sentence. All copies of the book had to be destroyed.
By then I was fifteen years old and, although I was aware of my father's trials, I didn't know many details. In 2013, reading the material now in my possession, I realised that my father had been the victim of a cruel injustice, one rooted in the complex and turbulent socio-political contrasts in post-war Italy.
I decided to write An Author on Trial to prove conclusively how bigoted and prejudiced judges, aligned with the illiberal and aggressive censorship policies "in defence of decency," adopted by the ruling Christian Democrats party and fuelled by the Vatican, decided to make an example of my father, even if this meant they would have to misapply the law, which clearly states that "works of art cannot be considered obscene".
Writing about my family affected me very deeply. I had to take on board that my father was a very flawed husband and father. He continuously undermined my mother's confidence and her relationship with me, and by the time he left her, she was a broken woman. I also had to accept that my father's relationship with me had been ambivalent from the start.
I feel, however, great satisfaction that I have been able to show to my children and grandchildren, as well as to whomever might be interested, that my father was unjustly convicted, and to warn that the aim of censorship of the arts is not to defend alleged public decency, but to deny freedom of expression.