La Grande Guerra a piedi – Nicolò Giraldi

Peparing the interview:

1. We have read that you took inspiration from a famous writer and traveler, in order to talk about your experience. What stroke you of Patrick Leigh Fermor?
2. In the book your grandfather is mentioned. How and through which ways did you manage to get in contact with his figure?
3. What kind of people and/or testimonies did you come across?
4. Which are the most important perceptions of the Great War that you collected meeting the different testimonies you came across?
5. We are carrying out a project during our English lessons. Why did you decide to leave from England and how English testimonies were similar and/or different from those of the other countries?
6. Which was the effect of your meeting with Canterbury, city that has been destination of pilgrimages and of painful religious sceneries?
7. In our project we are also interested in understanding which meaning and which role had women during the conflict?
8. In your opinion, did war change women’s perception of themselves, of their social and personal identity?
9. Do you think that knowing the war and knowing it indirectly through perceptions, documents, poems, stories, diaries and other communicative dimensions could be useful to consider war as a re-solution of problems?
10. In English poetry, controversial positions have been recorded. What are the impressions you gathered about it and what are your reflections about it?
11. Which kind of value could the memory of war acquire today, in a moment of threatening contrasts and global conflicts that seem to be nearer and nearer, and where the necessity of a closer Europe is more and more urgent?
12. As a journalist, what meant to you writing  a diary, or better, a memory?

My questions:

3. Which was the stop-over (which place and people) that marked you more? Why?

4. How did your personal idea of the war gradually change during the steps of your travel? Was it a change in positive or in negative?

5. After becoming more aware of the meaning of the word ‘war’ thanks to your travel, what is the advice, the message, you feel you want to send to our young generation?