MONSTERS

        Freaks of nature? Failed genetic experiments? Being coming from others dimensions? The last inhabitants of a disappeared world? Figment of our imagination? Traces of a past, came to us overcoming thousands of natural obstacles? Monsters, legends of the past that sometimes can become real, when the television or the radio confirm it… The “monster” is the “diffident”, who arouse fear, horror and disgust because it’s unknown, abnormal, is something that man is afraid of because “out of the common run”. Man is afraid of all that he don’t understand and that’s unusual. He’s afraid of darkness because in the darkness hide the unexpected, the “anybody” the “anything”. He’s afraid of monsters because also the monster is on one side the unexpected, the “different thing”, the anomaly of nature, but on the other side is charmed by it because man is curious; if Christopher Columbus wouldn’t be curious, probably we never discovered America. Because chasing our fear help us to exorcize them; more we are afraid of something, more we must search it, because only facing it we can overcome it. We mustn’t run away from our nightmares because they are part of ourselves and they show us the way to reach the perfection. In the Renaissance were printed little books showing the “monsters” of the moment. They were the embodied fear of the men of that time. The most common monster was Luther, portrayed deformed and with demoniac characteristics, but also popes and kings could become monsters. Moreover, in that period, “monsters” were also seen as “signs send by heaven” which must be interpreted and they might be linked to famous prophecies. If a child was born deformed, he was portrayed; then the portrait was printed in little instalments; it might travel around Europe, usually with “prophecies” written in verses or not, about political events of that time or the humanity’s destiny. It was just in the half of the XIV century that Nostradamus wrote his “centuries”. Afterwords, the “monster” become the outcast, the renegade, the different, left outside the society, the victim of political or religious persecution. In the XV century also Jewish, accused to be the responsible of the epidemic of plague (but not only this), will be seen as a kind of monster, of different, to persecute and eliminate, like the protestants, killed in bulk by the Christendom in the modern age. In the XVII century originated the Romanticism’s monsters, created by Shelley, Stoker and Le Fanu, in particular, the famous Frankenstein and Dracula. In this century were also discovered the first fossil dinosaurian footprint and the first bony remains, but they were misunderstood and mistook for the remains of mythical animals such as unicorns and dragons. They thought that these monsters really lived. Then, in the following centuries, were better interpreted and we don’t say that dinosaurs were monsters, because we know them. But for humanity, things that we don’t know or that we know a little, may be a monster. Nowadays, we put this adjective especially to the most awful serial killers. In Italy we remember the “Florence’s monster”. But in the peopleìs imagination, this word had always meant the “real” monster, from the most ironic monster of catastrophic Japanese movies, to the most horrible and disgusting like an “Alien” or a “Predator”. But the question is: there are in the world real monsters? Does the America Big Foot, seen and photographed more than once, exist? Does the Mokele Mbembe exist? Does Nessie, the “Loch Ness” monster exist? 

Maybe a day…. We’ll discover it!

Translated by Roberta "Nemo85"