The 25 speeches that changed the 20th century

The twenty-five speeches that shaped the twentieth century Our journey through the last century in twenty-five speeches aims to recount these profound transformations through characters, but above all through symbolic dates and moments. Through changes in vocabulary and syntax, but also through different and certainly controversial characters from contemporary history, the real effort must be to empathise. To be a contemporary audience, a recipient of that message, but at the same time a real person living in the era and places where those words were spoken. And then to be political, to be a citizen of another country, with another language and culture, and to try to live and understand the disruptive nature of that speech delivered elsewhere by a representative of a people and a history and a politics and a culture different from our own. Finally, being contemporary citizens, capable of seeing through the lens of the future exactly how that speech, the power of those words, changed a history that was different until the day before. It is only by completing the first two identifications that the third – the easiest for us – acquires a fourth meaning, namely the understanding of the work behind the words of a speech that can often last only a few minutes. The sense of the weight of a message, of a summary, of the awareness of what is being conveyed, but also of what is being delivered to its immediate recipient, to the “remote” recipient and to the “historical” recipient.Read more