"La toccatina": Polyglottal aphasia in Pirandello

"La toccatina" [literally, "The Light Touch"] was the stroke that made Cristoforo Golisch aphasie and the title that Luigi Pirandello gave to a short story published in 1906. After having become suddenly aphasie, the protagonist of the story forgets how to speak everyday Italian but preserves the ability to express himself in German, the mother tongue that he has become so unused to speaking that it seemed he had forgotten it. The family circumstances of Pirandello certainly favoured his contacts with the neuropsychiatrie environment of the time, the fruit of which is his description of an aphasie syndrome in a bilingual patient.