Alberto Mario Banti
The theme of the unification of Italy and more than 150 in general of the Italian Risorgimento was recently brought to the attention of the general public with the assistance of Roberto Benigni seguitissimo in Sanremo. However, I feel good contributing back to the discussion that is very critical but also constructive, Professor of Alberto Mario Banti , great scholar of the Renaissance.
Roberto Benigni in Sanremo, but certainly what he loved Berlinguer! What - with gentle sweetness - with Troisi joked about Brothers of Italy ... What a transformation! Amazing! Yes, since Thursday, February 17 "on the stage of the Ariston," as they say in these circumstances, not only did the exegesis Inno di Mameli. He has done more. He made an apology of passionate political and moral values \u200b\u200bproposed innate. And - as someone said - he also taught a history lesson. A "memory" history lesson if we want to use the vocabulary of the comic.
Good. And what have we learned from this history lesson? That we Italians and Italian-2011 even descended from the Romans, who were known for having possessed a great army, which instilled fear in everyone. They also state that the fighters of the Lombard League (1176); from Palermo who rebelled against the Angevin on the evening of Easter Monday of 1282, by Francesco Ferrucci, who died in 1530 in the defense of Florence and Balilla, boy who in 1746 started a revolt against the Austrians in Genoa. Interesting. As a historian, I frankly do not know. I mean I did not know that all these people who thought they had fought for other reasons, in fact, had already fought for the construction of the Italian nation. I thought this was a distorted version of history offered by national leaders and intellectuals of the nineteenth century nationalists. And what a century of historical research had shown the invalidity of that claim. But, you see a little 'that is going to discover in one evening on television.
But there's more. We found that all these "Italians" were good, the exploited and oppressed by foreigners, violent, savage and rapist - foreigners who in turn were German, French, Austrian and English. It also this is an interesting concept, one that erased at a stroke the sentiments of opening to Europe and the world that have successfully characterized the political action of the last forty years.
Then we understood that we feel a special thrill of excitement when, walking through the Louvre museum or some other foreigner, we are faced with a painting, say, by Titian or Tintoretto: e This is because those are painters 'Italian' and we, in some way descended from them. How strange: this seemed a strange concept really: I get excited even in the face of other paintings, Dürer's Goya or Manet, to say that it is irreducibly anti-patriotic?
And we finally figured out what the fundamental value that makes us Italians and Italian, and that should make us love the fighters of the Risorgimento: the mystique of the heroic sacrifice and death on the enemy, if the death of themselves on the altar of the motherland, the militarization of the war-mongering policy. There. I argue that the recovery time from uncritical of the Risorgimento as a founding myth of the Italian Republic to run the risk of calling into the circuit values \u200b\u200bare as dangerous as those built by the nineteenth-century nationalism: the idea of \u200b\u200bthe nation as a community of descendants a nation that exists if not eternity, at least the dawn of time, the idea of \u200b\u200bwar as a fundamental value of patriotic masculinity and the idea of \u200b\u200bthe political community as a system of differences: "we" are "us" and we are united, as opposed to "those other" foreigners, which are different from us, and we are dangerous to the integrity of our community.
Each of these ideas put into the circuit of a society like ours, which is crossed by intensive migration processes, it can become very toxic: it can lead to the belief that defending the Italian identity implichi difendersi dagli «altri», che – in quanto diversi – sono anche pericolosi; può indurre a fantasticare di una speciale peculiarità, se non di una superiorità, della cultura italiana; invita ad avere una visione chiusa ed esclusiva della comunità politica alla quale apparteniamo; e soprattutto induce a valorizzare ideali bellici che, nel contesto attuale, mi sembrano quanto meno fuori luogo.
Ecco, con la performance di Benigni mi sembra che il rischio di una riattualizzazione del peggior nazionalismo stia diventando reale: tanto più in considerazione della reazione entusiastica che ha accolto l’esibizione del comico, Benigni's almost as if he had said things that everyone had the heart who knows how long. Now if these people are the ministers of Russia or melons, it is not surprising coming from these two political militancy that has always cultivated the nationalist values. But when they join too many politicians and commentators from the left, many of them also ex-communists, well there is to be truly amazed.
One might ask them: but what was of internationalism, pacifism, Europe, the opening of solidarity that has characterized the best democratic culture of the past decades? Why I do not think that such a background of values \u200b\u200bis compatible with these forms of neo-nationalism. With his long monologue, in fact, Benigni - despite having spoken out against nationalism - it seems essentially inviting us to counter nationalism Po dusting off an Italian nationalism same as in the League's system of values \u200b\u200band contrary to the one that concerns only the ' geopolitical area of \u200b\u200breference.
Well, we hope that the success of Benigni is a successful evening. Why embrace the solution of an Italian neo-nationalism would be to slip straight into the most pernicious of political cultures that have populated the history of Italy from the Risorgimento to Fascism.
Source: SRS Alberto Mario Banti from The Manifesto of 20.02.2011
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