PRACTICE ITALIAN

by Mariagrazia Pia

Afew days before the feast of the Italian Republic (on June 2, 1946 there were the first universal suffrage votes, including female suffrage), I wonder what it really means to be Italian: we are still parochialists, linked to our country village or to the city of province or regional capital, we belong to our single Region, yet, as well as Italians, we are in Europe, among the founders of this idea which was by G. Mazzini (Young Italy and Young Europe), both conceived in the first half of the 19th century by a republican like him, who had, in spite of himself, to accept that the Unification took place through the kings of Savoy and that Italy was a monarchy!

In short, being Italian means being republicans, Catholics, partisans, anti-fascists, pro-Europeans, workers, because the new constitution since 1948 states that our Republic is founded on work, a right, not just a duty and if there is no work, it is unconstitutional, State must guarantee it! Is it really so?

Then there is the family! This entity that cannot be questioned, can expand, shrink, can accept that the guardians of minors are called only parents and not father and mother, but it is always family! Instead, the Latin origin of the term gave to the pater familias, the head of the family, the power over wives, children, animals, things, slaves and family did not mean consanguinity, but property, the property of those “famoli” or servants, slaves!

You cannot be an Italian if you do not have this obsessive sense of family, which even the Nobel laureate Pirandello at the beginning of the twentieth century had already clarified as a source of madness, hypocrisy, humiliation and Freud had made it the cause of every future action of the child. raised and cared for or mistreated in this family! The pessimism of Verga still sanctifies it, finds a redemption in regaining all that has been lost by the youngest son of the Malavoglias, Alessi (Toscano was the real surname of the protagonists, but by analogy or contrast the nicknames were born, as a penalty of the Dante’s retaliation used by the people)! Svevo jokes about the family with Zeno’s Conscience 1925, Pascoli, however, after too many losses, leaves us the idea that it is necessary to rebuild the family nest, even morbidly with the sisters and not with other women. The poet from Trieste Saba in the section “Il piccolo Berto” of his Canzoniere remembers himself as a small boy, loved more by the Jewish nurse than by the affective mother and jealous of that affection, who took the nurse away from him, abandoned by his father, tied to Trieste and his wife , compared to all mild animals and loyal to their owners. The wife was offended and I think not wrongly!

Mariagrazia

If one is an atheist, can he call himself Italian? If he is of another religion he is certainly tolerated, included, not discriminated against, he now has an alternative to teaching the Catholic Religion at school! If an individual is against private property, as the mother of all injustices, as J.J. Rousseau (Essay on inequality) seems to be against Life, as if property were an inalienable right, as natural as the right to Life.

But to which life?

We are a people of artists, writers, poets, musicians, navigators, inventors, scientists, geniuses and even brigands, people who know how to get by and even at the expense of others .... no more than other peoples, in this case ... we are still the soft spot of Europe, as of the Rome-Berlin AXIS and the landing of the Allies in Sicily to free the south from Nazifascism was a new Spedizione dei Mille…. Italy was again broken in two by allied liberation in the south and partisan wars and massacres in the center north!

We are everything and the opposite of everything, we know, we can be nuns and prostitutes at the same time and in the same place, literally and metaphorically, but we know it, we have a sense of guilt or pride, we are reflective and certainly more self-harming than aggressive of many other peoples, even when we colonized, even when we applied racial laws! We are a people that over the centuries has mixed with too many other peoples to be well identified: from the Italic peoples, to the Celts, the Phoenicians and the colonizing Greeks, to the conquering Romans, to the Germans who have plundered and dominated us, (Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Normans, Swabians), from the Arabs, to the French, from the Spaniards to the Austrians ... we call ourselves Italians for literature!