The Bloc Notes of Michael the Great
In 1822 Gioachino Rossini visited Beethoven in his home in Vienna, a kind of hovel with a broken ceiling and a pital always on the piano. After an exchange of views on the musical trends of the time, the genius of Bonn dismisses him inviting him to compose only comic operas in the future because the Italians were not made for serious opera.
Even if seven years later the genius of Pesaro would have blatantly denied it with the “Guglielmo Tell”, a masterpiece of the romantic theater, the anecdote is significant. In fact, it attests to the circulation in the Habsburg cultural milieu of a polemical idea of our national character, deaf to the depths of the drama. After Hitler’s defeat, in “Doctor Faustus” (1947) Thomas Mann takes up this representation of the prosaic and “carefree” soul of the descendants of Aeneas and contrasts it with that of the German people, fearless in pursuing their catastrophic destiny to the end .
Cesare Garboli in his “Sad and civil memories” has dismantled in a couple of masterful pages the mythology of the Teutonic described – in terms now Dionysian now Nibelungic – by the great novelist from Lübeck. There is no doubt, however, that this is how the countless travelers who came down from the north to enjoy the sea and the sun that they envy us so much have seen, and still do: politically cynical but weak, sentimental, festive; prone to acting, singing, laughing. In short, like the homeland of Machiavelli for those who have studied, or of Pulcinella and Arlecchino for the illiterate. But it is never possible that this really is the country that suffered the tragedy of the Mussolini regime and in which today anti-fascism has become a dust, the dandruff that is swept away from the clothes before a walk
The question is not idle, especially in times when the ancestral gregarious instinct of the majority of Italians has been awakened by political leaders who claim to give a damn about the past. But politics without history, Alessandro Manzoni observed, is like a blind man without a guide to show him the way. No wonder, therefore, if that of the Conte government risks hitting a wall.
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In the second flounce of Purgatory (Canto XIII), Dante depicts the envious with their eyes sewn by an iron wire. The analogue and clear retaliation, as they lived always looking at their neighbors with rancor, enjoying their misfortunes: “I was delighted by the damage of others”, confesses the Sienese Sapia because her fellow Ghibellines had been defeated by the Florentine Guelphs in the battle of Colle Val d’Elsa (1269). What the Germans today call “Schadenfreude” is certainly not a new feeling, as the father of our language shows.
We have seen him at work on social networks in the avalanche of festive tuits for the flames that devoured the cathedral of Notre Dame. There have even been those who, faced with the large donations promised for its reconstruction by the two big French luxury companies, have painted them as robbers of the people in search of cheap advertising. The truth is that, if the (perhaps) most hateful of the deadly sins has its roots in the murderous hand of Cain, in the era of triumphant populism social envy is becoming a mass phenomenon, which inevitably leads to the disavowal of the value of solidarity and Christian charity itself. This is where a mortal sin for the good Lord can turn into a lethal poison for democracy. These are dark times.
