First posted: 24 february 2010
Today some people said me that I tend to despise Italian culture and to sign the praises of the foreign one. They also try to point how, instead of the outlanders, we have got a direct descent of the great Roman empire.
Probably when I speak I can give the wrong idea that I’ve got this “forma mentis” but, if I have to be honest, what I despise is the present Italian society, certanly not the ancient, quite another thing.
My answer to this appointment, therefore, was: “I’ve got nothing against ancient cultures, neither Latin nor Greek, which I love, but, in Italy, we don’t know them well and, very often, people abroad is more interested in a specific way about them and they’re able to drain from and actualize the teachings including them in their society. Do you want to talk, I don’t know, for example, about Seneca, Petronius or Cicero or any other Latin author?”.
Currently the grammar high school is scorned and offended because it’s judged like an environment where people study the “dead languades”, or with a terminal illness. I wonder, then, why, for example, Nietzsche or Heiddeger have taken inspiration by the Greek language and culture if it was so senseless as it seems to italian people.
Perhaps it is the study in our schools based purely on learning mnemonic versions of the translations done in classes (or clearly copied/pasted from the Internet) and, later, attached to the tests without an explanation about the text (I would say the exegesis or contextualizing but they’re teminologies unknown by the teachers themselves)?
It looks like that we don’t understand what exactly the ancient cultures offer, and continue to teach, showing how to live in an ideal way, and I’m not surprised that this point is completely misunderstood by Italian people.
I have noticed that some people get really annoyed while hearing around (in people talking) about how our country, considered as a formal “society” (what a significant word… how many euphemisms i am using here! I wonder why…), is going to fall into complete ruination (such as being corrupted by an infectious disease orby the typical “bacillus” currupting and spoiling books pages…) and about how we are currently deeply criticized by foreign countries, blaming the collapse of our ethics, for example: we give up realizing (and getting aware of) where we are gradually directing our steps (in a sort of no mans lands, where “licet” and not “licet” are the same, where there is no difference between morality and immoral acts, between ethics or illicit behaviours), and we are unable to realize that just because we ourselves are made of “debris and ignorance” (please try to feel the sound of the spelling in my original language, italian, “we are made of “macerie e ignoranza”, translated into italian… isn’t it like the sound of ruination itself?).
Fed up by television programs (just like chickens being stuffed) and sparkles, fragments taken from italian news (daily “chronicles” contained in the most common and sold newspapers), we tend to miss all the real facts happening around the world, being news from the outer world something “missing” in our major newspapares and tv programs (there is an italian journalist, who has written a very significant and important boom about that, entitled “La scomparsa dei fatti”, “The vanishing of the news and facts”, translated by me; this journalist’s name is Marco Travaglio, a master of true journalism). We happen (sometimes) to hear or read about the news and facts coming from all over the world, but those news are reported manipulated or filtered by the “Big Brother” of our news agencies, so most of the news are altered and reported with no accuracy or precision.
Coming back to an old problem, already discussed by me (forgive my self-quoting hypertrophy), I am wondering about how many persons really know english language here in Italy… and I am wondering whether people educated in english, here in Italy, are used to reading english newspapers (or listening to their tv news broadcasting) or not.
Some days ago I bumped into an article reporting that Beppe Grillo (an italian famous comedian and a blogger whose mission is to divulge the most important facts and news without altering or censoring them) has been invited to Oxford university to “lecture” in comunication, diffusion of culture, the media, the italian problems and contradictions, about the “humus” surrounding our country. Apart from the fact that the italian embassy tried to diffuse some information against the reputation of this person (who is honest, sincere and guided by common sense), trying to make him appear less reliable and authoritative, they also quoted some of the comedian-blogger most famous opinions and words, blaming him for being a “dangerous” paradigm of an “anti-politicians” provocative troubles maker (accusing him of being a sort of professional “provocateur”). Some sentecnes and words of this famous comedian-blogger talk about how many italians, while living in foreign countries, are sure that they don’t want to come back to Italy, looking things from another point of view, from another alternative perspective, conscious of the faults and problems stuck and attached to the social/political pattern of our society and country. According to Beppe Grillo’s recurrent critical opinion, some italian, living in foreign countries, feel like “exiled” human beings, clinged to the “kindness of strangers” while being welcomed by foreign countries. Many italians cannot stand anymore the endemic state of corruption of our country, often hurt and “slaved” by criminal organizations (mafia, camorra, ’ndrangheta, etc.) and by illegals acts committed by the political bureau. (I think you all can recall the so-called “Tangentopoli”- the crisis of italian political/social system due to the curruptions and financial crimes, called polis, city, of the bribes-that culminated into a series of trials directed by the famous Milano’s pool, whose members were for example Francesco Saverio Borrelli, Antonio Di Pietro, Davigo, Colombo, etc.
So after the eclipse of common sense,of rational thinking,of critical toughts many italians are sinking into the aberration of the nonsense, symbolized by the gossip news, by the lacking of true informations, by the meaningless and pathetic reference to our latin (greek) roots and traditions, as if italian people were all fond of learning about our cultural origins, as if our cultural traditions (the greek-roman source of knowledge) could be learned by osmosis or treasured into ourselves just like a sort of genetic “acquisition”.
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