palmerini.org | cooperazione, sviluppo e pensieri

coming back from holidays is always a good moment for good purposes. when i came back to india from our last visit to italy, i decided, like a smoker, to reduce my daily consumption of “italy”: less italian websites, less italian newspapers, less concern in general about the country. a few days after, i was reading the hindu, one of the most popular newspaper here, a very well reputed one. you can tell it from the fact that normally you never find news about italy on the hindu, exept for some news on fiat (among other reasons, there is a negotiation ongoing for selling tata’s nano, the 2500 € car, in italy through fiat). but these days even the hindu cannot ignore this:

and so i found myself back again deep into the abuse of assumption of italian information… what a miserable condition.

i have always been (and i still am) extremely critic towards italy and its recent history. i have to admit, however, that there seem to be forms of intelligent life in italy, even if they remain mostly hidden from mainstream “culture”. strangely enough, when the rest of our country is falling apart in a devastating collapse of old and now meaningless ideals, ideas and ideologies, leaving only ruins of our glorious (?) past, literature survives. people have found exemplars of active brains that are able to express original ideas using new forms of expression. they pick up the pieces of our destruction and build new stories using old stones from the past. this is how i imagine the new italian epic, (original definition by the wu ming collective [en]). a first attempt to describe it has recently been translated in french [fr]. don’t miss it.