About Italians
Hercules was looking after a herd of cattle when a disobedient, unruly calf ran off. The mythical hero had no choice but chase after it. In its escape, the animal galloped across a peninsula shaped like a leg stretching out into the sea. Arriving at the foot of the peninsula, Hercules threw himself into the stormy waters, crossed a strait, and reached a three-pointed island. Of this island, Goethe one day would say, “Without seeing Sicily, one cannot form an idea of Italy. It is there where one finds the key to everything.”
Hercules named the land he crossed “Italia” from the Greek italòs for calf.
Over the centuries, the wondrous places traversed by the calf’s thundering gallop and the mythical hero’s pursuit became populated by Italians (unruly cattle).
These Italians built civilizations, endured them, and merged with other civilizations, and then in our modern times, Italians lost their identity.
Identity gets lost. It’s a dramatic process that can have dire consequences, and it isn’t only the prerogative of Italians. Identity gets lost in school, on the street, and in the rooms of our homes.
In school.
Our identity gets lost in school when we do not teach the vital necessity of seeking out the spirit, history and value of our origins, even when our history has been horrific and our values trampled on. Human beings who do not know how to trace the long, painful path that led to their being born in a given place and at a given time will live their lives blindly going in circles. No one can run away from their roots. And, if we do not recount our history and recognize our roots, we will live as if cursed, as if we were orphans. If the past gets lost, we lose our critical skills and the pleasure of reflecting on the past therefore modifying the present and future and gaining the added corollary of anguish of being unable to grasp our future. And so, our present becomes as unstable as a pavement during an earthquake. We cannot move ahead if the new generations do not know how to use numbers or recognize prime materials, and we will surely die if we don’t teach the new generations how to recognize their identity. The cultural identities throughout Europe are wonderful. Yet, in their stories lies also great horror. Young people must be put in the condition to “see” the wonder in their identity so that they will seek it out again and to “know” the horror of our history, so they avoid it from ever happening again. This is what school is for.
On the street.
Even when we walk, thinking only of where we put our feet, we are unable to synch our steps with those who have gone before us; we are losing our identity. Or rather, we are destroying it. There was harmony in the ancient planning of spaces created for walking, living, and cultivation that was learned from nature. Imagining those spaces and comparing our footsteps to those of the people who built those roads, buildings, and walls is essential. We must imagine the people who made a place “beautiful” or disfigured it. We must “see” the physical nature of these places that natural calamity or the violence of human beings has destroyed. These places once existed, forged by hands, and then loved and contemplated by its inhabitants. We must learn to walk while recognizing the soul of the streets that crossed cities and the roads that branched out into the lands our ancestors traversed. Here lies our heritage of harmony and culture and our legacy of ignorance and violence, which we must reckon with to continue our journey.
At home.
If society is in the wrong, the fault does not lie with the young ones growing up who have not had the chance to learn but with adults who have been inattentive and unable to teach them. Human beings are born ignorant but not stupid. Poor or absent instruction and education make human beings stupid, burying their conscience under electronic sands. When parents are distant, wrapped up in their own existential muddle, searching for love and meaning themselves, then the solitude of young people and children becomes terrifying. Absolute. And how we lose an authentic identity.
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Giacomo Leopardi lamented that foreigner “...regard present-day Italy, or rather, modern Italians living today as the custodians of a museum, a chamber pot, and the like...”
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What lies in the minds of these custodians? Do they feel pride in their museums? Do they feel any shame for the toilets’ stench? Or have the custodians’ gaze and sense of smell grown so tired, lazy, and bored that they no longer perceive the value of museums or toilets? Or even worse, might the custodians not even know what the museums contain and instead envy the slyness and wealth of the people who built and own the toilets?
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Reading one of my favorite authors, I came across a page that speaks of us Italians: “… I am once again among this infamous people who have such beautiful faces and such ugly souls… they are clever and sly, and when they want to be, they’re capable of even seeming honest and loyal; and nonetheless they are so wicked, dishonest, and impudent that our wonder makes us forget our indignation. Their voices are horrible: if just one person were to shout on the street in Berlin like thousands of them do here, the entire city would come running. But when it comes to theater, they trill brilliantly… The main trait in the national character of Italians is absolute impudence. This depends on the one hand that they do not feel inferior to anything, so they are presumptuous and insolent, and on the other, they do not consider themselves good for anything and, therefore, are vile. However, those who are prude are too timid; others are too proud. The Italian is neither one thing nor the other, but according to circumstance, can be the most cowardly or arrogant.”
Let’s not take it out on Arthur Schopenhauer, who wrote these words about us. He dispensed with his fellow countrymen even more hurriedly: “I despise the German nation for its infinite stupidity, and I’m ashamed to belong to it.”
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Are we still so impudent? And presumptuous and vile as well? Is this still the image we transmit? Are we incapable of crawling out of the noisy, inconclusive confusion our arrogance and cowardness have dragged us into? Have we changed? For the better? For worse?
Should we debunk or confirm Schopenhauer’s words? We look then at public life and at the behavior of the people who decide and influence our present history. Let’s look at how people communicate in public media and private platforms, how we relate in the day-to-day at work and places of leisure and in the privacy of our homes. Each of us will come up with our answer.
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Going back to Schopenhauer. While on the verge of death: “The worms soon gnawing up his body was not a sad thought for him. Instead, with horror, he would think of how his spirit would be diminished in the hands of philosophy professors. He asked for the latest news in politics and literature and expressed hope that Italy could have unity. He added, however, that in this case, the old richly individualized Italy with multiple divisions in character, spirit and customs so precious to the culture of Europe, would be reduced to a modernly confused and culturally flattened country.”
So, before dying, he thought of Italy. A brief, dazzling thought that, as always, he saw from afar. The next day, the doctor found him dead, sitting in the corner of his sofa, slumped on his back. “He always had hoped to die a gentle death because only a person who has been alone all one’s life can understand the lonely matter of dying”.
The moment he pronounced these words gives particular symbolic power to his call out to us – who live in “a modernly confused and culturally flattened Italy” -- to not lose our identity forged of distinct riches born from ancient and deeply-rooted differences, spirits, and customs.
If Europe owes Italy a great deal, we Italians cannot let our children forget it. We cannot lose our conscience nor the memory of the dreams and nightmares we have lived through during our long journey, which is like no other in history. Otherwise, we would become nothing more than provincial oafs in America’s shadow.
According to Milton, Italy was “the center of civilization and the hospitable home of every kind of erudition.”
A FOOTNOTE REGARDING THE ITALIAN CAPITAL
I was born in Verona; my mother was from Lombardy, and my father was Sicilian. Brought up and educated in Milan, I then lived in Rome and Paris and, for work, I traveled half the world. I must confess that I detested the Italian capitol for an unbearably long time. I felt at home everywhere else in Italy, everywhere I felt a strong bond, but not in Rome. Then something happened. A shift in my soul that was difficult to explain, but it finally allowed me to understand this city.
Reading a fragment of Hawthorne was enlightening:
“When we have once known Rome, and left her where she lies, like a long-decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and a fungus growth overspreading all its more admirable features--left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs--left her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing those staircases, which ascend from a ground floor of cookshops, cobblers' stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists, just beneath the unattainable sky--left her, worn out with shivering at the cheerless and smoky fireside by day, and feasting with our own substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed at night--left her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man's integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly bestowed on evil meats--left her, disgusted with the pretense of holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipresent--left her, half lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle of which has been used up long ago, or corrupted by myriads of slaughters--left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness of her future--left her, in short, hating her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the infinite anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down--when we have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery, by and by, that our heartstrings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we were born.”