Of Ernesto Galli of the Loggia

Source: Corriere della Sera
Every time it decides to commit suicide, the Left knows that it can always count on those who are ready to help it get the shot in the barrel.: they are the intellectuals on his side. Who in turn know that whatever they say or do they can always count on the masochistic silence of their victim. This is the first reflection that comes to mind when reading Tomaso Montanari's long article «The invented identity of Italians» (The Fact, 10 September). And immediately afterwards one cannot help but think that on certain subjects in Italy any discussion is impossible since instead of trying to understand the other's reasons everyone repeats their own like a mantra for the public of aficionados. Montanari's thesis is perfectly expressed by the title of the article: the Italian identity does not exist. In his opinion, the term identity itself is a cursed term, serving only to fuel "the poison of identity rhetoric" and therefore to justify the "us" against "them", the doctrines of «rejection», «the concentration camps in Libya», the «foreigner as enemy» as well as obviously «the cultural paradigms (…) connected to the ghosts of Nazi-fascist nationalism", the "Italians first" and so on sermonizing. All infamies attributable precisely to the infamous concept of identity.
It's a shame that to try to be right the author resorts to an expedient that is quite unworthy of his intellectual rank: that of making a convenient opponent that he can easily knock out. If identity, in fact he writes, means “absolute equality, exact and perfect match", well, he concludes triumphantly, then «we must say clearly: no, this Italian identity does not exist". Already: the point is that to my knowledge there has never been anyone so idiotic (least of all someone with a minimum of studies behind them) who supported the existence of an Italian identity in the meaning that Montanari attributes to the word identity. When we talk about Italian identity we mean that meaning of the word for which, for example, we talk about "identity card": that is, as any good dictionary will attest (I quote from Zingarelli): the «qualification of a person, of a place, of a thing for which it is such and no other". In short, Italian identity means that our peninsula presents a set of characteristics which, taken as a whole, are its own alone and not those of other places on earth.. It does not mean at all that in Italy everything is monotonously the same, that everything is identical.
Having cunningly established that this is precisely what this is about, our author has an easy time making fun of such nonsense.. Perhaps not everyone knows this, Indeed, that Italians are the result of a thousand crossbreedings of different peoples from the Alps to Sicily? That Italian culture has always been multifaceted and multi-souled? That there isn't even an Italian cuisine? All true things but they prove nothing. Right, Italians - like almost all the peoples of Europe - are of mixed blood, but until proven otherwise only here and not elsewhere, only in this geographical space, Normans and Byzantines, Arabs and Jews, Greeks and Lombards, Latins and Franks, their languages ​​and cultures have had the opportunity to mix and intersect in such a peculiar way. Likewise, in the Peninsula alone, a myriad of very prestigious literary productions were born, coincidentally all written in one language, Italian: although naturally with very different perspectives and contents (as if the culture of Munich had ever been the same as that of Berlin or in Marseille they spoke the same language as Paris). The fact is that no sensible person would ever define Primo Levi or Giorgio Bassani as Jewish writers: they were two great Italian writers and that's it. As for cuisine, the extraordinary variety of local cuisines in this country is certainly undeniable, but Montanari knows another place in the world where pasta is eaten everywhere like we do here? where vegetables are used as much as on our stoves?
In short, here it is not a question of establishing the existence of an identical but of a unicum. It is not a question of affirming any purity - as Montanari continually tries to insinuate in order to take on the comfortable role of the anti-racist Cato - but rather of focusing on a singular complexity. It's not about biology, In short, it's about history. Identity is a historical fact, the fruit of a story. For this reason it is unique and unrepeatable: because every story is like that. So from a historical point of view it seems unrealistic to me, for example, Montanari's attempt to contest the centrality of its "Christian roots" in Italian identity, and to do so by bringing as decisive proof nothing other than a sentence against the homelands of Don Milani. Then it's just a coincidence, I wonder, it's just a coincidence, I don't know, the endless number of churches present in the Peninsula? It is only a coincidence that until yesterday the most common female name was Maria? The presence of the Holy See in Rome is only an insignificant accident?
The reported "lack of a unitary identity" does not mean the lack of an identity at all (and perhaps even a very strong identity). If this were true, of the rest, no country at least in Europe could then boast one, since neither Spain nor France nor Germany, just to name a few, they certainly possess a much less varied identity than the Italian one. Not only that, but it would also remain to explain a significant historical mystery that I like to put in an adequately rhetorical and arousing form, I imagine, Montanari's healthy disgust: what should we think of the thousands of women and men who have been killed on the battlefields over the last two centuries, on the gallows and by firing squads shouting "Long live Italy"? What were they? Victims of deception, of an illusion of "an idea of ​​a closed and warlike nation", "of a grim nationalism"? Of what?
In reality, what Montanari is really interested in in this discussion is using history, Italy's past, for an exclusively and frankly political purpose: and that is to support the need for an open door towards immigrants, since as he writes «we are all temporary, migrants and foreigners", that «our us was formed thanks to a sum of “them” welcomed and merged in this land» , and that therefore «Italy has always been multi-ethnic and therefore multicultural». Statements which, however, contain a series of somewhat too casual stretches, which especially a scholar should have some restraint in allowing. The peoples that Montanari describes for example as "welcomed and merged into this land" over the centuries were so, but after invasions, guerre, devastating abuses and miseries that often lasted a very long time: which doesn't seem like an irrelevant detail to me. Then talk about Aeneas, to give another example, as of «a refugee, asylum seeker and Trojan migrant" means, apart from the ridiculousness of the vocabulary, also distort the reality of a myth that, at least in the Virgilian version, far from giving us such an idyllic image, it instead speaks to us of ferocious wars that would have been triggered by the arrival of Aeneas on the coasts of Lazio. If we want to take it seriously, a precedent that is not at all reassuring, it will have to be admitted.
In the end anyway, made a clean sweep of one part of history and manipulated the rest, the way is open for our author to proclaim as the only possible Italian identity that of a "constitutional patriotism inspired by a cosmopolitan constitution like the one that the European Union could have created". And so the Left is served: if you want, you have the perfect recipe to enjoy an encore of the electoral catastrophe of 4 March.