Well, I’m in the clear, and I’ll defend myself by saying that I prefer Kafka. Alongside – or in contrast to – the epic, lyrical and snobbish poet of the French bourgeoisie and nobility between the 19th and 20th centuries, I place the mystical rabbi, the Hasid from Prague, an employee at an insurance company, more inclined towards parables and aphorisms than towards apotheosis and aesthetic glorification. Consequently, I must acknowledge not only my failure to read Proust’s entire masterpiece, but also my surrender to the absurd temptation of weighing up and comparing the two most incomparable storytellers of the twentieth century.

The reality and truth is that I read Proust not so much out of any particular passion for Proust himself, but because of the passion I harboured for his most timely and brilliant critics and interpreters – the very best of critical essay writing: namely Walter Benjamin, Erich Auerbach, Giacomo Debenedetti and Edmund Wilson. Incidentally, Proust (like Kafka) did not give rise to a school of thought; there were no ‘Proustians’ after him, just as there were no ‘Kafkian’ writers; instead, there were thinkers and critics whose interpretations of In Search of Lost Time made it possible to derive social and moral philosophy from a narrative.

I began at around the age of twenty by attending Debenedetti’s lectures on the twentieth-century novel – lectures which, following his death, became legendary and were later published in book form. But Debenedetti certainly did not measure up to Proust in the 1960s, when he taught his students that the revolution in the novel during the first two decades of the twentieth century was closely related to Freud’s depth psychology and Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Among the critics who discovered Proust in the 1920s, Debenedetti was the first to do so in 1925, when he was just over twenty years old, immediately observing that In Search of Lost Time lends itself to being anthologised, even though its most striking feature is a continuity of rhythm that renders it indivisible in its unbroken flow. The ‘Proustian tone’ asserts itself ‘from the very first line of the novel’. It is a ‘poetic magic’ that instantly creates a musical atmosphere, and whose perceptiveness does not miss a single sensory detail or any accompanying emotion the moment it arises.

If Debenedetti was himself, in person, somewhat like Proust, then for the melancholic and meditative Benjamin too – who was equally steeped in French literature (Baudelaire, Zola, Gide, Apollinaire, Valéry, Péguy) – Proust is a model, an example, a literary and biographical phenomenon. In the fifteen pages that Benjamin wrote in 1929, entitled ‘Towards a Portrait of Proust’, the portrait emerges right from the opening lines as follows: ‘The depths of the mystic, the art of the prose writer, the verve of the satirist, the learning of the scholar and the obsession of the monomaniac’. His great literary work either establishes a genre or dissolves it; it stands as a case unto itself. Benjamin, adopting a somewhat journalistic style for once, pulls no punches and proceeds by accumulation, speaking of the ‘greatest work of recent decades’, an ‘unusual illness’, ‘uncommon richness’ and an ‘abnormal disposition’. Proust drove his publisher to distraction with his revisions of the galley proofs, which were filled to the brim. He also said that he would have liked his entire work to be printed in a single volume with pages in two columns, and without any line breaks. Finally, here is the writer as a man: ‘Proust’s defining trait is not humour, but comedy; in him, laughter does not lift the world up, it hurls it to the ground (…) the unity of the family and the individual, of sexual morality and social decorum, effectively falls to pieces. The pretensions of the bourgeoisie are shattered by laughter’. And further on: ‘In his curiosity, Proust had something of the detective about him. To him, the privileged class was a clan of wrongdoers’.

On the other hand, Auerbach, as a social critic and philologist, in his 1927 essay entitled Marcel Proust: The Novel of Time Lost speaks of the “unprecedented richness of the linguistic fabric”, but not only that: “The nervous, pedantic and timid cadence of the sentences’ is that of ‘an extremely singular person, a monomaniac suffering from all manner of tics and obsessions (…) a hypersensitive capacity for observation, consistent to the point of madness and terribly aberrant; the colossal novel unfolds amongst his few motifs and events as if in a cage, without seeing the world flowing by right next to it’.

Well, there’s enough here to overcome any reluctance or even boredom that might prevent readers from reading the work in its entirety.

A final essay from 1931 concludes the reception of Proust and his work outside France. It is by Edmund Wilson, the master of American criticism, who in his book Axel’s Castle addresses and explains European literature from Symbolism onwards to his fellow Americans. Here it is: “Marcel Proust is the first great novelist to have applied the principles of Symbolism to fiction (…) His enormous novel is, on closer inspection, a symphonic structure rather than a narrative in the common sense of the term’. Yet Wilson corrects himself: ‘But anyone who has stopped at The Young Girls in Flower and knows only the subjective Proust is bound to form a mistaken idea of the quality of his genius (…) From this point onwards, we find ourselves violently hurled into the life of the outside world. The contrast between the dreams, meditations and lamentations of the neurasthenic hero and Proust’s powerful imagination lends dramatic force to a pervasive sense of humour’. Wilson says that Proust learnt from Dickens and goes on to surpass him, for example, in the tragicomic portrait of Baron de Charlus. Thus, stylistic musicality by no means exhausts the originality of In Search of Lost Time: “Proust ferociously dismantled the social hierarchy he had previously depicted. He shows us that the values on which it is founded are a sham.” Wilson is right. To understand Proust, one must not stop at his initial stylistic tone and his symbolist approach to knowledge and memory. Proust is a great and ruthless moralist; he reveals that even “the world of lovers can be a hell”.

What lies ahead? I shall read Capotorti and Sparvoli’s book to find out what else has been learnt about Proust after a century of critical studies, from Bataille and Contini right through to Orlando and Mariolina Bertini.

Whilst Burroughs’ novels represent one of the most unsettling reading experiences of the twentieth century, these texts offer a better understanding of the reasons behind them: his literary influences, philosophical interests, obsessions and, above all, the genesis of the cut-up technique, developed in collaboration with the artist Brion Gysin. The process is well known: cutting out words, phrases or passages from different texts and reassembling them into new sequences, producing unexpected combinations and meanings that the original text did not appear to contain. The pages also reveal a portrait of an author deeply marked by post-war America and its conformism. From a young age, Burroughs felt the need to break free from rules he perceived as oppressive. He recalls, for example, his experience in the Scouts, where even the time spent in the toilet was strictly monitored. Behind such episodes looms the shadow of puritanical morality, which continued to weigh heavily on his upbringing: during a trip to Santa Fe, he even felt guilty for having masturbated twice a day. A seemingly minor detail, yet one that reveals the conflict between individual desire and social discipline which would characterise much of his work.

No less interesting are the pages devoted to the writers who influenced his development. Burroughs surprises, as is often the case, with the unconventional nature of his judgements. Regarding Hemingway, he considers The Snows of Kilimanjaro to be his only true masterpiece, one of the most powerful accounts of death – or, to use his own words, of the ‘stench of death’ – in English-language literature. He compares it to the endings of Joyce’s The Dead and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a novel in which he particularly admires the narrative structure and symbolic complexity, whilst at times finding the dialogue somewhat stilted.

The theoretical core of the collection, however, remains the cut-up. For Burroughs, this is not merely an avant-garde game, but a tool for altering the relationship between language and reality. The technique is extended to tape recorders: voices and sounds are cut, overlaid and recombined. Writing thus takes on an almost magical function. Just as a ritual claims to exert an influence on the world, so too can language – when manipulated and freed from the ordinary sequence of words – bring to light something that would otherwise remain hidden. For Burroughs, in fact, the cut-up is not merely a matter of pure chance. Behind the apparent disorder of the combinations, profound connections, latent meanings and, at times, even mysterious ‘voices’ are said to emerge. Hence his interest in the psychophony research of Konstantins Raudive and Friedrich Jürgenson. Among the explanations proposed for those voices recorded on magnetic tapes – interventions by the deceased, extraterrestrial intelligences or the psychical energy of the experimenters – Burroughs significantly favours the latter: it is the unconscious memory that resurfaces through technology. Telepathy, auditory hallucinations and the unconscious thus become different ways of questioning the limits of consciousness. Burroughs recalls that even Freud, albeit with great caution, had taken the possibility of telepathic phenomena seriously; and he looks with interest at the theories of Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. According to Jaynes, consciousness as we know it today is a relatively recent development: people in the most ancient civilisations would have perceived the ‘voices’ generated by their own minds as divine commands.

Burroughs is less concerned with establishing whether such a theory is true than with using it to shake our certainties. This, ultimately, is the thread that links linguistic experiments, tape recorders, telepathy, psychoanalysis and literature: the attempt to understand where reality ends and where the mind’s construction of it begins.

The crucial question then becomes: what is consciousness really? Burroughs prudently avoids any definitive answer and resorts to an image far more effective than any theory: consciousness is like a ruler trying to measure itself. An insoluble paradox that perhaps explains why, beyond the provocations and Beat mythology that have accompanied his name, Burroughs continues to unsettle and fascinate to this day.

Like dreams and Surrealism, for Savinio cinema is, in short, both an extraordinary probe into the unconscious and a diabolical instrument, in that it accustoms us to lingering in the indistinct, without bringing its discoveries to the clarity of Metaphysical Art. Yet despite this ambivalence, the link with his own and de Chirico’s imagery is very strong: in his early theoretical articles from the early 1920s, he defines it as ‘mythology in action’, capable of ‘showing us our own contemporaries in a state of contemporary primitivism’, or rather ‘an exact image of the earth before the Flood’; and in his final piece, written on his deathbed, Savinio uses cinema to bid farewell to a human world destined to be lost in astronomical space. But when sound cinema took hold, his love of souplesse inspired him to admire, above all, the cinema of Paris, which ‘creates prose’ by pouring the national resources of theatre and the novel onto film. Thus the ‘gags en passant’ of René Clair—this Racine with a camera—are set against the ‘thoughtful humour’ of Charlot, who forces us to pay for his witticisms with a moralising pause. Significantly, as soon as they set foot in America, the French directors’ work deteriorates: it is like transplanting organisms designed for rooms on a human scale into a boundless prairie; or, to put it without metaphor, into the climate of that gigantism which, for Savinio, is the most dangerous enemy of intelligence.

Generally speaking, Europe confines itself to theorising or alluding, with aesthetic tact, to what countries still too young thoughtlessly translate into monstrous realities: communism in Russia, or that surrealism which in the US culminates in Disney’s frenzied Fantasia – ‘a meal consisting solely of saccharine sweets, washed down with rosolio’ – with a ‘nauseating’ effect. Yet Savinio is not exactly kind to the old continental Surrealists such as Cocteau either, despite the fact that his fiction, from Angelica to Angolino, shares with them a certain use of ‘frames’ and an obsession with the symbol of the eye. Even the most insignificant film, as Balducci rightly points out, becomes, in Savinio’s criticism, an opportunity to raise a general issue of aesthetics, ethics or civilisation. What is more: just as when he goes to the theatre, Savinio also makes some of his most surprising observations at the cinema by paying no less attention to the audience than to the actors. The context explains the text.

Not that it was any easier in the past. For many centuries, to sign one’s name, one had to find an oak tree infested with wasps: the growths in which the insects lay their eggs (known in botany as galls) were the main ingredient of the ink used to write "Hamlet", "Les Misérables" and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Garfield cites a recipe far older than those masterpieces (it dates back to 1483): one had to crush the galls, add ferrous sulphate and gum arabic, and then wait two weeks, stirring every day. However, the drudgery of the inkwell remained: whether made of goose quill or steel, the pen had to be dipped back into it every two words. The most obvious idea then emerged: placing the ink directly inside the pen. So obvious, in fact, that it occurred to several people, and the fountain pen ended up with more than one ‘baptism certificate’: France, 1827; Iowa, 1867; Missouri, three years later.

Perhaps the most enduring founding myth is that of Lewis Edson Waterman, an insurance agent whose pen spilled ink onto an important contract in 1882. Before he could redraft the documents, a mysterious rival snatched the deal from under his nose; so he shut himself away in a relative’s barn and invented the perfect feeding system. A story almost certainly invented after the event, notes Garfield, “in such a sweet, American tone that, over time, even its protagonist would have been led to believe it”. Just over sixty years later, in France, a fountain pen saved a life.

During the Metz offensive in 1944, a rifleman had his windpipe severed by a piece of mortar shrapnel and could no longer breathe. Private Duane N. Kinman, aged nineteen, had nothing but a small pocket knife with him. He took the wounded man’s pen and said to him: “I don’t like doing this, but it’s the only way to save your life”. He then carved a slit, inserted the tip of the fountain pen into the windpipe, and his comrade began to breathe again. “The brand of the pen was not disclosed,” notes Garfield, with the typical regret of a collector. That pen did what every fountain pen should do: let something through, in just the right amount. It is the same definition that Garfield hears from Geoffrey Parker, great-grandson of the founder of that Parker company, who quotes his grandfather Kenneth: the fountain pen, he says, is “a controlled leak”.

And today? The figures read like an obituary: in the United States, 94 per cent of state schools use laptops and tablets for learning. Yet the number of exhibitors at trade fairs is on the rise, and twenty-somethings are returning to Manhattan’s stationery shops. “These days, pens are, in theory, no longer necessary,” says Theodora Helgason, who runs a specialist shop in Nolita, “and I think that’s one of the reasons why people like them now.” Schulz, after all, had realised this early on: rather than mourning them, it’s better to buy things that are about to disappear in bulk.

It is not strictly speaking laziness, though in some ways that has always been there; it is rather a sort of emptiness, as if someone had come along to occupy a space I considered my own, whilst demonstrating, moreover, that they could do so with disarming ease and skill. Artificial intelligence finds the words, constructs sentences, organises thoughts, identifies connections; it can imitate styles, change tone, be brilliant, ironic, melancholic; it can write an article in a matter of seconds, whilst I might spend an entire morning struggling to come up with a decent opening line. So why should I carry on?

I realise, of course, that the question is not only rhetorical but also flawed. I am well aware that writing is much more than simply producing a text or a competition to see who can master concepts, grammar and syntax better and more quickly. Yet knowing all this does not seem enough to restore my desire to do it. Alfonso Berardinelli wrote in this newspaper that ‘there is no escape for human intelligence. Let us not delude ourselves into thinking we can maintain a spiritual life alongside artificial intelligence’. Perhaps he, too, is exaggerating, but I certainly tend to agree with him.

Until yesterday, writing was also a way for me to feel capable of something, to make myself known: not necessarily good, not necessarily original, but at least recognisable and perhaps appreciated (one always hopes for that). Despite all my limitations, I felt I was giving voice to what I thought I understood about this or that subject. Now that voice seems superfluous to me. Having written on several occasions—with others in mind, especially younger people—about the risks of artificial intelligence eventually writing in our place, stifling our natural language and thus our thoughts, I find myself uncomfortably experiencing the effect on myself. But not in the sense – at least I hope not – that I am losing the ability to write, but rather in the sense that I am no longer sure it is worth doing. And that is perhaps even worse.

I realise that before I even formulate a thought, I’m already imagining how a machine might develop it; even before I look for a word, I think that ChatGPT would surely find a more precise and effective one; before I start an article, I find myself thinking that a better version of what I might write already exists somewhere. It feels like a pre-emptive defence, an early surrender even before taking to the field, perhaps a way of getting used to irrelevance before it even becomes official. On the other hand, once it is established that a well-argued and formally flawless text can be obtained in a matter of seconds by turning to any chatbot, what is the point of racking one’s brains to write it oneself? As far as I’m concerned, as I’ve already said, there remains the unquenchable pleasure of reading – of certain ideas that spring to mind without any pretence of being put down in writing, and of others that need to be written down to clarify them to ourselves – writing is that too. But otherwise, I’m becoming increasingly sceptical about the usefulness of writing. What gives me heart, however, is a firm conviction: that the great poets and writers are not in the least affected by what I am writing in this article. They will continue to write, without their energy being in the slightest way diminished by artificial intelligence or even by our whingeing.

The term ‘mass radicalism’ stems from the observation that, due to a combination of internal and external circumstances, a multitude of extremist theories are reaching and seducing an ever-growing and increasingly vulnerable segment of the public; a poisoning of the wellspring brought about by the West’s desire for self-destruction. The first stage of this offensive, explains Fertilio, is the indictment of the traditional family, judged to be a theatre of alienation and abuse of every kind, reviled and stigmatised as ‘patriarchal’ and ‘sexist’, a source of mutual resentment, hatred and sadism, as well as oppressive towards women; nothing more than a scaled-down reproduction of a Western society that is itself sick, poisoned by the capitalist logic of power, property, money and profit: in short, both family and society are deemed unworthy, immoral and deserving of destruction.

We, the poor victims of this system, therefore urgently need a process of ‘collective re-education’. Mass radicalism offers us the mirage of an ‘enchanted garden’ of a religious, almost mystical nature, to be built through the social constructivism of a new, strong and enlightened elite. The first step in this process is a complete deconstruction and reconstruction of language, involving the imposition of the ‘official jargon’ typical of totalitarian systems. The ideology has a dual component – archaic and utopian – that is, at once naturalistic and scientistic. In very Platonic terms, ‘the world must be rebuilt from the ground up to become itself once more’.

And so begins the ‘waltz of prohibitions’. In describing the vast and menacing array of this new mass radicalism, the author takes pleasure in identifying ten schools of thought, each with its own followers. These range from the more traditional ‘revolutionaries’ (that is, the Marxist orphans and failures of the 1970s) to the far more tragic ‘destroyers’ and ‘nihilists’ (De Saussure, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault); from the ‘redeemers’ (Reich, Fromm, Marcuse, Baudrillard, Barthes) to the ‘ephemeral’ (Warhol, Vattimo, Lyotard, Gadamer); from the ridiculous ‘apocalyptic’ (Pasolini, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky) to the decidedly comical ‘post-humans’, and so on.

The anecdote about Fertilio’s meeting with Michel Foucault, in the editorial office of a publishing house, way back in 1976, is particularly fascinating: “I was struck by the intensity of the aggression and contempt I felt being hurled in my face (…) as if he had sensed, many decades in advance, that our irreconcilable differences would have some consequence. Namely, this book”.

This, too, is a story within a story, and there are many narrative threads that each of Pinocchio’s supporting characters recounts through their reconstruction – at times rigorous or philological, at other times emotional and poetic – of those who, in various capacities, have worked with that blueprint, Collodi’s fantastical novel, ‘encountering’ it and emerging transformed: the screen displays the testimonies and reflections – profound and often surprising – of directors, actors, lecturers, philosophers and art historians who have engaged with the puppet at different stages of their lives and in different parts of the world, interpreting through shifting lenses not only the character of the puppet-child, but also his unforgettable supporting characters – who are themselves archetypes – gradually confined by prejudice and gradually freed from that cage. Is the Blue Fairy a little girl, a woman, an ally or a tyrant, wonders the young Alida Baldari Calabria – who played the eleven-year-old Blue Fairy in Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio (2019) – as she reflects on her own growth both within and outside the film? And who is Lucignolo really, wonders director Francesca Comencini, taking his side – an expert on Pinocchio by family osmosis, that is, first and foremost because she had him at home, in the form of a TV drama directed in 1972 by her father Luigi? Or who is Mangiafuoco really, we ask ourselves, whilst Anna Luscenkova Foscolo, lecturer in Russian Language and Literature, recounts the Soviet parallel to Pinocchio: ‘Buratino’ – with a single ‘t’ – who emerged from the pages of the lesser-known Tolstoy (Aleksey), and later became an animated film and an Iron Curtain counterpart to one of Disney’s most famous cartoons: and so a Mangiafuoco takes shape – a true villain and true antagonist, renamed Karabas Barabas and a symbol of all capitalist wickedness, facing a Pinocchio who fights for the oppressed workers.

However, it also features the inclusive puppet from “Pinocchio, che cos’è una persona?” by the playwright and educationalist Davide Iodice – which recounts the origins and journey of a teenager navigating the twists and turns of growing up, a boy to whom society perhaps ‘gives a long nose for being a liar’, but this is merely a mirror: who is the real liar? Among others, the philosopher Caroline Anthèrieu-Yagbasan, the director and puppet designer Toby Olié, art historian Francesca Tancini, Chinese lecturer Gao Chanxu (who still remembers the cover of Pinocchio that fascinated him as a child) and director Guillermo del Toro. The result is a collective narrative full of unexpected insights: is the piece of wood from which the animated puppet is born like Michelangelo’s marble, which imposes its form on the sculptor? Pinocchio is a symbol of imperfect humanity even when he becomes a boy and looks with amused tenderness at his former self—a block of wood—in the corner of the room, having gone through love and pain; it is like when one finds oneself looking back at one’s past self, emerging from a disastrous relationship: ‘Oh, how funny I looked when I was in love!’. But Pinocchio also looks to the future, and there is much of the unease of our times in the film’s exploration of the relationship between humans and puppets: Pinocchio as an android? Pinocchio as AI? But, in another surprise, it is the ending itself that challenges us: why does no one ever remember the last page of Pinocchio?

The columnist, who signs his pieces with the initial ‘L.’, making his debut as a music critic, is Carlo Lorenzini, the man who, nine years later, would adopt the pseudonym Collodi. The author of The Adventures of Pinocchio was, in fact, a scathing music critic for some of the leading newspapers of the time from 1847 onwards for a decade. An extraordinary volume published by Libreria Musicale Italiana and edited by Marco Capra, Collodi e la musica, reprints the musical writings of the Florentine journalist and writer.

As a music critic, Collodi was scornful, polemical, often vitriolic, and always incisive and sharp. A staunch defender – ever since his very first piece on the harp – of Italian tradition, when in 1853 he heard Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien, he criticised the music for being “too slavishly tailored to French taste”, addressing the composer: “Where are you? Where are your beautiful songs, your passionate melodies, your brilliant colours? Where is that multifaceted power of yours that descends into the soul and touches the very fibres of the heart?”.

Collodi’s writings on music make for a thoroughly entertaining read. He was fiercely critical of Verdi and of what he termed ‘Verdi-mania’: in 1855, in Florence, he attended a performance of La Traviata and savaged it as ‘a jumble of waltzes, larghi and cabalettas, all strung together by monotonous and insignificant recitatives’. When he reviewed I Vespri Siciliani, staged in 1856 at the Teatro Pagliano, he did not skimp on what might be called ‘incidental’ details: ‘Between the third and fourth acts. Many are glancing at their watches and starting to say it’s late!… Between the fourth and fifth acts. General signs of weariness… and an eagerness for the fifth act to begin… so they can go and fetch their overcoats and umbrellas!”.

In addition to reviews and music columns for L’Italia musicale and Lo Scaramuccia, the book also includes satirical articles, oddities, musical profiles and caricatures, as well as dialogues and parodies: In these pages the Collodi of Pinocchio—humorous and light-hearted—clearly emerges: the writer who described journalists as ‘the link between the parrot and the leech’. In his irreverent, self-deprecating humour, Lorenzini – who knew music well and played the piano – was keen to point out that ‘to speak authoritatively about music, two absolutely essential things are required: to know nothing about music and to imagine oneself to be a great intellectual. Music and politics are two subjects in the public domain: anyone can discuss them at length – even the deaf and the illiterate’. Collodi, as a music journalist, as Capra aptly writes in his introductory essay, was a multifaceted figure ‘always lucidly suspended between news reporting, criticism and literary invention’.

Like much literature from the interwar period, “Il garofano rosso” revolves around the myth of adolescence. In this case, it is an adolescence set in secondary schools. The story is set in 1924, in a town in eastern Sicily. Alessio, Tarquinio and the others are fascinated by everything that presents itself as violently anti-bourgeois: the most vitalistic form of fascism, but also the Bolshevik revolution. Vittorini imbues his protagonist with his own extreme rhetoric, his eagerness to transform every intense sensory experience into a banner of rebirth. Hence his instinctive belief that words can change things instantly. But this is merely the illusion of a young man accustomed to renaming familiar surroundings with student-like enthusiasm to make them seem magical. Thus, in the city of the ‘pink mountain’, a printing works becomes a mythical ‘quarry’, a fenced-off area where the ‘Mato Grosso’ is fought out, and the revolution a Western seen at the cinema.

In Alessio’s upbringing, the turning point is his first ‘conscious’ summer spent in the village: there he realises that, as the son of the brickworks owner, he can never be like the workers, and that beyond the limbo of childhood lies nothing but a wasteland. When he returns to the city streets, the school of night-time occupations and great love is reduced to a place of death. In the end, like Borgese’s Rubè, Alessio joins a procession of flags without knowing where he is going, and listens to the macabre, Saint-Just-style oration of a scrawny ‘lad’: History is a dream that infects the immature, driving them to shed blood. A particularly telling passage is the one summarising a clash between the teachers – who represent the old liberal state – and the students, who, armed with ideologies they have only just picked up, attempt to justify their hooliganish, romantic, rootless zest for life.

The protagonist recalls “the cold of the revolver pressing against my thigh”, and transforms his brawls into fatal duels with his female companions, who play the role of mischievous rivals. Then the name of that year’s martyr surfaces, perceived as a relic of a past to be buried. With Tarquinio, “people joke and laugh, and nothing is heard of the man commemorating Matteotti somewhere in the square. We only know that he is speaking, that there is this emotional, slightly nasal voice—at times shrill, like the closing arguments in the Assize Court—and that there is this ‘Anointed One of Bourgeois Justice’ gesticulating over one conscience after another as if to make them give birth—but we do not see him, and we whistle ‘Giovinezza’ amongst ourselves”. There you have it; we must never forget this: youth was a quintessentially Fascist myth. But also a Victorian one.

It is a myth that prevents one from achieving a fully realised form, forcing one to constantly strive to capture the spirit of the times. “From James to Joyce, to Saroyan, to Faulkner, to Hemingway, Vittorini moved, step by step, from one to the other, yet always remained in a perpetual state of avant-garde,” wrote Geno Pampaloni. “Each of his books beats, in Italy, a beat ahead of the ‘pulse’ of militant literature, and to a large extent determines it. I find myself wondering at this point whether Vittorini will find time for Vittorini himself.” This is perhaps the most poignant – and most affectionate – description of one of the central figures of twentieth-century Italian culture. And today it still rings out as a warning – both cultural and political – for those who write or campaign.

The writer’s name is Caro Claire Burke. The protagonist is a ‘tradwife’, the sort of woman who proudly lives as if washing machines and dishwashers had never been invented. The milk is milked from their own cow and brought to the table whilst still warm, with its frothy cream. The bread is kneaded by hand and baked in the home oven. There is no mention of the pill – neither the contraceptive pill nor even painkillers – as if they had never been invented. Anaesthesia is the work of the devil – is it not written in the sacred text, ‘you shall give birth in pain’?

Natalie Heller Mills is 32 years old, a mother of five with a sixth on the way, and the owner of a supposedly rustic business that rakes in several million – we only find out later in the novel how she got there, following a marriage to a very wealthy and equally idle husband. The operation appears effortless—one might expect her to boast about doing the laundry with ash at any moment. In reality, Natalie employs a small team of assistants, kept well out of the camera’s view. She appears elegantly dressed and well-groomed, kisses her fair-haired children, and offers a few mementoes of rustic life for sale.

Christian faith, of course. And if anyone raises objections about the authenticity of a life like hers, she invokes ‘baby brain’ – the mental confusion that follows childbirth. This comes in very handy when a truth slips her mind – the presence of farm labourers, for example – that needs to be kept hidden. She is an unsympathetic heroine. Her perfection and the web of lies she weaves make her unlikeable, yet they also lead her followers to dream of a country house with a butter churn for making fresh butter in the kitchen.

By page 37, the idyll of “on the old farm, all together now” begins to fade. Natalie wakes up one morning to find the house uncharacteristically cold. She initially assumes that the electricity has failed and that the house’s generator—still under warranty—has also stopped working. She has not yet grasped the full seriousness of the situation. She touches the duvet—it feels awful. It isn’t the flannel and linen blend she’d bought a few years earlier. Its surface is rough; Natalie imagines that the usual elegant-yet-rustic duvet is out for washing, and that the one on her bed has been pulled from the back of a drawer without a second thought.

The first thought worthy of the name suggests ‘I’ve been kidnapped’. Yet in the next room are six children, looking even more ragged than she remembered them. And here we begin to understand Anne Hathaway’s interest in this novel, which runs to over 400 pages (several dozen of which could have been cut without any loss). The actress cast as Natalie will be able to perform certain scenes with dishevelled hair and no make-up, out in the woods. And in others, she’ll be made to look as young as she did in her university days – miracles that only skilled film make-up artists know how to achieve.

There are a few twists and turns, though they’re more of the tedious sort than the surprising kind. What we do have, however, are all the talking points we need for today’s debate. The influence of influencers. The allure of the pseudo-rustic world. Men who want to be in charge, even if they end up being incapable of doing anything. Housewives chopping onions on a live stream.

If they ever get that far. The dispute between Giuseppe Valditara and Giuseppe Laterza must in fact be considered on two levels: a theoretical one and a practical one. The theoretical level is captivating the debaters, but in itself it has no raison d’être: it is obvious that a publishing house has no duty to please serving ministers with its publications, and that a politician would not appreciate the government of which he is a part being consigned to history with a judgement that is, if not hostile, then at least sloppy. The practical aspect, on the other hand, is being ignored by public opinion, yet it directly concerns teaching practice, for which the textbook serves as a support and reinforcement. The Education Minister’s protest regarding the history textbook’s alleged capacity to indoctrinate pupils is based on a number of unstated assumptions, which I shall list before analysing them individually: school history syllabuses cover the period right up to the very present day; textbooks have a duty to remain neutral; teachers are passive conduits of what is written in the book; and pupils are passive recipients of what they study.

If they were made explicit, I am sure the minister himself would be the first to acknowledge that they are all incorrect. The trouble is that, by leaving them implied, they remain hidden and contribute to the spectacular misunderstanding from which the controversy has sprung. If, looking back, we all tried to recall just how far our study of history had gone at secondary school, we would realise that we never got round to discussing the government in office – at least not systematically, as part of a progressive chronological progression within the final-year syllabus. This was not the case when, in the fifth year, we began with the unification of Italy, let alone when the subject was not included in the final exam and faded into obscurity during the second term – in my case, the final event I was taught about was the sinking of the Lusitania, which brought history to a premature end on 7 May 1915 and left it to my extensive general knowledge to discover who had actually won this blessed First World War. This remains true even after the Berlinguer reform, which mandated that the entire final year be devoted to the study of the 20th century; now that I find myself on the other side of the lectern, it is a source of pride among colleagues when one of us manages to reach the point of discussing more recent events such as Tangentopoli, the war in Yugoslavia, the founding of the European Union. Berlusconi.

It is absurd to claim that history textbooks should remain apolitical. This does not mean that they can dictate terms like great sultans, expressing arbitrary or capricious judgements, as their task is, first and foremost, to equip young readers with the ability to argue on the basis of facts rather than prejudices. However, demanding neutral textbooks implies a conception of history as a static contemplation of crystallised events, whereas historiography is a dynamic discipline, founded on interpretation and ensuring the coexistence of different perspectives on the same events. If this were not the case, one textbook would be as good as another, and history would become far more tedious – a study comparable to memorising the telephone directory merely to reel off names and numbers before an enthralled audience. History demands interpretation, and interpretation involves the possibility of error.

At secondary school, I studied from a textbook with a strong Marxist slant which I still have to this day – the Brancati – although I could brandish it, foaming at the mouth, as an example of politicised historiography. For example, at the time, the interpretation of relations between Russia and Ukraine was the exact opposite of what we now know to be the reality and was aligned with Moscow’s propaganda (another textbook of a similar ilk culminated its account of world history with a photograph of Massimo D’Alema, a choice that turned out to be a misjudgement). Nonetheless, I remain indebted to Brancati for the lessons on which I have relied in my subsequent studies in the field: that historiography requires a guiding interpretative framework, lest it be reduced to scholarly caprice; that it must be founded on a solid understanding of the material conditions from which institutions arose; and that it must always be accompanied by a healthy dose of critical reading, capable of tracing the evolution of the prevailing interpretation of that period over the course of subsequent centuries or decades.

If this principle is ignored, history teachers risk being perceived as mere mouthpieces, reducing lessons to – as one politically incorrect colleague put it – a ‘textbook for the blind’: a tedious repetition of the same old content that pupils are expected to learn by heart. I, too, have had a teacher who would open the textbook and read it aloud to us, pacing up and down the classroom from the corner of the Epistles to the corner of the Gospels; I trust, however, that the Minister does not take this teaching practice for granted as the most widespread, or indeed the only one. If, as you walk past a school in Milan, you hear someone shouting themselves hoarse, that is me: I am trying to explain to my pupils that the lesson and the textbook are complementary parts of the learning process, so it is not enough just to read the textbook, just as it is not enough just to listen to the lesson.

History consists of one event following another, each with its own context—comprising aspects of varying degrees of significance—its correlation with other events (past, present and future), the succession of interpretations it has undergone, and the specific points of reference we can find in our own era. The interconnections between these elements are potentially infinite, and while the textbook presents a selection in line with the authors’ expertise, the teacher has a duty to highlight other possible connections, in line with their own abilities, the interests of the individual class, and developments in current affairs. A textbook that speaks ill – I am not referring to Giorgia Meloni, but to Count-Duke Guzmán de Olivares – will not prevent the teacher from presenting countless other perspectives and facets on the same figure.

Of course, if a teacher were to simply recite the textbook, if their lesson consisted of telling pupils to study from page such-and-such to page such-and-such, and that’s it, then there would be cause for concern that pupils might end up being indoctrinated. Even in this case, however, there is no need to worry: pupils no longer use textbooks, which parents buy, if at all, only because they are compulsory. An increasing number of colleagues confirm that their pupils (for mine, the seal of confession applies) simply study from more or less muddled notes taken during lessons, thus relying on oral tradition and turning the study of history into a game of Chinese whispers that leads to the certainty that the Spanish invaded England with the Invisible Armada and that Catherine de’ Medici was the seer of the Kingdom of France. Few even bother to consult the final page of the textbook; those who do—already avid readers—possess a sufficient arsenal of ideas and knowledge not to blindly accept the first line they encounter. The minister can breathe a sigh of relief: whatever appears in the textbooks, there’s no way the students will be indoctrinated by it. To be on the safe side, they don’t study.

The philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who has long focused his attention on seemingly ‘pop’ topics whilst delving into their deeper meanings – as in his recent work Il continente ignoto, which centres on love – had already explored these figures some time ago, gathering accounts of them from the three major monotheistic religions. His new book, La gerarchia degli angeli (il Mulino, 224 pp., €18), is a rigorous analysis that begins with the nature of these figures in Christian mythology to examine how their organisation has exerted a subtle yet decisive influence on the development of those reflections that link politics and theology; but also – and this is the aspect that makes the essay all the more interesting – how this hierarchy of ‘creatures so ambiguous and, moreover, belonging to myths that have often served to justify prolonged forms of domination and alienation’ still reverberates in the structures of Western society. Coccia’s essays take their starting point precisely from the concept of ‘hierarchy’, a term which literally means ‘power over sacred things’ and thus denotes a form of imbalance between those who hold it and those who lack it, delving into the nebulous boundaries of these phantasmal beings who rebelled against God out of jealousy at the sudden importance acquired by humankind, and who formed a ‘society as a space for the exercise and circulation of power’.

Thus, by setting aside the error – so dear to us because it offers solace even in relation to our own world – that amongst the angels, ‘courtiers of God’, ‘one is as good as another’, Coccia demonstrates how these are far from removed from our own world, for the mechanisms which, according to theology, govern their mutual relationships and their relationship with God bear witness to a certain exercise of power which, to anyone who engages conscientiously with the world, will not seem new: the fall from heaven of the rebellious angels ‘who have lost their glory, their honour and their closeness to God’ symbolises how this celestial society, even before the birth of humanity, experienced conflicts and tensions that highlight how power, by its very nature, gives rise to the possibility of revolt.

Thus, Coccia suggests that angelology is not merely a remnant of a distant, bygone world, but a paradigm for observing the world from a different angle. In a landscape dominated by ‘surveillance capitalism’ and an annoyingly hyperuranic bureaucracy, by a clear separation of roles and an obsession with order, by the algorithmic machine that fuels the anaesthesia of thought, and by a ‘culture of surveillance’ that leads everyone to become their own overseer, the stories recounted by Coccia show how these processes of the celestial society continue to be replicated in the present, supporting that ‘survival of the Ancient’ of which Aby Warburg spoke—that is, the cyclical reappearance of patterns from the past which thus reveal themselves to be timeless.

With La gerarchia degli angeli, just as with La vita delle piante, which showed how forms of plant life were far from alien to humankind, and with Filosofia della casa, which instead described domestic space as a living prism onto which we project ourselves, Coccia reveals to us the extraordinary and surprising closeness between worlds that are worlds apart: between the mechanisms of today’s monsters and the ‘oldest of societies’, ‘the most perfect’, that of the angels, whose members ‘live entirely for their task, and in accordance with it’, because for them ‘to exist means “to work”, “to fulfil a task”’. It is a complete short-circuit, one of those extreme reversals of thought that help us understand who we are.

The tone was that of someone playing host. The facts bear this out: in Turin, whoever occupies a university building gets to keep it, and the institution relocates elsewhere, even posting updates about it on Facebook and Instagram. The sequence of events is documented. The Einaudi Campus was occupied on 26 October and, from 2 November, the university arranged for distance learning, rescheduled exams and graduation ceremonies, and sent staff to work remotely. In announcing this, it acknowledged that the occupation was preventing free access and the smooth running of academic activities. Two weeks later, the occupiers moved to Palazzo Nuovo and the university announced the same measures. Meanwhile, whilst Vice-Chancellor Prandi declared her willingness to engage in dialogue, the occupiers called for her resignation, describing online teaching as an ‘arbitrary decision’ in an email to lecturers. Indeed, why on earth should teaching take place at the university?

It is interesting to note that, around the same time, a German university dealt with a similar case. On 4 November, the Academic Senate of Kassel abolished the civil clause, which restricted research to non-military purposes, and opened the door to military research as well – which, in these times, may well be useful for defence. Around a hundred students occupied the main lecture theatre in protest. Following an attempt at negotiation and repeated calls to leave, the vice-chancellor filed a complaint for trespass; the police intervened during the night and by the following morning the lecture theatre was back in use. Forty-seven people were under investigation, and six police officers sustained minor injuries. The university justified its decision with a single figure: 17 lectures and meetings postponed or cancelled. The students spoke of an escalation, and whilst opinions remain divided on the civil liability clause, the university is pressing ahead. In other words, in Kassel, 17 missed lectures in a single lecture theatre were deemed sufficient grounds for action. In Turin, an entire campus was occupied for two weeks and a second site has been occupied since Monday, as if the problems of the cost of living, rearmament, budget cuts and the situation in Palestine could be resolved by sleeping in the university. Consequently, everything has come to a standstill: bugianén, in the ironic and contemporary sense of a term originally coined for a different purpose.

But the comparison also holds up on the merits. Kassel has abolished the civil clause; Turin, on the other hand, states that it has no framework agreements with Leonardo or Thales Alenia Space, that it has restricted the agreement with Confindustria Piemonte to civilian use only, and that it subjects research to a dual-use risk assessment. In March 2024, the Academic Senate had already withdrawn the call for proposals for scientific cooperation with Israel, and now it appears to be preparing to take a harder line. These numerous concessions have failed to prevent either the occupation or the accusation that the university is ‘a research laboratory for extermination’, while alienating it from two Turin-based companies that produce space technology and provide skilled employment. The result is a scenario of unfortunate degrowth, held hostage by a minority that condemns the violence of others without examining its own.

The University of Turin has around 80,000 students. Those taking part in the occupation represent a tiny fraction of this number, and no elected body has granted them such a mandate. Yet they are deciding ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘whether’ lectures take place, whilst the majority of students – who pay their fees and would like to study – have no say in this matter. Then there is the position of the lecturers. The message calls on us to “stand together” with the occupiers against the university’s decision and to plan with them “the contribution the university can make to the movement”. Personally, no thanks.

Certainly, one of the duties of those who run a university is to engage in dialogue with students, including those who contest agreements with the defence industry or the cost of accommodation – issues on which discussion is legitimate. However, that dialogue should be based on one condition: that it takes place in lecture theatres open to all, with participants who have a name and a mandate. Without censorship or violence from those who wish to impose their own views on others. In Turin, this condition is lacking, and the invitation to ‘discuss’ was sent to lecturers by the occupiers, at night, via a Gmail address created by some Trojan horse who chose to become the mouthpiece of those occupying the premises – and no one stopped it.

At the heart of the matter is a passage in the textbook Trame del tempo 3, published by the well-known Apulian publishing house, which refers to the Meloni government as an executive that “stands out for implementing measures that are clearly repressive”. The passage in question states that the current government “came to power for the first time a century after the March on Rome and seventy-seven years after the Liberation from fascism”; it is “the party that has taken up its legacy and which continues to maintain close ties with its avowedly fascist ‘base’ – as also demonstrated by Fanpage’s June 2024 investigation ‘Gioventù meloniana’”. It goes on to state that the government “stands out for implementing openly freedom-suppressing measures, such as the so-called ‘Security’ bill of September 2024, which significantly curtails the right to protest”. Finally, according to the textbook, the Meloni government is waging “a war on migrants with renewed fervour, with plans for deportation and their constant criminalisation in the media”. 

According to the Minister for Education, Giuseppe Valditara, the textbook should be withdrawn from sale. “It contains statements that are entirely manipulative and unreliable. I believe it is in the publisher’s own best interests, to safeguard the scientific reputation of its publishing house, to withdraw a text which, from a scientific point of view, is entirely inadequate and which risks being used to indoctrinate students.” Laterza, however, has stated its opposition. "I do not think it is appropriate for a history book to venture into political assessments of the government in office. That is not history but current affairs; it is political debate, and there is another forum for that – not a history book that is subsequently adopted by schools," observes Giannelli, whilst acknowledging the legitimacy of Laterza’s decision not to backtrack. “That would be censorship. You cannot tell someone what they must or must not publish. A person is free to write whatever they like; if anyone believes there are defamatory passages, they are free to file a lawsuit or take the matter to the relevant authorities.”

You can write, and you can buy too. “Just don’t buy books that contain certain things,” adds the president. “There is a very clear – and indeed open – procedure laid down by our education system concerning the approval and adoption of a textbook, which is entrusted precisely to the teaching staff. It is up to the teachers’ discretion to adopt one book rather than another.” So was Valditara wrong to call for its removal? "The minister is, after all, a political authority. Whilst on the one hand he administers the education system, on the other he remains a politician with a legitimate vision which, within the current majority, has been legitimised by the majority of those who turned out to vote," replies Giannelli. "I have nothing to say on this matter."

Not even teachers and pupils—who are always very active in taking to the streets to protest against political interference in the classroom—will have spotted it. “It probably went a bit unnoticed. That book will have been assessed correctly in other respects,” concludes the president of the National Association of Headteachers.

In the world of comics, we’re discussing Papereneide, written by Francesco Artibani and illustrated by Simona Capovilla, which has just been collected in a volume by Panini Comics. It is a work that strikes a delicate balance: respecting the framework of Virgil’s poem whilst simultaneously adapting it to the Disney formula, characterised by misunderstandings, iconic characters, adventure and humour. And in this, the writing and artwork succeed extraordinarily well in transforming the imagery of antiquity into something that feels instantly at home with the Ducks, without making it seem like a mere costume play.

In the realm of film and television, "Ramayana – The Birth of a Legend" is a must-see for all enthusiasts of Indian cinema and mythology alike. One of the oldest and best-known tales in Indian culture, which for centuries has spanned literature, religion, theatre, dance, art and popular culture, now comes to the big screen as a contemporary blockbuster, featuring stunning visual effects and a soundtrack that brings together two Oscar winners from seemingly worlds apart: A.R. Rahman and Hans Zimmer. 

Finally, the recommendation for the gaming world is the Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek expansion. A major event in which Wizards of the Coast brings characters, spaceships and stories from virtually the entire science fiction saga into Magic: from the original series to subsequent adaptations. Rather than simply placing Picard’s face or the Enterprise on existing cards, as is often the case with these crossovers, they are translating Star Trek into the language of the TCG, exploring its mechanics, stories and characters. 

Three features to help you navigate the world of entertainment and pop culture, a realm of major new releases and big comebacks, age-old stories and unexpected crossovers. DECODER is here to decode the present, including through its new popular myths, piecing together, week after week, feature after feature, a vast map that charts, more than ever before, the infinite nuances and directions of our present. Join us next week for another trio of unmissable titles. 

The life Marceau describes is a world away from Paris: it is set in communist Poland in the 1980s, in Warsaw, in the outlying district of Ursynów, where the director had a flat to which he had regained the right of occupancy after having lent it to a member of his family for twenty years. This situation stemmed from the administrative practices of the communist era, which allowed people to benefit from the right to occupy state-owned accommodation. “You agreed, not without some reservations, to take advantage of the benefits of Marxist philosophy and moved there for the first time. With me,” writes the actress.

The daughter of a veteran of the Algerian War who worked as a lorry driver and a mother employed in a shopping centre, Sophie Marceau grew up in a working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris, amongst council flats and wasteland, a far cry from the image of the middle-class woman in "Le Temps des cerises". “I had no records, no music, no books, no cinema – I had nothing of the world. We were street children; we played outdoors, and I loved it – I felt very much at ease wandering about outside in my slippers,” she told France Inter.

When she arrived in Warsaw before the fall of the Wall, it came as a shock. “Everything was dark, sad and dirty. There were no colours, no light; I was left with the image of a flat, lifeless city,” says the actress, recalling the practical hardships of daily life: “We always had to go and fetch water from the spring.” Travelling in Fiat 500s – nicknamed ‘yoghurt pots’ in Poland – residents would sometimes wait up to two hours to return home with two fifteen-litre jerrycans.

But Sophie Marceau also recalls with emotion “all that resistance, those people who were suffering but trying to keep fighting against the communist yoke”. And who, in 1989, thanks to Solidarność, would regain their freedom. In Warsaw, Marceau shot her first film, a short film entitled L’Aube à l’envers, inspired by Paul Verlaine’s poem of the same name, but which, she says, is in fact the “synthesis” of her relationship with Andrzej Zulawski.

However, ‘there are truths that can only be revealed once they have been discovered’, writes Mouawad, and, in the director’s interpretation, this is perhaps the most emblematic line in the entire play. It is uttered, through a clarifying letter, by the protagonist, Nawal (an extraordinary Frédérique Loliée), when everything has come to pass twice: first by living through it and second by learning its contours. “Knowledge alone,” explains Lorenzi, “remains merely a theoretical tool,” as Jeanne (Barbara Mazzi) is well aware, Nawal’s daughter, who, despite her expertise in graph theory—which she teaches—must acknowledge the impossibility of indisputable knowledge and set out on a journey to understand, even in place of her twin brother Simon (Elio D’Alessandro) who refuses to do so, the reasons behind the silence into which their mother has retreated during the final years of her life. The entire production is therefore a journey to an ‘elsewhere’ where a war is being waged – the war of a world in conflict when human beings are incapable of recognising their brother in their brother: Lebanon, yes, but more broadly the space where men and women move about unawares. It takes the form of a polygon, where each vertex is a character conceived as a relational node connected to the others – bearing in mind that for anyone living, there is always a blind spot – and Lorenzi recreates this on stage with a platform upon which the actors move and which can rotate, transforming space into time. Its movement is therefore, by necessity, circular and gives rise to layers. The same point is the present of the story but has already been experienced in the past: the two horizons coexist and algebraically add up in the ‘mathematics of solitude’, as Jeanne defines it. One can emerge from a womb and, inappropriately, return to it; a child can be abandoned and, with horror and love, recognised; existence torn apart and in revolt against its own expression, for ‘for everyone, before the truth there is silence’.

But that is not all: between the stage and the audience, as well as between one character and another depending on what is happening, Lorenzi places a screen made of a tulle veil that alters the perception of reality and, ultimately, of truth. “I think,” he explains, “and this is one of the reasons why I feel at ease with Wajdi’s dramaturgy – having also staged *Come gli uccelli* last season – that he does not wish to tell us anything in a definitive way. Rather, he leaves us with a doubt, placing us in the uncomfortable position of spectators who must remain within the contradiction.”

So what can we, and must we, make of words? Of telling our own story? We have no choice but to use them, as Nawal’s grandmother Nazira (played, as always, by Loliée) teaches the young girl (played with passion by Sara Verteramo) when her son – fathered by a boy of her own age – is taken away from her. Nazira urges her: “Learn to read, to write, to count, to speak. Learn to think.” It is precisely with this exhortation—which is the very same we must offer our sons and daughters today, whilst not forgetting that this is not always possible everywhere— Loliée-Nawal’s intensely powerful monologue before the judges comes to a close; they are assessing the degree of violence that her torturer and rapist (played by Giovanni Drago) inflicted (not only) upon her, without knowing who she actually was. Guiding everyone toward an unacceptable, yet paradoxically soothing, truth is the notary Hermile Lebel, who, with his tics and his objectifying role, acts as the guardian of the ‘rules’ and leads the twins Jeanne and Simon to give names to things and, ultimately, to themselves. He is played by the ever-impeccable Filippo Dini, artistic director of the Stabile, who wanted the Veneto region itself to bring to life on stage a story so disturbing, so universal, so topical: a classical tragedy of the contemporary world (which, after the Veneto, will be staged in Turin, Cesena, Trento, Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples and Brescia). We can all, once again, hear the sound of silence. Bow to the power of the word.

What is the origin of the welfare state?

One might say that it has two parents, one communist and one liberal. The father is the Marxist critique (The Communist Manifesto of 1848, Capital of 1867 and Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875) of the bourgeois conception of equality, understood as mere formal equality, consisting of equal legal measures, but applied to individuals who are in fact different in terms of ability, family circumstances and economic conditions; and hence the proposal that follows from this: the need to ensure equality of starting points.

A great American historian and political scientist, Charles Tilly, wrote years ago that “The State made War; War made the State”. A similar statement can be made about the welfare state: the State ensured the welfare state; the welfare state shaped the State

The concept stems from the framework set out by an English Liberal, William Henry Beveridge, who was elected to Parliament for the Liberal Party but had close ties to the Fabian Society: he worked on the 1909 ‘Poor Law’ report and then, from 1919 to 1937, headed the London School of Economics, an institution founded by the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Beveridge was concerned with freeing people from want ‘from the cradle to the grave’; he sought to combat disease, ignorance, poverty, unemployment and ‘misery’ by ensuring free and universal public provision for healthcare, education, employment and social protection. The so-called report bearing his name dates from 1942 and, despite the war, caused quite a stir in Italy that very same year. Both events prompted a shadow member of the Constituent Assembly, Massimo Severo Giannini – who had served as chief of staff to Nenni, the Minister for the Constituent Assembly – to draft what is now the second paragraph of Article 3 of the Constitution, an example of transformative constitutionalism. Giannini took the text to his party colleague Lelio Basso, who sat in the Constituent Assembly; in the days that followed, Basso discussed it with the most enlightened figures within the Christian Democrats, and the article was incorporated into the Constitution almost unchanged from its original wording.

The idea is that

a) equality is redefined in terms of a level playing field;

b) in four areas (health, education, employment and social protection), the State should assume an obligation to provide services, to which citizens’ rights correspond (and thus not merely charitable handouts);

c) that the obligation applies to all citizens (and later also to residents), and is therefore universal in nature;

d) that there are mechanisms in place to ensure this obligation is fulfilled. Hence the 2,155,259 people currently working for the welfare state in Italy.

The ‘tree’ of the welfare state

The ‘tree’ of the welfare state is shaped by five constitutional provisions. The trunk consists of the second paragraph of Article 3, which states that ‘it is the duty of the Republic to remove those economic and social obstacles which, by limiting the freedom and equality of citizens, prevent the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic and social organisation of the country’. It has four branches: healthcare, education, employment and social protection. With regard to the first public interest addressed by the welfare system – health – the first paragraph of Article 32 stipulates that “the Republic protects health as a fundamental right of the individual and in the interest of the community, and guarantees free medical care to the indigent”.

Secondly: Article 34 stipulates, with regard to education, that “schools are open to all. Primary education, lasting at least eight years, is compulsory and free of charge. Those who are capable and deserving, even if they lack financial means, have the right to attain the highest levels of education. The Republic gives effect to this right through scholarships, family allowances and other provisions, which must be awarded on the basis of competitive selection”. With regard to work, the first paragraph of Article 4 establishes that “the Republic recognises the right to work for all citizens and promotes the conditions that give effect to this right”.

“Accepting the alliance between the welfare state, the market and liberal democracy was a painful step for orthodox Marxist socialism. A step that had to wait until the 1970s in Italy” (Maurizio Ferrera)

Finally, with regard to social protection, Article 38 stipulates that “every citizen who is unable to work and lacks the necessary means to support themselves is entitled to maintenance and social assistance. Workers are entitled to have adequate means provided and guaranteed to meet their living needs in the event of accident, illness, disability, old age or involuntary unemployment. Those who are incapacitated or disabled have the right to education and vocational training. The tasks set out in this article are carried out by bodies and institutions established or supported by the State”. As can be seen, therefore, having affirmed the principle of substantive equality, the Constitution guarantees its implementation in the four fundamental areas in which the welfare state operates: health, education, employment and social protection.

The crisis

Today, the welfare state faces numerous problems, two of which are fundamental: its heavy financial burden and its weak administrative capacity.

As for the first issue, that of the financial burden,

a) there is an imbalance in the internal breakdown of expenditure because 60 per cent of total welfare expenditure goes towards old-age and survivors’ benefits, compared with a European average of 47 per cent;

b) It is projected that by 2050 there will be one pensioner for every person in work. This raises the question: can we afford it?

The second problem is not financial, but administrative. Welfare institutions provide services to citizens and are therefore organised not as a hierarchy, but as networks; these require an administrative capacity that is currently lacking in many countries, but particularly in Italy.

The solutions

The solutions are:

a) the redefinition of universalism through its differentiation, in the sense that free services are not guaranteed to everyone, but only to those in need;

b) economic growth that makes it possible to bear the financial burden. Beveridge believed that well-functioning markets were necessary to achieve the four objectives and said that profit is ‘a bad master, but the best servant we have’. For this reason, it is important to remember that Article 47 of the Constitution – drafted by Tommaso Zerbi, a member of the Constituent Assembly who was also a professor of Accountancy at Bocconi University in Milan – stipulates that the Republic shall promote public access to direct and indirect share investment in the country’s major industrial complexes;

c) the duty to work: Article 4, second paragraph, of the Constitution provides that “every citizen has a duty to carry out, according to their abilities and their own choice, an activity or function that contributes to the material or spiritual progress of society”;

d) then there is what is known as ‘secondary welfare’, which consists of voluntary organisations active in the social sector, as well as corporate welfare;

e) although the welfare state originated within the nation state, there is a role that the European Union could play; however, it is a regulatory giant and a financial dwarf, whilst the welfare state requires a considerable amount of financial resources;

f) Finally, we must not forget that we are faced with a question: what balance should be struck between warfare and welfare?

In the second paragraph of Article 3 of the Constitution, the idea that equality is redefined in terms of a level playing field and that, in four areas (healthcare, education, employment and social protection), the State assumes an obligation to provide services, to which correspond citizens’ rights

Maurizio Ferrera, Welfare. Ideas for our common home. Interview by Daniele Manca, Laterza, 2026, pp. 18–19 and 198–199

“The idea that the social risks generated by the market should be countered and mitigated by the state gradually emerged as early as the first half of the twentieth century and became fully established during the so-called ‘Glorious Thirty Years’ between 1945 and 1975. It was Ralf Dahrendorf who coined the term ‘social democratic consensus’ to describe this vision. In reality, this consensus was the result of the convergence of various traditions. Liberal reformism, first and foremost, that of Keynes and Beveridge. Christian Democratic solidarism, that of Dossetti and Maritain. And then, of course, social democracy: the Anglo-Saxon variety (in particular Fabianism) and the Scandinavian variety. In the late 1920s, the Swedish Social Democratic leader Per Albin Hansson coined the famous metaphor of the welfare state as ‘a common home for all the people’, where ‘no one is privileged, no one is the child of a lesser god. A home where the values of equality, cooperation and solidarity prevail’. A highly evocative image, which still retains its appeal today. We must not, however, forget that the house was built on democratic foundations, thanks to the resources generated by the market. And this has always remained the case in Sweden too. Accepting the alliance between the welfare state, the market and liberal democracy was a painful step for orthodox Marxist socialism: private property, for example, had to be accepted. A step taken in Sweden in the late nineteenth century, but one that had to wait until the 1970s in Italy and which has not yet been fully taken by the radical left in France.

“At the heart of the original vision were images of democratic national political communities, centred on the happy marriage between well-functioning markets and robust social protections.”

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“The welfare system plays a fundamental role, provided it meets three conditions: it must guarantee benefits and services throughout the entire life cycle; it must weaken, or even sever, the traditional link between entitlements and formal employment status; it must provide robust and flexible ‘walkways’ (footbridges, handrails). These three conditions create a more favourable environment for a diversity of opportunities: people can rely on collective support whatever life paths they choose. It is clear that a pension-based welfare system (where protection is concentrated at the end of working life), which is predominantly insurance-based (protection linked to the duration and regularity of contributions), family-centred and offering few services, restricts rather than broadens the range of opportunities”.

Giovanni Farese, William Henry Beveridge. A freedom based on solidarity that leads to peace, in “L’Osservatore Romano”, Friday 16 October, p. 8.

“What, then, does the Beveridge Report consist of? It proposes the establishment of a national social insurance system for all citizens, to provide for disability, unemployment and retirement, funded equally by employers, workers and the State. This would have guaranteed, in Beveridge’s words, ‘a standard of living below which no one would be permitted to fall’. On the contrary, the intention was that this would lead to a general improvement in the living standards of the population, alongside the achievement of the goal of full employment. ‘The organisation of social insurance,’ the report states, ‘must be treated as a comprehensive policy of social progress. Social insurance, when fully developed, can provide income security; it is an attack on poverty. But poverty is only one of the five giants standing in the way of reconstruction, and perhaps the easiest to tackle. The others are sickness, ignorance, squalor and idleness’”.