Italy in practice. In a book, the great examples from which to start again

Is there really a better Italy? Or is it just trite rhetoric to fuel a national sport that thrives on extreme localism and continuous divisions within a Leopard-esque game of position. Because if everything, instead of simply changing, slides silently under a blanket of vacuous indignation, it can maintain a status quo with the only truly concrete objective of protecting more or less legitimate, but certainly increasingly cumbersome, income positions in a contemporary society.

Instead, they seem to have identified a key to revealing a possible and concrete difference Gabriele Dadati and Giovanni Battista Menzani, editors of the volume “Start from here”, the third title from the young independent publishing house Low. The volume analyzes a series of experiences which in some way, according to the editors, can represent substantial examples of a better Italy, but which in truth represent both something more and also something different, that is, breaking points. No slippage, but peremptory and at times revolutionary actions as is the case of professor Franco Basaglia and the movement he gave birth to and which led to the closure of Italian mental hospitals, real concentration camps and absolute shame in a democratic country. Basaglia’s innovative drive, which from Gorizia then came to reveal itself in its most exact completeness in the virtuous experience of Trieste, was in fact capable of aggregating forces and intelligence beyond the logic of class and profession. And perhaps we should think outside of any stereotype about what it was even before the legacy, the origin of what would later be the 1968 movement. Because it is around that turn of the twentieth century that many of these experiences reveal themselves. Starting from the experience of Don Milani’s Barbiana school up to the anti-mafia cultural action of Peppino Impastato in Cinisi. In fact, they are all part of the same cultural soup. A broth that was then partly spoiled or at least misunderstood, but which had a value effect that we can highlight in particular today – as for Basaglia and also for Adriano Olivetti – in its practical action. In a practice that was able to precede a theory that indeed many times tended to betray the experiences of a season that everything could have been less than unrepeatable.

“Starting from here” thus intends not only to bring to the surface actions and stories that have now become part of a collective cultural baggage, but to free them from a form of impossibility that today makes them entangled in the past. Starting again is instead the meaning of a discourse that must regain its pace and go beyond a generic defense of rights to return to getting its hands dirty in things, in contradictions as well as in the generative force of conflict. Regenerate a society beyond conformist pacification by highlighting the revolutionary strength of a thought that was as instinctive as it was meditated in its practice. A return to the territories and communities of reference not as often self-referential enclaves, but as spaces of inclusion and concrete participation.