But would you have ever imagined a president of Amet and a mayor (of Trani) in the 60s, 70s or 80s hurling broadsides at each other or calling each other “dealer” or threatening to have him sent to a criminal trial? I had never seen a mayor and his trusted man, appointed by him, two prominent representatives of the institutions who hit each other with (virtual) pizzas in the face in public. More and more often, nostalgia returns for the staid years of the First Republic, when clarifications or conclusions (perhaps with agreed resignations), soft ways or possible recompositions, took place in the dusty offices of the institutions or parties, perhaps amid clouds of smoke (the only ones we don’t feel nostalgic for). Now everything is turned upside down in a sort of Carnival, in the deepest sense of the expression. Of those Carnivals studied by Ernesto De Martino in which the hierarchical order was completely turned upside down and the subordinate or the subject dependent on the Principal, whoever he was, mocked him publicly and belittled or mortified his role. In the permanent Carnival represented by Trani politics, an institution, yet another, the Darsena in this case, has been badly managed for years (there are several of our articles to testify to this) and when it comes to the final knot, the funnel that narrows, the final showdown, the hide and seek of responsibilities begins, with the institution that is now collapsing, but not for “now”, becomes a battleground with a “view” of the bare Trani politics seafront. In short, there would be no need for yet another flop of a municipal institution to give a political judgment on the current administration. And there would not even have been the need to call Bottaro a “mazziere” (a beater in the service of a politician against opponents of various kinds, I read from Treccani), thus causing the tone of the political debate to drop from the loftiness of the First Republic mentioned above to the permanent “Carnival” of today. As I have already written on another occasion, epithets and nicknames are up to us in the press with the possible right of satire (if done well and originally, not copied or forced), they are not up to, if you will, the representatives of the Institutions, moreover appointed on trust. The most reliable result is that the CEO of Amet, for consistency, resigns. Or will he be resigned? With the possible consequences of the case, such as other scenes of fighting between councilors to attest the paternity of the next. And the Carnival will continue… ps: who will be the mazziere and who will be the one beaten?
