In Ventotene, Romans or Latians living in the southern part of the region generally go there for sunbathing or a rejuvenating boat trip. After perhaps passing through the more glamorous neighboring island of Ponza. And perhaps American friends, or specifically New Yorkers, who have lived in the capital or who still hold affective and geographic relations with the capital also went there.
Instead, the Italian media these days have published images of a composed and somewhat mournful unseasonal pilgrimage. It is March and raining in much of Italy. Scattered, and therefore not numerous (at least compared to what was expected) members of the progressive world who wanted to return to the real but also, above all, symbolic places, the center of the discussion on the roots of Europe that is inflaming the national public discourse and beyond.
“For a Free and United Europe. Draft of a Manifesto, ” this is the exact title of the book written by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi (with the contribution of Eugenio Colorni) in 1941 while they were in exile in Ventotene during Fascism. It was reopened for discussion by Giorgia Meloni who, speaking in the House on the majority resolution on foreign policy, had attacked that founding text especially in the passages on private property and the model of continental federalism.
“This is not my Europe,” the PM concluded, and immediately the uproar broke out and down came the backlash (dialectical even though some important leaders admitted that at least the book would have gladly been thrown at them). Those authors wrote no to confinement, where they ended up even for a joke about Mussolini (it happened mutatis mutandis even in communist regimes), today we celebrate democracy even through the freedom to criticize even so-called sacred texts.
Freedom that we celebrated enlightenment not surprisingly in France, ten years ago, after the deadly attack on the headquarters of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Enlightenment of reason, and therefore of irony, even toward the Sacred, in that case literally, Muhammad. So if we can criticize Muhammad we can certainly criticize Spinelli as well. One can answer: of course, always on the same principle of freedom. But not with miters (Paris 2015) and not even with insults, which are then masked and sublimated miters .
Meloni herself was impressed by the verbal violence meted out to her. Finally, going into the substance and not the principles, the common army that Spinelli spoke of (and that is much talked about these days) was more to avert fratricidal wars between European states than to spend 800 billion on a Rearm aimed at anti-Russian paranoia. To look, or rather to read well, it seems to me that the spirit of Ventotene has been betrayed more by Ursula Von Der Lyen than by Giorgia Meloni.
The article Everyone (not quite) in Ventotene comes from TheNewyorker.
