It would have pleased me no end if this evening I had found here present some
personalities from Lombardy’s sub-cultural and sub-political establishment. What
we find so disturbing about these people is that they lack not only inspiration,
to use a poetic term, but also the modicum of intelligence and cultural
awareness required to understand the importance of welcoming and embracing the
presence of foreigners, of strangers as they say in Milan, but not in the
negative sense of the word, on the contrary, with affection.
And one of the
things I’ve learnt, and not so long ago I have to admit, but fairly recently, is
that everything we’ve gained in the way of cultural enrichment we owe to
visitors, to those who came to our land in faraway centuries, starting from the
II century A.D., from the III, and so on. In hundreds, in thousands they came,
they learned our language, they brought their learning, their culture, they
enriched the potentialities of our lives, they enriched life, and our culture
owes them this recognition. In hundreds, in thousands. It’s really incredible
how many I find. St. Augustine, for example. Very few people know about St.
Augustine, that he was black and he came here to Italy, first to Rome, he wasn’t
at all happy there, I must say. He taught rhetoric. He didn’t even get paid. He
was taken for a ride, he taught in a Moratti school, I mean a private school and
his students had to pay, so then they stopped coming and, luckily for him, there
was an important personage in authority who liked him mainly for the way he
spoke, for his wit and sense of humour. He came from Africa, was born in Africa,
he was really dark and gave lessons and then they got the idea to send him to
Milan. And so he came to Milan, he arrived. There was the Empire in Milan at
that time, and this is another thing not many people know, that Milan was the
capital of the Western Empire and it was the most important city that existed in
Europe at the time. It was culturally alive. I’m talking about the IV century
A.D. It was a tense moment, historically. There were new faces, new languages
arriving everywhere. There was a feeling of danger and of effervescence,
something revolutionary in the way people perceived the world. And he stood up,
and when he gave his speech he said outright, “I am paid to use words, your
words, your language, and many people applaud me, knowing very well that it is
my job to teach and to speak well of stupid things. I am a rector.” But I’ll try
to speak ill, if at all, everything I’ve learnt that is authentic, alive in your
city, and one of the best pages about this city, the generosity of the city of
Milan, was written by St. Augustine himself, and with him there were at that
time a great number of foreign authors who were the first to paint a portrait of
our city that is extraordinary, unknown. This isn’t taught at school and this
really is remarkable, we don’t know whether because of lack of interest in
learning about our origins, our race, what we used to be, or just out of sheer
stupidity. Actually, I think it’s stupidity more than anything else, because
there really isn’t any other reason, and when I hear people blathering on about
the Carroccio [used by the Northern League Party as a symbol of the Lombard
historical heritage, trans. note] and Lombard historical traditions, while
in reality they know nothing, they are truly ignorant of everything that
happened in our history.
It’s also clear to me why they don’t accept the
presence of people who don’t speak our language, who have a culture, who would
have things to tell us, so many, many things to teach us, so we can learn, and
instead there it is – they try to keep them away. They think a priori that they
have nothing important to tell us. We don’t need them, and this is truly the
lowest form of civilization imaginable. Our downfall on the cultural level
begins precisely with the fact that our politicians, some of them anyway,
haven’t understood the importance of supporting the presence of people who come
from other places. They are our wealth, they are our sounding board, they give
us the chance to enrich our language, our being, our gestures, our thought, and
I say woe to the nation that has foreigners among them and does not use them to
enrich their way of living and to enrich their awareness and knowledge of things
as well. We learned an enormous amount from foreigners in times gone by, and
afterwards we also had the chance and the luck to be able to enrich
others.
In the 16th century there were an incredible number of people who
left Italy to go to other parts of the world as it was at that time to work, to
produce, to bring culture. Just think of how many architects, surveyors, masons
there were in Russia, for example, in Poland, in England, who went to France, to
Spain, to Africa; they went all over, and they were scientists, people with
enormous talent, and every time they came back, they brought with them the
treasure of the knowledge of what they’d learned.
This could be connected to
a piece of news I heard recently and that perhaps some of you have heard, that
is that our language has been demoted in Europe, it isn’t considered worthy of
being one of the fundamental languages for relating, let’s say for dialoguing.
That is, it is second class compared to others that have been considered first
class. It’s not that they have anything against us. The fact is that all of a
sudden there are no longer those of us who, throughout history, would take the
wonderful stuff we know elsewhere too and really made the most of it. I remember
a great book by a great Frenchman, written at the beginning of the 20th century,
a work that was fundamental for me [la leçon des italiens]. So – what
does it tell us? It tells about all the things Italians carried to the rest of
the world, to France especially, learning, music, theatre, dance, pantomime,
from the theatre of the street to the theatre of the court, the building and the
architecture of theatres, painting, musical instruments, incredible and then,
too, the way of life, the cuisine, knowing how to enjoy life. Well, we’ve lost
out to foreigners how to transmit the capacity to enjoy life.
I don’t think
that we – we have our ambassadors, but I don’t think that a person like Bossi
can, now he has some problems, but I mean, maybe it’s Berlusconi who can teach
what the life of Italians is. He’s a person that as soon as they see him, they
say, “this summer I’m not going up there.” I can feel that in you … I feel a
certain reluctance to open up with wisecracks, with political satire. Why did
have I say this? To latch onto this thing: what’s important in our sprit is the
sarcasm, the irony, the grotesque, knowing how to turn situations upside down,
even difficult ones, even when times are hard, when other nations collapse, go
to pieces, not hold up. Whereas we, even in the hardest times, have had the
strength to fight back thanks to our imagination, our fantasy, our sarcasm and
gleeful satire, our sense of the grotesque. We are losing that, too, we are
losing what is precisely one of our own special hallmarks, which cost centuries
of history and civic consciousness.
It is we who invented the Comunes: that’s
another thing we don’t study at school. The Comunes represent a unique
phenomenon, and what do you know, it began right here, in Italy, only in Italy.
It was in our land that people understood the importance of living together, of
living and of developing, of having relations with others, of opening our doors
and going to knock on other people’s doors. Well, this fact, this phenomenon
also comes from this extraordinary gaiety, this joy in dialoguing with others,
in learning their language, letting them learn our languages. And we have had
many. A frightening wealth of languages. Because our dialects are not local
jargon, they are real languages with their laws, rules, structures.
And so
when I think of some people who would like to change certain, I don’t know,
street names with new names linked to Lombard, to Neapolitan, and so on, their
feeble effort to paying homage to our culture stops right there, to changing the
names, a word, instead of broadening our knowledge with all the words, all the
dialects that can enrich our language. And it is just the English and the French
(I’ve lived in France quite a bit) who teach us the richness of our language.
This is the treasure for instance they have won by learning the languages of the
peoples who come to our land. This is what hospitality is for. And it is
enough.