happy birthday to us.
Today was the 150th anniversary of the first meeting of the Italian parliament.
I went out and everywhere was draped in Italian flags. All open shops had something red-white-green even if it wasn't a flag. Considering that it only happens during the World Cup it felt quite nice, even if I might not be my country's most ecstatic supporter, or at least not of my country's current state of affairs. But I don't know, considering that most people from a certain secessionist party *cough* Northern League *cough* didn't go to the parliament today and that I really don't think that we're a country united in the way US/France/England/Germany/whoever is, it was a good feeling. Also it kind of felt awfully nice as well that my mom made pasta in three different colors so that the plate was green sauce-plain-red sauce.
Anyway. We've been around as a united country for one hundred and fifty years. If you look at them as a whole they really weren't a shining succession of amazing (heck no). We had the crappiest monarchy that ever was, if you look at our politicians you can realize that they've always been more or less bad, we're arguing now about the same things we argued then, foreign people complained about how we keep our artistic patrimony in the 19th century the same way they do now, a lot of people I know have/had/didn't use to have any idea of how the unification actually happened and to be honest I happen to like our national anthem just when others (mainly from the secessionist party) diss it just because it's the national anthem (or when Benigni comments it line by line, but whatever). We have our share of serious trouble about which no one talks about so our national news look like small town gossip in comparison to everyone else's, and so on. And to be entirely honest I'm not sure that everyone who died to make this country one and a half century ago would be that happy with how it turned out. Also I'm mostly proud of being Italian whenever I think about what we did rather than what we're doing.
Still. We might not have gone through this century that brilliantly, but we did get through it. When Cavour said 'we made Italy, now we should make Italians', he said a very sad truth because I'm of the opinion that we still haven't made the Italians (and we won't until half of the country stops evading tax payment imo, but that's another story), and when he said 'free Church in free State' it was another very sad truth (and I doubt it's ever going to happen), but just the fact that we're still here when we've not been a country since Roman times it's already something. And in spite of what the secessionist party says, we are a goddamn nation, give or take. We speak the same language and we mostly have the same roots, and that's a fact. We can work on acknowledging it not only when the World Cup happens. And that said, dammit, we have pretty awesome things too. We have history, we have the majority of the most amazing art ever produced spanning from music to paintings to literature; the people who died to make this country real did it because they actually believed in it, we might have had bad politicians but we also had amazing people trying to improve things (whether they managed it or not), and heck, we did kick out the crappy monarchs at some point (even if they came back through the window, but at least they aren't monarchs anymore). We have a great healthcare system which is dissed too many times and the best public schools one can have when it's the first place where money is cut whenever there's need to cut money. The fact that people are throwing flyers in opera theaters in order to protest against cuts to the arts/culture funds might be sad because there's the need to do it but on the other side makes me happy because it means that someone still thinks that you can actually eat with culture (in disagreement with the economics ministry, which makes me very happy indeed). And alright, yeah, B. is still where he is, but seeing his pissed-off face on TV this evening while they were airing opera live with Muti directing and helping the singers hold up a sign against the cuts to the funds for opera theaters was so priceless that I might have forgotten about him for one moment.
So yeah, we're not perfect, and I'll admit to love Italy more than I usually love Italians, and it'll take us at least another one hundred and fifty years to realize that we're actually a nation and that being a nation doesn't mean hanging out your flag just during the world cup, but I guess we did decent enough for now. I'll just hope that from now on we actually do better and that everyone putting flags outside their window today thinks the same thing. to the secessionist party people: you don't know what you're missing when you say that you don't care or don't feel represented. So well, happy birthday to us and to another one hundred and fifty years of sort-of-bad-but-we-like-it national anthem. Maybe in 2161 we'll feel like a whole nation all the time and not just during the world cup and we won't need to worry about bad politics. I doubt I'll be there to see it, but it's a nice thing to hope for, right?
So that probably was rambling-ish and way too long, and I was wondering if I shouldn't include a certain not exactly uplifting quote but then I decided what the hell, I want to feel optimist for once.