Who knows if the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, while he quoted and criticized the Manifesto of Ventotene in Parliament, had in mind that on the same evening, on the first national channel, Roberto Benigni would have dedicated a masterful to that text lectio followed by millions of Italians? And who knows, then, what should Roberto Benigni have thought of treading the stage, for almost two and a half hours, live, after that involuntary “promo” who unleashed a tussle in the room, jumping at the head of the agenda of the evening news? In the preview of “The dream”, the only pre-registrative part of the event, Benigni passes a sheet with the long monologue, but this is also the only truly “theatrical” part of the show. Because then the jester rises on stage, on the notes of the march written by Nicola Piovani, now his trademark, and transforms himself, in short, into a visionary, passionate, tireless singer of Europe, of that dream of unity given by three equally visionary young people in the confinement of the Ventotene islet, ran the year 1941.
The monologue of “Il Dream”, written by Benigni with Michele Ballerin and Stefano Andreoli starts a little undertone, with some jokes about current affairs, and seems a bit the usual Benigni: already seen, already heard. But then, as the evening advances, it is all a crescendo of intensity, with a man of seventy -two years who seems identical to twenty years earlier, certainly in the passion that exudes from every pore, which hypnotizes us with 3000 years of European history, from the invention of democracy, in Greece, to the Risorgimento, from Garibaldi to De Gasperi, passing through spinels, red and colors – Self-hero of the Manifesto of Ventotene-and get to Victor Hugo and Eve Merriam’s poetry: “I dream of giving birth to a child who will one day ask me: Mom, what was the war?”. And already, because as Benigni masterfully told, the dream of united Europe was born precisely on the rubble of the war. Aided by the co-author of the monologue, Michele Ballerin, who wrote a good book that has the same popular intent of this evening, “The United States of Europe explained to everyone. Guide for perplexed” (Fazi publisher), Roberto the visionary has not only hired a battle of those that seem impossible on paper-heating, again, today, over eighty years later, the dream of Europe, Bureaucratic technicalities of Brussels and Strasbourg – but he replied, a few hours later, to Meloni’s speech in Parliament, teaching everyone the cleaning of communication.
As populists of all latitude show us, which thanks to social media have a good game to bend to their advantage every fact in a molasses that we can call post-truth, a “clean” communication is the one that does not distort, not de-contextualizes, rather he explains, argues, reasoned. If a political leader, a premier, in parliament, lets himself be influenced by reckless Spin Doctor In deliberately, the sense of a manifesto that is the first stone of European building, which certainly remains a dream or utopia, the visionary jester has the extraordinary strength to reveal the makeup in front of five million spectators with the weapons of argument, reason and passion. With “Il Dream” Benigni gives all of us a lesson not only on Europe, but on the short-circuits of political-media populism that begins in these difficult years. The two things are held: perhaps we did not notice, but with his television shows – from Dante to the Constitution, from the ten commandments to San Francesco – Roberto Benigni is reminding us of the foundations of our identity, of Italians and European ones, without the two things being in contrast. An identity that finds the highest expression in the democracies that we built after the war, and in the peace that the latter guaranteed the old continent. An identity that recognizes the value of argument, explain, of reasoning against hyper-semplification, propaganda, populism. Honor to Rai who, as a public service, himself the son of Europe, too often criticized instrumentally (even by those who grit against “Tele-Meloni”), gave us this benign dream, which closed in the most visionary of the ways: from Europe the utopia of a new brotherhood is born. As Pope Francis reminded us: “We must disarm the words to disarm the earth”.
