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Rating: "Eppur Si Muove" boldly presents itself to the reader as an entirely detached work from the usual anthropological essay written by illustrious scholars and with a verbose, colorful, and high-flown vocabulary. First of all, it should be remembered that the work under analysis represents the faithful pseudo-essayistic transcription of the namesake talk show aired in the distant 1994, a year which was fundamental for Italian politics, with the entrance of Berlusconi, the definitive end of the First Republic and, albeit less significant, the break between the Lord of Arcore and Indro Montanelli, the culmination of a divergence in the management of "Il Giornale" which had been exacerbated for a long time and was no longer tolerable for either party.
Cultural anthropology manuals and anthropology of complex societies almost always tend to disprove the precise formulation of national "identities" aimed at confining the vices, defects, magnificence, and pathologies of a state within a well-defined niche. The theory holds that the mixture of peoples and cultures within a territory whose borders have often been drawn by rulers (and therefore would not coincide with natural frontiers) is the true factotum of the much-acclaimed multi/pluri culturalism; hence, it is wrong, then, for the Padanians and the like to take a ruler and a set square to incorporate the regions north of the Po, justifying this choice with an identity so ancient and rooted as to derive it from the unaltered purity of Caesar's Gauls/Celts. Yet the current Italian is perfectly recognizable to a foreigner: beyond the many stereotypes that crowd the perception of the beautiful country (the various "Guidos" and "Guidettes" in the US, the cuisine...), even the most fervent multiculturist (and thus of the absence of certain and fixed identities) is able to trace a summary, unfortunately real, of the average Italianity, pointing out aspects such as clientelism, the obsessive culture of family and mother (the so-called "Great Mediterranean Mother"), the paradoxical contrast of murderous brutality-Catholic-like idolatry, the grandeur and creativity of the amateur who precisely for such “innate” qualities disdain the maturation and career development typical of countries devoted to that Weberian Protestant ethic.
Just as they did with their talk show, Montanelli and Placido bring the "cathodic" reflections of "Eppur Si Muove" onto print about the aberrant Italian oddity, oddity mostly noted for centuries and not just since the national unification in 1861. First of all, the Italian from Milan, Canicattì, and the Cupolone has always had a predisposition to eternal irresponsibility, to not wanting to take charge of events, facts, and consequences: it is the rule of "it's not my fault" that drives the peninsular to dodge problems that almost always concern them - directly or indirectly - disdaining them with an absolutely detrimental egocentric individualism. In this regard, we entered at the end of the 1800s into the pro-German Triple Alliance and within less than fifty years found ourselves shooting at our former treaty partners on the Karst and the Piave. The same thing happened with Fascism and the Second World War: here we professed ourselves all devotees to the Lictor Fasces when there was the threat of the cudgel and castor oil; at the moment Uncle Sam crossed the Sicilian channel, the black shirts were almost all burned in the home fireplace. Placido and Montanelli therefore reflect on this opportunistic and defeatist Italy, a people that will never be able to take their responsibilities before the Global Court, the land of those who point fingers at the Red Robes and communist journalists just to dodge the black abyss of the cliché.
But it doesn't stop there: Italy as a homeland of mama's boys, of worshipers of the Great Mediterranean Mother who never punishes and always forgives, who allows children to dissolve their companions in acid and absolves them with a summary and reductive indulgence. And it is here that Italian-made clientelism bursts out: cousins, sons, brothers, nephews at the head of the small factory, boards of directors that seem to be family dinners, administrations perfectly tracing the family tree. The Italian mother is then the bride and childbearing of brilliant and creative minds that do not need hard apprenticeship before reaching the milestone of perfect training: the beautiful countryman justifies his dilettantism - almost always catastrophic and destructive - with the idea of the congenital natural propensity for improvisation, free creation, the genius that does not require education and maturity. We are all Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Dante: all devoted to the pursuit of supreme beauty and not the more useful and pragmatic rationality. We are already initiated into genius, we don't need teachers and tutors.
Montanelli and Placido finally highlight the gap between reformed north-central Europe and southern Catholic Europe. By connecting the Lutheran-Calvinist separation from the Church of Rome to the birth of entrepreneurial-capitalist thought (already specified by Max Weber), the authors have glimpsed in the Italian model the sum of the orthodox Catholic's submission to Authority: unlike the Protestant world, where the embracing of the idea of freedom of individual interpretation of the Scriptures from the Vatican's will allowed the flourishing of individual enterprise in mercantile-capitalistic areas, Italy is still driven to a passive, uncritical, and uninvolved approach to what is proposed to it. Thus remain the "ipse dixit", the credulity of the gullible, the lies of the powerful masked behind an electoral spot, the moral missives of the Pope and the prelates, all elements that have forged a spirit resistant to criticism and common sense. The Italian is gullible and at the same time a huckster: it's all about power (economic, media, political).
Here, then, is a panorama of our beloved-hated Country, land of extreme wonders and infernal pathologies, of good cuisine and lupara bianca, of astonishing monuments and illegal construction, of saints and heroes, of thieves and murderers. Of Us and You.
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