On My Poem “All’Italia”

I should begin with this:

«Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.»

But I must turn it toward another direction, and perhaps rephrase it:

«Al finir del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per un dolor oscuro,
ché il peso portar era duro.»

That heavyweight consisted of two names: Silvia and Claudia. There was a third name as well: Italia.
These names generated within me an unbearable state of suffering.
I was living abroad, far from all three of them.

I saw the disaster - perhaps the final disaster - that Italy was going through.
Italians were being replaced, living in complete political subjugation, without the slightest hint of rebellion. The best of the youth were leaving the country; the population was ageing and shrinking.

What bewildered me was that, despite all this, they pretended to be happy - yet they were unhappy, and were drifting into a heightened state of egotism. Italian families were becoming little more than shelters for selfish individuals. The Italian people had become spoiled and self‑absorbed, like children.
Too much comfort and wealth, too much foolish television and bad journalism had degraded them.

My daughters, Silvia and Claudia, in those days, never called me, never tried to communicate with me. They seemed completely uninterested in me.

In the end, I managed to gather this threefold pain into a single poem. All’Italia:

Come posso non piangere se penso
quella Italia, cui Corelli cantava
Fellini dirigeva, Pasolini amava,
Visconti ne urtava, il senso.

Ripenso lei pingue e felice
L'Italia dei sogni che credeva
Che a tutti la vita lei scioglieva.
Come non piangere me infelice?

Io vado ora, io muoio, traditrice.
Che sarà di te Italia abietta
mai libera, tu serva e negletta
E ancella di un popolo morto e giudice.

Padrona doma, l'italo giovane
Ti lascia e non si duole, a lui bagascia
Di solo cibo e nulla vivi pascia
Ti fugge, passa i bordi tuoi lui cane.

Lascia una vita piatta di regole
meschina e che soffocano futile
la vergogna di popolo cieco, inutile
Che scompare felice nel suo sole.

Ancora là i due miei occhi vivono.

E amor inganna speme, ma non muore.
Ė libero dai vincoli e di sé è in sé
E un'altra speranza i nomi, ahimè,
Silvia, Claudia io dirò a voi nel cuore,
Di lontan parlerò al vostro amore,
Piano pronuncerò stessa passione,
La stessa che in vita m'era agone.

E allora potrò, dir piangendo:
Alma terra natia, la vita che mi desti ecco ti rendo.


I wrote this poem after watching videos of the tenor Corelli and of Pasolini, and after recalling the great lessons of Visconti’s cinema. I began to miss the Italy of my youth - beautiful, rich, elegant, joyful, safe, and full of hope. I reflected on the present (l’hic et nunc). Now that I see her from afar, living outside Italy, I see that she has betrayed her own kind and has become increasingly enslaved to the powers that dominate her.

Her finest youth have abandoned her, leaving her like stray dogs wandering the world. What remains in that land is a people cowardly, weak, and slothful. And yet I still love her, just as I love my two eyes that still live there: my two daughters, Silvia and Claudia.

Love deceives hope, making it prefer falsehood to painful truth. Today’s Italy is another Italy, and my daughters — this is the truth — think more of themselves than of me. But I will always love them. Even after death, from afar, I will speak to them with the same passion with which I thought of them in life: a great suffering, my continual agony.

And finally, through their thoughts and their hearts, I will speak. I will return to my land. In that form, I will return to her in tears of love - to my beloved native soil.