>>> Today, Monday 20 May, I’ll be in Aosta at 8:00 pm. Tomorrow, Tuesday 21 May, I’ll be in Lodi at 5:00 pm and Brescia at 9:00 pm. The live broadcasts will be on La Cosa
The final event of the Tour entitled “Tutti a Casa” {Send them all home}, will be on 24 May in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo. Give your support with a donation <<<<
“Once upon a time there were wars and the young men went off and died and three generation of young men got missed out. Today, luckily, this no longer happens but another type of murder is taking place: the murder of the future. The impossibility of finding oneself through work, this is the most atrocious thing that is happening to a young person in Italy.
And so the only thing I can humbly say to them, with great humility, is that I don’t believe in hope. Anyone who lives by hope, dies hopelessly. I believe in intentions, that you have to make some plans in your head, to do things anyway, to stand up to the circumstances, even hopelessly ...” Andrea Camilleri
Passaparola with the writer Andrea Camilleri
“I would like to talk about something that I feel is fundamental. Something that few people seem to take an interest in and most people in Italy seem to not care about at all. But is is a serious matter. I would like to talk about the protection of the Italian language. Someone said: “Look who’s talking - and you’re writing in dialect”. Apart from the fact that I also write in Italian, however, you see, that’s not the problem. The problem is that recently, well a few years ago, they decided that the European laws were to be translated into English, German and French. Before that, they were translated into Italian. Then Italian got excluded. They’re no longer translated into Italian. If you want to know what Europe’s laws say, you just have to know English or French. Otherwise tough luck. You have to get them translated.
This means a step back for our language. Our Deputies in Europe should have forcibly opposed this move. Why’s that? Because I’m noticing that in the field of technology, English terminology is quite common. There’s ever more use of English words even in every day life. And not just there but even the politicians are using the English terminology for Italian laws or for Italian regulations, like “election day” and so on. What’s the point of all this?! This is provincialism above all. You hear a President of the Council using English words and to me, an Italian, that makes a mark on me. It’s as though the British Prime Minister were to use Italian while speaking in Parliament. It’s madness! It’s pure madness.
There are Italian words that mean exactly the same thing. Why not use the Italian words? Let’s not talk about the world of fashion. By now they only talk English.
That’s how languages die! Do you know how many languages die? Six languages every 15 days in the world. A language becomes unused and then it dies.
My God, we have a really strong literary tradition. Fortunately, that will not disappear. But there’s the risk of making Italian become a dead language.
Take care. I’m not an autarchic like there were in the fascist times, when Wanda Osiris had to change her name to Wanda Osiri, removing the final “s” because it sounded foreign, or "Saint Luis Blues" became "Tristezza di San Luigi”, which was a mental delirium, but I’m saying that a just defence of the language is absolutely necessary.
We have waged a dreadful war against the dialects, but the dialects are the strength of a language. We have this rare thing, the multitude of dialects that other nations, other peoples, don’t have. The language is national. It’s like a tree, that sends out its roots into the whole of Italy and it draws in words towards the centre. Once upon a time, this is how the words became the language - from the periphery to the centre.
And they were like life-giving sap for the tree of language.
They produced live leaves. If the land where the roots of the trees get their nutrients, if the land is polluted with foreign words, the tree will die and this is a risk that we are encountering, not now, for sure, but certainly in thirty years time! So I’m inviting you to have less provincialism and to retrieve some really beautiful words for our really beautiful language.
I’ve written a book called “Come la penso” {How I see things} and it’s just been published. There are a few things in this book: “Why - can you get to eat culture? Culture is not something sacred, something just for people of culture, for the few. It’s for everyone! Then what is culture? It’s not just literature, but the culture of a manual worker, how an office worker carries on their work, it’s about how the administrator of the condominium is thinking. Culture is us! Because we are culture. The human is culture.
Sure, there are higher forms of culture, but when I hear that Italy is the country that spends the least on culture in the whole of Europe, I’m stunned into silence, because - well - what have we come to? Above all there’s the stupidity of not understanding that if you spend money on culture, then culture gives you back your money three-fold. Because spending on culture means keeping Pompei on its feet and not letting it fall to pieces. It means making it possible to keep museums open at all times and in all circumstances. It means exploiting our works of art even for the tourist industry. I don’t know whether I’m contributing to culture by publishing books. When you think that I’ve sold six million copies in Germany and they are writing to me from Germany: “But what’s it like in Sicily? I would really like to go there”, and at times, when I reply I’m turning myself into some sort of tourist operator. I don’t know whether it’s a matter of culture, but it is a matter of money that definitely comes back to Italy through tourism.
Let’s do Montalbano on TV … I’ll tell another story. The BBC takes it and shows it in the UK in the early evening. You won’t believe it! Am I not getting a letter from a British tourist company that is sending two charter planes to Sicily full of tourists who have seen Montalbano?! Culture provides food. I’ll keep on saying - the money invested in culture gives a threefold return to the State.
Thus as well as raising up the person intellectually, it is also beneficial to the finances of the Italian State. This idea of giving advice to young people isn’t really very comfortable for me, partly because I’m 88 years old and someone giving advice to young people is presuming at 88 years of age to understand the youth of today. That is presumptuousness.
This is why I don’t want to act like a lovely grandpa. I always try to avoid that assiduously.
Today, however, there is something that I can see, not how they are thinking because they do their own thinking about their own affairs and that’s how it should be. To understand today’s young people, you need to be their contemporaries, and that’s something I’m not. I’m a contemporary of the atomic bomb, of the TV and the miniskirt and I stop with the miniskirt that seems a good place to linger.
As well as that, things are beginning to get difficult for me. Let’s not talk about computers and the Internet. However, it’s clear that a series of economic, social, financial, and political circumstances are killing the young people of today.
Once upon a time there were wars and the young men went off and died and three generation of young men got missed out. Today, luckily, this no longer happens but another type of murder is taking place: the murder of the future. The impossibility of finding oneself through work, this is the most atrocious thing that is happening to a young person in Italy.
And so the only thing I can humbly say to them, with great humility, is that I don’t believe in hope. Anyone who lives by hope, dies hopelessly. I believe in intentions, that you have to make some plans in your head, to do things anyway, to stand up to the circumstances, even hopelessly. Think of being on a life raft. But you just have to get this life raft to a beach, while never losing, not tenderness, but the courage and the strength that comes to you because you are young.
This is what I wish for you: never lose the strength and the belief in your youth.
As for the adults. Many of the adults are responsible for the situation we have today. Thus a bit of advice that I can give to the sensible adults is to take quite a lot more interest in serious political life, because abstentionism makes things worse. To take part in public life and in political life with your own opinions is always something positive. Thus continue to exist in society.
Spread the word if you think its appropriate and if you don’t think its appropriate, stay silent.”
