That of Veltroni – Moretti is a left that was not real and never really existed
In a recent interview, the governor of Emilia – Romagna and candidate for secretary of the Pd Stefano Bonaccinilingered, among other things, on personal aspects that readers like so much.
And so he declared that he was an old Emilian communist, that he has aviator glasses because he was recommended by his wife but above all that he is a huge fan of the Panini football stickers.
So Bonaccini starts with the oratorio narration of Peppone and don Camillo, films that take place in the municipality of Brecello, in Giovannino Guareschi’s lowlands of Reggio, all fog and productivity. He is from Campogalliano, in the Modena area, but the distance is small and the topology of feeling works wonders, canceling distances.
So Bonaccini tells us about his inevitable passion for football and the desire to play in Serie A but instead of Juventus he had to settle for Ganaceto, it happens to those with too high ambitions.
But he – he lets us know – the passion for stickers Sandwiches he never left her and tells Il Corriere della Sera:
«I have two hundred complete albums. Every first of January, which is my birthday, friends give me a new album. At the presentation of Luigi Garlando’s book on Panini stickers, they gave me a test: I had to recognize the players, with their names covered. Everyone from 1970 onwards. I haven’t made a mistake.”
The reporter warns her that “they’ll think he’s crazy” but he doesn’t care because he thinks that Paninis are an indispensable archetype of the legendary 60s and he hopes to grab some votes in that age group which is also his.
Given that there is nothing wrong with collecting football stickers, however this seems like a not so veiled reference to Walter Veltroni and his “left at Happy Days”.
We cannot know how much was true and felt and how much was instrumental in the communication strategy of the then director of l’Unità but Veltroni built on it “an idea of the left” that somewhere in the Jungian collective unconscious of progressives there is still and the magician Bonaccini has managed to recall it. The former communist leader proposed the reprinting of the Panini albums and gave them free with the newspaper. Veltroni himself recounts that «We reached the record of 300,000 copies and by 8 in the morning we were already sold out and Gramsci, attentive to popular culture, would have been happy».
Probably Bonaccini must have read these statements about Gramsci and must have been somewhat emboldened, let’s even say – if his wife allows us – excited, and therefore he wanted to let it be known that he has not reprinted the Panini stickers of the players but that he likes them a lot .
Actually Gramsci he spoke of national-popular culture understood in the dimension of his era that saw him prisoner in fascist prisons, but the duo Veltroni – Bonaccini didn’t go too subtle. And in fact what is more nationally popular than football?
Veltroni actually spread a series of tapes with l’Unità VHSbut this time for a fee. These were cult films for the left of the time, stuff to make Nanni Moretti go hungry and all the statues of fauns that the Roman director still frequents at Villa Sciarra, near which he resides in a tasteful Art Nouveau villa, all yellow lights, small gardens, humidity and a lot of nostalgia.
But that of Veltroni-Moretti it is a left that was not real and never really existed. A left of Happy Days, of Nutellaof radical-chic walks in Monteverde Vecchio with retired Latin and Greek teachers, of tea with pastries, of memories of past loves and of metaphysical anguish experienced in the Monteverdian sunsets masterfully described in Gramsci’s Le ceneri by Pierpaolo Pasolini.
It was a left created in a laboratory, a virtual reality light years away from Stalin’s Gulag and the ruinous failure of real socialism (and Pasolini knew it well too).
Now Bonaccini is proposing it again, but with an obvious contradiction: his pride in having been an “Emilian communist”. Veltroni instead, more coherently, said he had never been a communist. Stalin, however, would certainly not have liked the Panini stickers and he would have tried to tear them up as a product of “decadent capitalism”. When we talk about the betrayals of history…
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