Pizzica and Taranta to cure Political Obesity

In these days, we have to cope with the usual “Italian good news”: enormous political corruption, bribes in public health, severe measures against fixed-term workers, easy life for top managers, impunity for powerful political figures, discriminations, creation of first class citizens and no-class citizens, etc. Today in Italy we have a strong State for the weakest components of the society, and a weak State for the strongest one. All this convinces me once again that from this kind of politics we cannot expect anything good: it is a disease we have to bear also silently because we have chosen this disease (at least the majority of us). It seems to me that Italy has become an obese patient who has eaten too much chunk food: he cannot make a diet and he is getting worse and worse. Finally (even tacitly) one may think: “You have eaten so much and now someone has even to cure you!” In short, Italy is not simply affected by a cancer, Italy has chosen to get a cancer to death. Of course when I speak of “cancer” I mean a diffused disease not simply referred to a specific (left or right wing) politician for which we all are responsible: it is too easy to attribute responsibilities and faults to others when our politicians (at national and local level) are finally an “our mirror imagine”. Given that from this kind of politics we cannot expect anything good, we powerless small persons escape in a micro-dimension and in micro initiatives sometimes with great liberator power. This is the case of the event held in Vignanello (a village in the province of Viterbo) on July 25^th. In a small square in the old part of the village (which has been restored after years of degradation) a fantastic concert of taranta and pizzica music has represented a wonderful convivial moment of “staying together” in a sort of ritual celebration. Taranta is a very old music characterized by a frenetic rhythm strongly linked to the cult of Mother Earth (Gea, Tellus, Cibele) and Dionysus: so many traditional symbols, possession music, rhythms having the taste of the countryside and land and the power of Mediterranean Sea as cultural common place. This culture once characterized the italic countryside overcoming also the Alps which christians and the urban culture tried always to fight in order to vanish taranta and its symbols. On the contrary, under the ashes, this culture seems to live again as in the case of the Vignanello night where under a wonderful moon (symbol of Diana) we danced all together in presence of another symbol of Dionysius: wine.