Franco Cassano has died, who had made the idea of an authoritative South different from the rest of the country the heart of his political, sociological and philosophical reflection. “Meridian thinking”, his most famous book, published exactly twenty-five years ago, in January 1996, had been an earthquake for the “specialists” of the South, received either with wild ovations or with ferocious criticism. As often happens when the writer is out of the ordinary because he is curious by nature, open of heart and mind.
Cassano had gone right to the heart of the problem: why don't we accept the South as it is, and from here we start for its rebirth? In the sense of considering his weaknesses, his slowness, his customs as objects of respect so much as to make them the foundation stone for rebuilding the entire edifice. And for this approach had also been approached the theorist of "happy degrowth", Serge Latouche, authoritative in his field, but the furthest from "meridian thinking".
Cassano intended neither to build a myth of the good old days, nor to invite to leave the South in its half-development. He argued instead – and how prophetic it was to think with hindsight – that one development model, valid at all latitudes, could not go well in Italy or even in the world, especially after the post-war borders had been swept away in 1991. It was necessary to patiently tie the knots of each canvas again because this was the only way to achieve a design without holes and no patches. And now that the failure of a certain model of development is there for all to see, and that the "dark and aggressive side" of our "fundamentalism, that of the economy", has come out, it would be worth going back to re-reading his "Meridian Thought".
Cassano was a communist, the youngest of the so-called "ecole barisienne”, that current of thought (but woe to define it as such) of which some intellectuals of the PCI found themselves belonging perhaps in spite of themselves, we would say today. We are talking about the mid-seventies, before the Moro murder (1978) overwhelmed every thought and every policy for years. Among others, Beppe Vacca, Franco De Felice, Biagio De Giovanni, Vito Amoruso, Peppino Cotturri, Alfredo Reichlin, Arcangelo Leone de Castris, Franco Botta were part of it. And there were also non-Bari residents: Rusconi in Milan, Barcelona in Sicily, Cacciari in Venice. They were discussing how the PCI should have done to achieve in Italy a different model of socialism from that achieved in socialist countries. A reflection that came from afar, already the heart of Togliatti's thought and policy, and which would later lead Berlinguer to speak of the universal value of democracy. For those young and old intellectuals and politicians (in the PCI the role of one and the other was not separated) it was already the juice of the Italian way.
Cassano rarely spoke of that period, he was a man of the present, one of those who look at what flows in society on a permanent basis because it is only what matters if you want to contribute to making the place where we have to live better. That's why, for example, he had willingly accepted the invitation of Peppino Caldarola, director of l'Unità for the second time in 1999, to keep a weekly column that would give readers the gist of what had struck the author in the seven previous days.
The writer had had the task of being his interface in the editors-in-chief of the newspaper. For a year, on the eve of the column's publication, it had been necessary retreat to the “Cassano bubble”, as it had been defined in the editorial office: to listen, suggest, comfort that scholar who had a thousand questions and one or two answers. Politics was always at the center of his reflections, but with the best guise, the one with a capital P, as they say when it wants to represent the art of understanding what humans seek to be happy to put it into practice.
We lived as a country one of our “turbid” periods: the centre-left government led by Massimo D'Alema (from 21 October 1998 and after a reshuffle from December 1999 to spring 2000) was about to leave the helm to Giuliano Amato for the last year of the five-year period opened by the first victory of Prodi. Then there would have been Cyclone Berlusconi (2001/2006). The heirs of the PCI were now called DS and they not only ruled, but actually led the government. Original sin, or the K factor as the journalist Alberto Ronchey had christened it, had disappeared: that never written rule according to which the PCI should never have entered the control room because it had chosen to be with the "enemy", the other part of the world, Moscow. When the Berlin Wall fell, theory also fell. But under that rubble there were also other stones: who were the communists now? How were they supposed to behave? And the party? What was it supposed to be? A debate that had split the militants before, during and after the birth of the DS (and before that PDS). And it had been so engaging and shocking that for a long time whoever had been in the PCI found themselves staying in the "Cosa", and not one, but even two, "Cosa 1" and "Cosa 2".
Cassano was looking for the answers to those questions and in the end he found them as always in reality. And again in Bari, as at the time of the École Barisienne. First the city had seen up close the frontiers of the old world collapse with the arrival of the Albanians of the Vlora, 20 hungry young people for whom Puglia was "Lamerica", like the beautiful title of the beautiful film on the exodus by Gianni Amelio. Cassano's philosophy became practical with the birth of a cultural association with a very "Cassanian" name, “Plural City”. It is no exaggeration to consider that experience the most powerful drive to the next Apulian spring. Intellectuals recognized by the city, professionals, journalists took part: Laterza, Botta, Comei, Viesti, Iarussi, Laforgia, Capano, Vigilante, to name just a few. And Cassano was its president. Because, as he said, «if ideas don't proceed hand in hand with decisions and facts, they run the risk of appearing as a suggestive utopia, or a rhetorical compensation».
Michele Emiliano, Nichi Vendola will find the land plowed and fertilized by the work of the association. Some of the members (Viesti, Capone) also became aldermen of the new governments.
And Cassano? Once the "enlightened" governments were born, he left the "plural city" to resume scholarly work. Camus, Pasolini, and the beloved Leopardi. In 2013, however, he was recalled to service by Pierluigi Bersani: he was offered the candidacy in Parliament to represent the Democratic Party, as the heir to his party was now called, which in the meantime had been born after the merger with what remained of the left DC. He accepted and regretted it: he felt uncomfortable in Parliament, he tried to be useful, but it seemed to him that he wasn't useful at all. Malaise worsened when he returned to Bari due to the opposition of the most radical part of his "followers" who had considered the choice opportunistic and wrong.
He suffered a lot, and the saddest thing of all is that when he spoke about it he ended up agreeing with the critics: he shouldn't have accepted Bersani's invitation, being a deputy had been a mistake. Not once had the "Cassano bubble", always active despite the fact that neither the address book nor the Unit no longer existed, had worked for those conversations: its interface, full of respect and a sense of the State, simply found a thought of the type. The point of agreement has never been found, the column has never found its title. And the time for conversations is also over.
