Perhaps not only the Bolognese remember the tortellini of San Petronio: on the day of the patron saint's day, the Committee for the celebrations offered tortellini with chicken and not with pork, a courtesy to satiate even fellow Muslims. Protests rained down, that was not the "real" tortellini, it was a "betrayal of culinary identity" in the words of Pier Ferdinando Casini. In itself worrying if not comical, the story finds a reassuring conclusion in the pages of the book You have the wrong forest by Maurizio Bettini, (Il Mulino, 168 pages, 14 euros) which takes its title from a quatrain by the poet Giorgio Caproni: «Ask no more/Nothing remains for you here./You are not from the tribe./You have the wrong forest», where it is clear that we are here, in our forest, and the others, the different, the unwelcome, do not cross the border.
As if to say that if we give the tortellini to Muslims in their own way, we are perpetrating a betrayal and committing a violation of identity. Bettini reassures us: in the volume Modern Apicius by Francesco Leonardi, printed in 1807 (Apicius, Artusi's Latin forerunner, was a glutton who wrote recipes) the Bolognese tortellino is prescribed with chicken meat. The episode is one of the most picturesque of the many that dot the book to illustrate the identity obsession that weighs on coexistence, on cultural exchanges and on the evolution of civilizations (this, explains Bettini, does not exist without a comparison, without a Idem it's a alter, the words that represent the Latin precursors from which identity and otherness descend).
Certainly food, omnipresent in our days, is powerfully invested by the obsession with identity, and they show it the widespread aversion to certain imports such as McDonald's menus and Starbucks coffees, or the frenzy of 100 percent Italian products on supermarket shelves, in shops of all product categories, in advertising and elsewhere. This is demonstrated by certain perspective illusions, certain oversights: pizza, spaghetti, which wave like Italian flags in the world, do not exist without tomatoes, a vegetable originating from the Americas and far from identifying.
However, that of food is not the only area, perhaps the most harmless, in which identity maniacs practice who, as we read in You have the wrong forest, has "origins in the theological sphere" and calls for purity: when identity and otherness come into contact they produce contamination and therefore impurity. Conversely, there are areas where the obsession with identity generates tragedy: when it is ethnic, it ends in massacres as a recovery of purity, it leads to rape which is contamination, as happened in Uganda or Kosovo. An Italian comedy version of “ethnic cleansing” it was provided by the then mayor of Treviso Giancarlo Gentilini when he invoked the purity of the local dog breed, discouraging the importation of foreign dogs.
As a classical philologist, Bettini goes to the ancient roots of the obsession with identity, to move continuously in time and space without disciplinary limits and with a spirit of observation, without leaving too many unexplored corners. The observation of reality suggests that no, "Italy is not a forest surrounded by enemies against which to exercise the right of self-defense" which, for example, is one of the workhorses of identity terror, it would take us armed against crime, which would be a typical custom of others, especially if black, gypsy and different.
From Dante to Matteo Salvini (the juxtaposition is certainly undue as it is contaminating) the scholars and propagandists speak in these pages: «Whoever reasons in such a repugnant way as to believe that the place where he was born is the most delicious that exists under the sun, he also esteems the his mother tongue above all others..." reads with wise words in De vulgari eloquentia, but the head of the League proclaims in one of his propaganda: «… I prefer to help companies that use Italian products, I prefer to eat Italian, to help Italian farmers». If the first, Dante, finds few followers still capable of reading, the second, Salvini, aggregates a procession of people who do not read but watch and listen because, as Bettini observes, the obsession with identity is widespread and fed by the "middle sphere" , thanks to modern communication technologies.
Among the many aspects, it is worth reflecting on the contradictory perception that the people have of the migrant and the tourist, two categories of people ready to snap into the forest, united by similarities (they occupy "our spaces", introduce extravagant habits, "part of them live in mobile homes, campers or caravans, in the Roma way") and divided by differences (those who bring money and those who suck ours, and yet «the tourist is not felt to be hierarchically inferior to the resident»).
And if the "others" are too many - true or false, but in Italy more false than true - identity panic is triggered, which Bettini tells in a sparkling way as unleashed in the scream of the Greek god Pan, lord of terror and delusions, capable to cloud minds to the point that – these are news stories – when in Turin a young woman says she was raped by Roma, it can only be true, even if she made it all up; if in Rome a carabiniere is stabbed it is the fault of an African and not of an affluent American tourist.
At the conclusion of the eventful journey through the identity obsession, Bettini warns that it is useless to open a debate with the identity holders, they do not hear and do not listen. It is worth instead of refuting relentlessly addressing the “grey area”, to those who have not thought about it, which are recoverable to reality data. Like for example – this is not suggested by Bettini but it is a true case – that hard and pure militant of the left who, having not read the De vulgari eloquentia, circulates a visititaly video and urges his friends to be moved with him in front of those obvious images (the lagoon of Venice), bogus (an improbable ship of Christopher Columbus), questionable (Italians would be champions of integration), full of factual errors (the Italians invented the theatre) and misleading phrases ('once we ruled over France and England').
Identity obsession it is not the exclusive preserve of the right but it went further if, in the aftermath of the American elections, exultant messages circulated about the identity of Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's next vice president; thank goodness she's a woman, thank goodness she's African Indo American, completely neglecting the fact that she maybe she's endowed with progressive ideas, that maybe she has legal and political experience, which is a little more important. Like Covid19, the obsession with identity infects blindly and, as some acute observers have pointed out, even the left is in love with categories, with the difference that it sides with the others, with those who "forest are wrong".
