The ballot to become mayor of Naples is between Gianni Lettieri, manager of the local industrial union, and Luigi de Magistris, a former prosecutor with a taste for justicialism and a European parliamentarian. The former is supported by right-wing parties, the latter by left-wing parties. When one puts his face in to compete for an uncomfortable seat (and the one in Palazzo San Giacomo certainly is) he deserves respect.
Yet a question comes automatically: did right and left really have nothing better to offer the city with the history that good or bad they have had in Naples? Let's think of the Neapolitan right. It is true that there was the long interlude of Achille Lauro and later the city also became a sort of vote safe for Giorgio Almirante's MSIs. But alongside an extreme right, which sounded shameful for the city, there was also a line-up that we could call conservative and which certainly had its intrinsic respectability. I am thinking of liberals such as the economist Epicarmo Corbino or the minister Guido Cortese. Both deputies to the Constituent Assembly, the prime minister of the Treasury in the first two De Gasperi cabinets, the second minister of industry in the Segni government. Both with a very high sense of public affairs.
In the mid-fifties, the liberals in Naples also had a newspaper called "Il Giornale". He went into a sales crisis. Cortese was Minister of Industry, but the newspaper closed all the same: it could not have been the Liberal minister who saved him with a provision that would have involved a disbursement, however small, of public money. Other faces, another sense of the state, another politics. But in Naples the history of the left is also noble, including the communists. Just think of the severe school of Giorgio Amendola, in which a generation of respectable politicians grew up: from the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano. And on the cultural level there was the magazine "Cronache meridionali" by Mario Alicata and Francesco De Martino, with which for some years he had the honor of dealing even with rough topics "Nord e Sud", the magazine founded by my father . Who considered himself leftist, but did not hesitate to specify: non-classist and anti-communist left. Except to recognize (they are appeals from when I was a child): “Think what a great political class Italy would have if these hadn't been communists).
Even though I can't say I'm anti-communist since the Berlin wall no longer exists, I certainly wouldn't say the same about the Bassolinos and Cozzolinos. In short, in Naples, after the defeat of Laurismo, there was a potentially robust ruling class. I don't just think about politics. I am thinking (and here we return to the respectable right) of Giovanni Ansaldo, editor of Il Mattino, with whom he chatted at the tables of the Cristallo bar in Piazza dei Martiri, perhaps together with the bibliophile Gino Doria and the publisher Riccardo Ricciardi, also the banker Raffaele Mattioli , in his brief visits to Naples. It was thanks to the resources found by Mattioli that dad in 1953 had managed to give birth to "North and South". Nor should it be forgotten that even in the Catholic world Naples and Campania have expressed a good ruling class.
The DC was not just Gava and gavismo. In the battle against Lauro, Fanfano's deputy Paolo Barbi was in the front row. "The roof" was a magazine of very authoritative Catholic intellectuals, often deployed in the cultural debate to the left of "North and South". And then there was a banker like Ferdinando Ventriglia, sometimes questioned for the determination with which he exercised power, but extremely competent and authoritative in the indications of economic policy for the city. Today, however, there are Lettieri and de Magistris on the pitch. And it is to be hoped that many of the accusations that the two exchanged during the electoral campaign are at least exaggerated.
I don't think Lettieri is just a clone of Nicola Cosentino, the head of the Campania PDL on whom a request for arrest for contiguity with the Camorra is pending. At the same time, it seems to me excessive to consider De Magistris merely an exasperated justicialist. But what is striking in both is the great distance that separates them from the need for redemption and the resumption of politics, with a capital P, which the city, submerged by rubbish and the consequent controversies, seems to need. It may also be true, and I hope so, as Umberto Ranieri says, that de Magistris has managed to arouse great expectations and hopes in the city. But both he and his competitor will hardly be able to satisfy a city that is on its knees because it has been disappointed by too many. And that more than a mayor, it needs a new ruling class. Starting with politics. Where there is a lack of parties that have the dignity of considering themselves as such.
Recently I was in Naples, in the industrious and civil quiet, of the Institute of Philosophical Studies of Gerardo Marotta, where he remembered an old friend who had recently passed away: Renato Cappa, editorial secretary of "Nord e Sud". To commemorate him were Enzo Golino and Nello Ajello who also passed through the magazine and then (singular case but up to a certain point) landed at different times at the helm of the cultural pages of "Republic". Rosellina Balbi had also played that role and that path, after being deputy director of my father's magazine.
It came natural to me to think of another coincidence. At the Umberto high school in Naples, in the gymnasium, in the same class as my father, in addition to Rosellina, there were Antonio Ghirelli, the playwright Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, the director Francesco Rosi (the one of the film "Hands on the city", Leone d' gold in Venice in 1963 and all focused on the Laurino misgovernment in Naples) and the writer Raffaele La Capria. There was fascism, Naples was smaller, but it promised well.
