When one pope dies, another popes. Without too many stories: while the coroner - the little that remains of the Italian people who are still interested in politics - observes the still lukewarm institutional corpse of the Letta government, noting its death with a lazy sense of duty, the political scene - or at least its narration – is enriched with a ready-to-play game, a crossword puzzle that is impossible to finish under an umbrella, the government ritual of full ministers.
The toto-ministri is like a milkshake. Rumors, half-truths or simple suggestions and interested self-promotions are put together, and then served cold. Renzi's team is just a fanciful hypothesis with which to fill the pages of some newspapers, but there is already at least one name capable of tickling the imagination of many Italians, even among the uninitiated in politics: it is that of Alessandro Baricco, possible albeit unlikely Minister of Culture.
“This business of paintings has always struck me. They stay up for years, then nothing happens, but I say nothing, fran, down, they fall. They hang there by the nail, nobody does anything to them, but at a certain point, fran, they fall down, like stones. In absolute silence, with everything still around, not a fly flying, and they, fran".
Perhaps this is how Baricco would have described the fall of the Letta government, like that of a painting that suddenly ends up on the ground, dragged to the ground only by inertia. For no real reason, just because, quite simply, his time has come.
The feeling between Baricco and Renzi, somehow, seems almost spontaneous. Seen from here it looks like a natural union, without forcing. Both represent the more pop side of the left, the more pragmatic one: the left net of the Italian left. Both, then, are part of a rare case, that of practical men who talk about dreams. And it is precisely for this reason, perhaps, that they are ambiguous, because you never understand if they have realized their dream or if they have retrospectively assigned a dream to their own reality.
It's a picture name, definitely. A high-sounding notch to be placed on the belt of a fledgling Government. The most important (like it or not) Italian author of the last twenty years at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. It is certainly a topic, something to talk about, one of the many sparks that light the fuse of the eternal contest of sagacity that takes place on Twitter.
An image name, we were saying, but who knows if, beyond the mistrust that Baricco's opacity (like Renzi's) may arouse, it might not also be a substance name. The question is just this. The answer will come in time, probably. On Baricco, and above all on Renzi.
