Semplificare il passato per appianare il presente. Del Quirinale come luogo di elaborazione di un senso comune storico per l’Italia del XXI secolo

Abstract

Simplifying the past to smooth out the present. The Quirinale as a place of elaboration of a historical common sense for 21st century Italy.

Since the 1990s, the role of the Presidents of the Republic has emerged as increasingly important. In the figure of the President of the Republic, a significant ‘communicative power’ has gradually been concentrated, the result of the convergence of the powers of information, persuasion and externalization, which would make him ‘the main maieuta’ (guide) of the orientations of collective judgement. The men who have succeeded one another at the Quirinale over the last twenty years have made abundant use of this communicative power, including in the area of collective memory and public discourse on the past. In the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s, a format of public discourse on the past has been defined and consolidated, based on a few key concepts and a few reassuring images. The presidents, who are the constitutional guarantors of national unity, have thus contributed to elaborating, each according to a specific approach and point of view, a sort of homogeneous format of ‘institutional memory’, strongly imbued with references to national unity and identity. An irenic and unrealistic a-conflict history has been proposed, in which the fractures would always be overcome by the Italians’ ability to find points of convergence and coexistence precisely in their Italian spirit, which would give its best results precisely in moments of acute crisis. At the risk of falling into the paradox whereby no one can really recognise and identify with an aseptic, distant, ‘cold’ history because it has been constructed in a laboratory.