oliviero beha

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Oliviero Beha

We get back from holidays, journalistically, referring to twosome notes escorting us to holidays. Both are the expression of the same Italian disease, that according to which we are always elsewhere, we never know really what we are talking about, we are inauthentic, in short “false”. Well then, in Piazza Venezia, at Palazzo Venezia, the façade is being restored. Since restoring costs a lot of money the municipal administration rightly looks after sponsors. As you maybe already know, it has become established over last years and ever more spread the custom to pay works 'lending' the space of huge advertising panels covering scaffoldings and once removed it is given to the sight of the bystanders the restored area. But in the case of Piazza Venezia, works were already done in June and the big panels not yet mounted, because negotiating delays prevented it.
This way the façade is clean again, but it has again after some days scaffoldings and advertising big posters because the Municipality must perform the agreements with the sponsor.
The justification of administrators was: costing the works so much we could not give up the money coming from advertising. Strictly intended it is true. But this way it is betrayed the relationship between means and end. Inventing a source of income from the lease of a public and important space that is covered and embellished, since a big drawing by Folon is better than huge scaffolding, is a thing. Sponsoring a monument without even showing it, that is replacing the façade of Palazzo Venezia with Folon, even if with a good (administrative) intention is another thing. Let's cover palaces directly and that's that. Do we care of works? Substantially works are becoming or have become an excuse.
For a less period, but instructive, a basic importance question for the next Italian future: I'm talking about the pension reformation, roused by the D'Alema government this summer and then called off thanks to the reaction of the Trade Unions Trimurti and in general of the historical left.
It' far obvious that in a country of grandfathers, fathers (a lot) and sons (few), reviewing the pension general situation is not an option, but rather a necessity. With the current unemployment rate the accusation against the unions of safeguarding whom has a job against who does not have any is worthy at any case of being seriously pondered. But that's the heart of the matter.
As for the roman monuments, one has the impression that it is instrumentally turned upside down, that the crux-pensions are a colossal alibi: the same actors of the stage Italy are saying it to us. D'Alema is accused of having made European election lost or at least the administrative second ballot coming out the pension matter in a not good time. So D'Alema sheaths it again.
Trade unions and Confindustria, historical left and centre-right make of pensions a tug-of war, a pretext for a political clash, for surviving, but nobody looks reliable or responsible when talks about pensions. Reasoning in cool blood, any person of intellectual decent honesty, any political background he comes from, must acknowledge that as for the restores first it comes the historical richness and then the sponsors' money, the same for the pensions first it comes the urgency of the whole matter, then the political use of it. Instead all upside down at “Alibi, Italy”. This happens in a country having lost since a generation the relationship between the means and the end, having not anymore clear utterable purposes.
All is politically masked under an improbable clash between left and right, seemingly and mistakable puppets governed by dying puppeteers.