As I write, crowds of supporters of Roma football club have been pouring down the streets of the Capital for the last two days. A number of comments could be made: about the championship shield, about football values, about what goes on behind the scenes, about the meaning of a million people coming out into the streets.... and so on and on. And maybe I shall make my comments, one by one, in the near future. But now, I would like to start talking about this million people, about the cheering, about the pretext-text-hypertext of football as a means of social aggregation and culture. Or rather, of “culture”, and in our case of course of “popular culture”. Trivially enough, the expression “Popular Culture” goes by as an uninteresting definition, which doesn’t really say anything, or which is simply not understood, because it refers to those who are well-read and who par excellence (maybe misleadingly, as we shall see) are not part of the people at large, who on the other hand are traditionally labelled as obtuse and slow-witted. So we have some sort of oxymoron, the figure of speech which holds together contradictory terms, such as that of an intelligent fool, or of a quick retarded, etc. Still, I believe that by not facing the extremely serious issue of “popular culture” we would be in fact causing offence to culture, society and politics: it would be an epoch-making mistake, as we would wrong both the so-called learned people, who speak from their so-called “ivory towers”, and those termed ignorant, the people “in the street”. Laying aside for a moment the vivid image of the million people, who continue to cheer in the background, let us take an example from abroad and then transfer it into an Italian context. During the spring, the Argentinean singer Mercedes Sosa performed in Venice, during her tour through our country. During another open-air concert in Argentina, in 1978, she was arrested by order of the Videla regime, because she was singing a song against the landowners who treated the “campesinos” (the farmers) as slaves. Banished from her country’s public stage, from radio and TV, from her nation, she was in exile for years. And by the side of the slaughters, she was quite lucky... During her interviews, she repeatedly referred, as I was saying earlier, to the apparently trivial concept that popular songs “can reach were political messages are absent”, and that “this enormous power should make people think” I do not believe anybody actually disagrees with the concept; at the most one takes it for granted, and doesn’t really care about it at all. But this is how things stand. Tragic times, in Argentina, in Chile, under dictatorship: much more cheerful and “rebellious” times in Italy, during the 70s, when the Mogol-Battisti couple was rife, with songs which had a stirring effect, and in any case still powerfully strike people’s heartstrings today. And what else can all this be, but “popular culture”? What else can tradition, habits and interpretation of habits be, but a form of culture? Not an elite culture of course, not an exclusive one, but one which is open to everybody to start with and is only forced to make a selection at a later stage. What else can we term all the things that fill up our days, when we develop the concept in a slightly “steadier” way, without wavering according to transitory circumstances, but a bridge between the ivory tower and the common people in the street? Most people don’t know Kant, but their happiness or unhappiness is not affected. And Kant himself - and it isn’t out of place to mention this here - wasn’t blind to anything or anybody, since he basically believed that reality is founded on what we see. Well then, songs, music and many other things are all aspects of popular culture which, if properly considered and spread, could make people more “cultured”, rather than distant and elusive, more social and therefore more political in the etymological sense of the word, since intellectuality and erudition are quite a different concept. When at the end of May we learnt about the death of Renato Carosone, who starting from the Italian post-war generation for decades had filled our hearts and minds with Neapolitan and “American” music and words, I was forced to think in these terms about this way of his of “producing culture”. And when, almost at the same time, Nanni Moretti was awarded the “Golden Palm” in Cannes for his profound film “La stanza del figlio”, I had similar thoughts in connection with films instead of songs. And now we have this million people entirely carried away by a rolling ball... What else can all this be termed, but “popular culture”, a world which very “illiterarily” (for a population who reads so little) represents the emotional, mental, environmental, existential and therefore “cultural” fabric which holds together a multitude of people? Is all this too “trivial”, in a country that is less and less cultured and more and more unpopular (in its lack of self-awareness and self-esteem)? (traduzione Interpres sas-Giussano)