Of DWARF PINE – Summer and books fresh off the press. “Calabria – Italy”is the latest book by the director of Calabria.Livand, the Calabrian journalist Holy StratiReghium Julii Lifetime Achievement Award, winner of the Troccoli National Literary Award, and now also “Calabria-America Lifetime Achievement Award”,“for the great attention – says Mimmo Morogallo, founder of the Prize – that his newspaper has always dedicated to the world of Calabrian emigration in the world”.
«In Santo Strati – we read in the motivation of the Calabriamerica Award (The journalist Peter Melia (he is the president of the Jury) which was awarded to him on Tuesday 3 September in Taurianova – a journalist with great professional experience, who in this latest essay tells of contemporary Calabria, which is made up of a thousand different problems, but is also rich in a thousand resources and a thousand different excellences».
«Calabria-America” – he adds Mimmo Morogallo – goes to the journalist Santo Strati for the great intuition that bears his name and is called “Calabra Live”, a daily online newspaper that every day reaches hundreds of thousands of Calabrians in every part of the world, telling a Calabria that is not always easy to find in the major printed newspapers. It is the Calabria of doing, the Calabria of talents, the Calabria of visions, the Calabria of passions. Inside Calabria Live there is the entire story of this Calabrian reporter who directs it and who has lived through the most delicate and complex phases of the Republic as a profession, telling the story of our country for over 50 years».
“Calabria-America” a Santo Strati for the pride and sense of community with which his newspaper and his books tell the tensions and expectations of the people of the South.
“Calabria-America” to Santo Strati for never having forgotten our emigrants abroad and for having understood that only a newspaper like his could ideally reunite them together in a single ideal and real group.
“Calabria-America” to Santo Strati – we read in the final motivation of the Award – for the pride and sense of community with which his newspaper and his books tell the tensions and expectations of the people of the South. “Calabria-America” to Santo Strati for never having forgotten our emigrants abroad and for having understood that only a newspaper like his could ideally reunite them together in a single ideal and real group».
“Calabria-Italy” is his latest essay. “People, events, places, dreams, disappointments, hopes of an extraordinary land”, all this is told by Santo Strati with great passion, with an uncommon personal transport, with simplicity but also with a lot of anger in his body, with the fear perhaps of “dirtying” further the beautiful history of a land like Calabria and that in the past – says Santo Strati himself – has been little told or perhaps badly told».
– Director, why did you choose this title, “Calabria-Italy”?
“You see, when they presented themselves before the immigration officials at Ellis Island, who asked where they came from, our Calabrian emigrants at the beginning of the century did not understand the question but intuited it and simply answered “Calabria, Italy”. They said it with great pride, but at the same time they were afraid of seeing themselves immediately branded as derelicts who would weigh on the community. They did not know a word of English and disembarked after a long crossing of the ocean that lasted weeks if not months. “Merica”, the new world, welcomed them and their first greeting expressed the proud sense of belonging – Italians, but above all Calabrians – that no one could ever take away from them. After more than a century, those two words – Calabria, Italy – put together they mockingly mark that ideal image that years of gap, of the Southern question yesterday, of differentiated autonomy today, have tried to dismantle».
In this latest essay, the director of Calabria.Live It transmits to those who read it the awareness of still being able to tell about this land of his, in the most correct and real way possible, to make it in this way even more mysterious and magnetic than it already is.
“Corrado Alvaro – Santo Strati recalls – wrote that the Calabrian people need “to be spoken to”, but I add – they must also be invited to speak: they cannot just listen. If the opinions and the story of misdeeds, but also the many hidden positives that I have tried to highlight, will serve to fuel a dialectic of comparison, it will mean that those who have read these pages perhaps have not been bored and this book can be a contribution to the dialogue”.
As a great chronicler, Strati gets back to work in the kitchen, and the result is a compendium of analyses and reflections of such pressing and effective relevance that it explains very well why this land “does not grow and does not take off”, the fault of a ruling class that is often inadequate, unprepared, incapable of understanding the changes, and above all in bad faith, because a ruling class that follows the old principle that everything “changes so that nothing can really change in the end” is an old and inadequate ruling class.
“Certainly someone will remain indignant, but from Calabria and the Calabrians we need a leap of common pride to work together, creating – as well as demanding – the no longer postponable opportunities for development. We all owe it to the generations to come. And it is to them and to the Calabrians, who like me, believe in it, that this work is dedicated.”
Santo Strati does not allow any easy reading of his book, rather it goes down hard as a boulder.
«Calabria, which had educated its young people, then let them “escape” without offering them the slightest opportunity for social redemption. Leave and be able to dream of a future (something that was then regularly achieved far from their homeland) or stay and throw away years of study and sacrifices, to make do in some anonymous call center or in modest commercial or service activities, with indecent wages, exploited for their need to work and feel “useful”? And we can see what the brain drain has produced: everywhere there are top professionals of Calabrian origin: doctors, lawyers, engineers, managers. Another Calabria, physically distant (but not in heart) that beats, produces wealth for the country (and especially in the North) and watches its children grow up with a Lombard or Roman accent, without neglecting to teach them the essential words of the dialect, to refresh on holidays at the seaside in Calabria or in the woods of Sila, Aspromonte or Pollino».
A generation born and raised elsewhere, in Milan as in London, as in New York or in Australia, or in Canada but firmly tied to its roots. Calabria elsewhere. The Calabria of the diaspora never finished, never concluded. Plundered, bled dry, forgotten.
From his privileged observatory as editor-in-chief and founder of the web-digital newspaper Calabria.Livefounded by him in 2017, Santo Strati, without partisanship and never hiding his visceral love for the land that gave him birth, transmits in these pages the vision of a Calabria that strongly believes in its rebirth, and still aims for development.
For the director of Calabria Live «this book, closed in April 2023, contains numerous unpublished chapters and several extracts from my editorials that appeared in the newspaper Calabria.Live. The initial idea was to collect the most interesting or provocative articles to stimulate and support growth and development in Calabria. Then, instead, the keyboard, once it would have been called the pen, took over and further, unpublished reflections came, which I hope can suggest ideas and debates».
With numerous unpublished contributions and the “re-fishing” of various editorials, Santo Strati stimulates discussion and arouses new emotions. But there are many cultural provocations that the journalist himself launches on the table of political debate these days.
“It is my new narrative – he says – certainly positive of modern Calabria, but without indulgences for the guilty initiatives of those who row against growth and development, with a contagious and optimistic look to the future”. This, obviously – the author writes again – does not mean ignoring critical issues and unsustainable situations that concern the Calabrian territory, indeed there is a marked and precise accusation of the lack of vision on the part of local administrators”.
But he also adds: «After all, the central government and politics are wrong to have neglected Calabria for too long, forgetting the young southerners whose future is being stolen».
“Calabria-Italy”, just read the book’s credits to better understand how much modern Calabria Santo Strati has recounted in this latest essay: The ships were leaving, The contagious pride of the Calabrians, The work that isn’t there, Faith, Envy and Jealousy, A new narrative of Calabria, Falling in love with Calabria, The Ferragosto of the Bronzes, The Bronzes as the identity of Italy, The ancient rivalry between Reggio and Catanzaro, The dream of growth and development, Visionaries, The regional vote and the opposition, The national vote of 2022, The waltz of the nominees, Involuntary abstentionism, Healthy vote from afar, If half of Calabria doesn’t vote, Giorgia and the South, The South as a resource not a problem, The vote and the Bridge, The No-Bridge, The whataboutism of the Bridge, Salvini’s Bridge, Impossible normality, The interim Region, Calabrian airports, Linguistic minorities and culture, The Cultural Consultation, 500 euros to direct a Museum, A law to protect the sunset, A mayor for Reggio, Demolition People, The Lido of Reggio, The Bergamot of Reggio Calabria, Tridico (Inps) and the last ones, Cutro and Mattarella’s Italy.
So the conclusions of the director of Calabria.Live himself, and above all a complete Index of names, which in these cases never hurts. (pn)
