The song is an unforgettable monument to the cheerful lightheartedness of love: which makes it one of the most sung songs of all time. One of those that enter your ears and never leave you: “What a mess, it must be because I love you/It’s an emotion that grows slowly/Hold me tight and stay closer to me/If I’m okay, it must be because I love you.”
I admit that on Sunday afternoon I really didn’t expect its notes to resound around the world at the end of the extraordinary match of the girls’ volleyball team that crowned them Olympic champions, as a euphoric sonorous gloss to celebrate that well-deserved triumph. I realize this: I am someone who practices the profession of criticism with a frenzied passion to the point of pedantry, convinced as I remain that this special intellectual disposition coincides in every way, as a great Englishman wrote, with the simple act of connecting, even and above all the most diverse things (“only connect”). So the question arose naturally: what relationship could there be, semiotically I mean, between the victory of the Italian women’s volleyball team and this very famous song by Ricchi e Poveri?
The winning national team today lives off an alchemy that happily blends the most diverse personal stories of its champions, whose common denominator remains the extraordinary athletic quality and a proud sense of belonging to a nation called Italy, no matter if increasingly multi-ethnic and multicultural. The names? That just reading them are the sign of a registry of welcome and integration: Paola Egonu, Myriam Sylla, Caterina Bosetti, Monica De Gennaro, Ekaterina Antropova, Carlotta Cambi, Gaia Giovannini, Loveth Omoruyi, Marina Lubian, Anna Danesi, Sarah Fahr, Ilaria Spirito and the Sardinian Alessandra Orru, coming from an island – let’s not forget – where more than half of the citizens vote for autonomist parties, if not even independentists. I would also add that this is a team set up by a man of great experience, professionalism, intelligence and talent like Julio Velasco, who – let’s not forget – is Argentinian (while Daniele Santarelli, the coach of the excellent Turkey, is very Italian).
I come to the point: why did the television connection between this victory and the song of Ricchi e povero leave me perplexed? We have suffered for decades from the stereotype, truly international, of being the country of pizza, spaghetti and mandolins. Can we now accept being accredited as the country of love in which all differences are cancelled out (including the still crucial one between “rich” and “poor”)? This Italy, the country we love just like our volleyball players, lives in the positive fortification of differences, even at the cost of great conflicts. A possible answer lies perhaps in the transformation of conflict into dialogue. Women and men are all equal before God and the law. But humanity can grow morally only because of differences and thanks to them.
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