VIII.xi. Modena City Ramblers

"Long live Italy, fearless Italy,
Long live Italy, seaborne Italy,
Forgettable, forgotten Italy,
Half garden, half hell."
- The Modena City Ramblers

When I arrived with Elizabeth and her friend Peter, Piazza Maggiore was packed with the city's decadent youth. A huge stage had been erected in the centre of the square. Somewhat incongruously, the focus of attention was a group of sexagenarian women chanting about the heady days of the partisans, the resistance movement that helped dislodge the Rebublic of Salo and the occupying German forces in the dying days of the Second World War. Indeed, Liberation Day here is seen as an event celebrating the freedom fighters, the irregulars, much more than the strategically indispensable advances of, say, the fifth Army. Bologna, which has a special and somewhat selective relationship to twentieth century history, celebrates what could have been. A case in point were the communist flags that some spectators waved about during the concert, in keeping with the "Lenin, Stalin, Mao" slogans that accompany the hammer and sickle etched into the backs of the chairs in many a lecture hall.
    The elderly chanters continued for some time, dedicating songs to "youth, the driving force of freedom," while the audience, unflattered, took little note. Clearly, the evening's main act had been delayed, possibly by the spitting rain that transformed the crowd into a seething, unpleasantly smelling whole. Finally, the headliners arrived, shouting raucous political slogans, encouraging in one of their songs the election of a communist, pacifist, filo-american soldier president. The crowd, enjoying every last word, had even grown to encompass the broad steps in front of San Petronio, and the venerable basilica's façade, hung with a banner congratulating Benedict XVI, formed a sort of weird antependium to the stage opposite. Was I the only one who recalled that the new Pope had once called rock music the vehicle of anti-religion?
    The Modena City Ramblers are a rag-tag group of folk musicians who spout out wistful elegiacal nonsense; like the women who performed before them, none are old enough to even remember the war. Beyond a few rehashed liberation chants, they seemed overwhelmingly concerned with outdated ideological notions. If there ever were an opium for modern Italy, one which distracts it and prevents it from becoming a world power, it would be the fatuous dialectic that continues to this day between Marx and Mussolini, carried forward by young and old alike, stubborn, hackneyed, futile, unaware as their country slips away from consequence. These were the flag-wavers in Piazza Maggiore.
    At one point, the lead of the Ramblers remarked that, since liberation day was being celebrated, it would be nice to see an Italian flag in the audience, for instead of the tricolour, only Cuba and the Soviet Union, along with some red handkerchiefs, flapped in the damp evening breeze. It takes sixty years to forget a nation.