When Andrea Riccardi assumed the presidency of the Dante Alighieri Society, perhaps he had in mind the same image that many years earlier had led him to found the Community of Sant’Egidio. Not the word of a poet, a saint or a navigator, but that of a painter, Marc Chagall: Our task is to color the world with many colors. one of our inferences, but Professor Riccardi grants it to us: A gray monolingualism can kill plurality and with this thought. In the bed of a language there are wonderful pieces of civilization, culture, history, life, present and future, even artifacts that involve, as far as we are concerned, the knowledge of Italian.
On Wednesday 14 April, in the presence of the President of the Republic, Dante Alighieri inaugurated a platform with global ambitions for the dissemination of the language and image of our country in the world. Let me say: it was needed. Dante, founded by Giosu Carducci in a newly born Italy, for many years downgraded by detractors to a historical find, now becomes the engine of a recovery.
How was this possible?
Dante has built monuments in many Italian squares. Today we are building a Dante-global, digital monument. It allows, through three rooms, the learning of Italian with paths that take into account the linguistic origin of the students, the training of teachers and the spread of our culture in the world. The 700 years since Dante’s death are not just an occasion, they are the very idea of a language that is born and can renew itself. With the Italian language, Dante created Italian itself well before Unit. Our identity, therefore, is cultural and linguistic.
Even if globalization risks making us marginal?
We must believe more in Italy in the global world. The globalization occurred in a historical moment in which we were introverted. After the First Republic, we believed that everything could be resolved within national borders. I believe instead that Italy and Italian are important interlocutors for a complete, not partial, not crude, non-violent globalization. Its limit, so far, has been mainly financial and informative, not humanistic. We must work on this misunderstanding, offering our language alongside the others, aware that Italian is not an imperial language that imposes itself, a language that is chosen. Here, we want to push Italy to open up to the challenge through language. Hence the idea of a large platform, naturally together with the opening of Italian schools in different parts of the world, such as in Tirana and Russia, where we will participate in an important project.
How do you explain that Italian is still one of the five most studied languages in the world?
There is an Italian universe that does not coincide only with the Peninsula. bigger, made up of emigrants, their children, new generations who come and go. Not only that: there are many supporters, attracted by the style, the product, the work, the art that we represent. We have to move from Italian-nostalgia to Italian-sympathy. We have a universe compacted in language, on which, however, little has been invested. In recent times there has been more sensitivity but still insufficient. In the Recovery Plan, for example, I don’t see the necessary attention to language, despite the fact that it means work for many young people. Italian entrepreneurship is also not generally sensitive. Those who argue that exports must be denationalized are committing a sin of ingenuity. The export linked to the taste and the taste to the tongue. Then our great limitation that we are aging not only demographically but as a driving force in the world. We will have a future if we can relate to others, otherwise we will end up being a small country where to do some tourism.
After all, Italian is also the language of the Catholic Church and reaches hundreds of millions of faithful …
Our main testimonial Pope Francis, as were Wojtyla and Ratzinger. Pope Bergoglio goes around the world and addresses, for example, Iraqis in Italian and the crowd greets him in Italian.
For many years Dante was associated with nationalism. Has everything changed now?
Unfortunately, fascism had transformed it into a propaganda tool for the regime. When we realized that he had not yet recovered from the horror of the racial laws that had caused the Jewish members to be expelled, we gave their heirs an honorary membership card. The idea of our founder was of a very different value, it was federative, neither racial nor religious nor political. It followed the concept expressed by an Arab poet in the 10th century: language is true art, because through it value is given to culture.
The initiative
Andrea Riccardi, president of the Dante Alighieri Society since 2015, inaugurated the Dante.global online platform in Rome on Wednesday 14 April during a ceremony in the presence of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. Dante.global a new digital tool created for the promotion in the world of the Italian language and culture in the context of the celebrations for the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. Born in Rome in 1950, the historian Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, state minister for international cooperation and integration into the government led by Mario Monti
April 14, 2021 (change April 14, 2021 | 21:44)
© Time.News
.