NoonJuly 2, 2022 – 09:21 am
from Aldo Schiavone
Alessandra Clemente did well to ask, from the columns of this newspaper, that the city institutions adequately remember the figure of Raffaele La Capria. I want to believe that the answer will be prompt and positive: because La Capria was not only a Neapolitan writer who was always very close to his origins. was, like Eduardo and very few others who in the twentieth century can be counted on the fingers of one hand, an author capable of transforming the life of Naples, the very life that cuts you to death or puts you to sleep, into very dense and authentic poetic material, into metaphor without boundaries of the pain of existing, of the unsolvable enigmaticity of being there. Perhaps only New York and Paris have had the good fortune to find, in the last century, those who knew how to enhance their harmonies (another word from him) and the charms as he was able to do with his tortured and mysterious city.
But perhaps this can be an opportunity to imagine something more. Marco Demarco has just reminded us that next November will be seventy years after the death of Croce, whose work – especially the post-systematic one of late maturity and recent years – is returning with great strength to the panorama of contemporary studies. . And it will be a date not to be dropped into silence: the opportunity to update our accounts of what is alive and what is dead in the philosopher’s thought, and in particular to reflect on the relationship with him of a line of studies that remains among the more significant things of the Neapolitan intelligence of these last decades. I know very well that commemorations and anniversaries do not go far: it is not these or other similar events that can nourish the intellectual life of a great European metropolis.
And yet: if we started precisely from the combination of the memory of these two figures – La Capria and Croce: so different, and at the same time so close in sharing a Neapolitan spirit experienced by both as an extraordinary and very vital laboratory of inspiration and characters – to make 2023 the Neapolitan Year of Culture? To launch a coordinated series of initiatives that should mark the start of a new phase in the civil history of the city? If we started – I mean – precisely from a celebration, even with all that is inevitably rhetorical and mannered it contains, but also with its ability, if one knows how to construct it, to revive the sense of a memory, to rediscover the meaning of a tradition, to outline an inventory of what the culture of the city is today, its creativity, its ability to innovate, to explore new paths, to think about the future?
The Neapolitan Year of Culture should be a close survey, without prejudice and without anything academic, on the living thought of the city: literature, theater, cinema, philosophy. But also on its institutions: libraries (about which it would be time for an in-depth discussion on the idea of the transfer of the National team to the Albergo dei Poveri building: a hypothesis that arouses, and with good reasons, quite a few perplexity); and at the same time the Universities, which should learn to make more system among themselves, to conceive themselves as a single complex apparatus of research and training; and private associations and foundations – from the Croce to the Institute for Philosophical Studies. The program of the Neapolitan Year of Culture should be limited to the human sciences: but it should look with even greater attention to the Neapolitan reality of hard sciences, from physics to biology, to all the knowledge behind the technological revolution that is changing the form of our lives, and to the relationship between public research and private initiative.
We have said on several occasions that the contemporary world needs more than ever to build a new network of connections between human sciences and knowledge of life and nature: from bioengineering to artificial intelligence, to neuroscience. This should be the most authentic vocation of that new humanism of which we now hear more and more often (although almost always in very vague terms). For many reasons that relate to its history as well as to its potential today, Naples could become a cutting-edge laboratory for this new frontier in Europe. The Neapolitan Year of Culture should also serve to clearly indicate such an objective, and to survey, in a first approximation, the forces already in the field or that could soon be in order to make it achievable.
I see no other way to determine that turning point in the history of Naples without which we will have definitively lost our future, if not the realistic project of a strategic plan that has the cultural heritage of the city as its backbone (a few days ago Emilia Leonetti wrote in about things that are entirely acceptable in this newspaper). The year of culture could be both the announcement and its first realization. And on the other hand, what else does governing a large metropolitan area mean today if not knowing how to identify with certainty vocations and strengths, and create the conditions to enhance and exalt them? In recent years there has been an increasingly serious disconnect between the ability to think the new – between the ability to create with ideas – and the political governance of the community. If the city administration does not set itself the overcoming of this void as the most urgent of the problems there is no way out. To do this, you need eyes that can see far away, and steady hands, that know how to keep the bar straight. We still say it with hope. But there is little time before this becomes just an illusion.
2 July 2022 | 09:21
© Time.News