An invitation to dialogue and confrontation between right and left “in a shared framework” and in an “open house”. It was formulated by the president of the Maxxi Foundation, Alessandro Giuli, who today presented his latest book ‘Gramsci is alive’ in the Mondadori bookshop in Piazza Cola di Rienzo in Rome. Syllabus for contemporary hegemony’ (Rizzoli) together with the journalists Giuliano Ferrara and Pierluigi Battista and the actress Sabrina Ferilli.
In his reflection Giuli underlined the fact that “after over 25 years of low intensity civil war around Berlusconi’s bipolarism, finally a ruling class in government has the possibility of writing an order of discourse in which a bridge must and can be built between right and left. In essence it is a question of designing a shared framework, of finding a unified story”. In this sense, for Giuli, “we have the duty to dialogue. The right must necessarily, in this historical phase, be a little left-wing to represent what the left no longer represents. The historical mission today is to get out of wild dialectic of mutual delegitimation”.
Illustrated in a crowded room, in front of a large audience – composed among others of the Undersecretary of Culture Gianmarco Mazzi, the writer Fulvio Abbate, the cartoonist Osho, the journalists Salvo Sottile, Serena Bortone, Stefano Cappellini, Pierluigi Pardo and Annalisa Bruchi and by the former minister for youth policies and sport Vincenzo Spadafora – the book addresses the conflict of ideas to build an ongoing project: to make it possible to declare oneself “the most progressive among the conservatives”.
A project that Giuliano Ferrara spoke about. “This book – he said – is not a surprise at all” and takes place, after all, in a political and historical phase in which “everything is very fluid as is the book. One of the attempts to renew the cultural identity of left – he highlighted – was to establish a relationship with fascism by trying to come to terms with the Twenty Years”. On the part of the left, Ferrara said, “there is always the problem of the right which we tend to criticize for having disguised itself a bit, for having assumed another identity”.
The journalist Pierluigi Battista recalled that he spent “his entire youth talking, writing, discussing, arguing about Gramsci. Then there was the end of ideology, Gramsci disappeared. The right came to government and ‘It’s still Gramsci. Giuli gave me a sort of existential setback. It could be paradoxical but it isn’t because I think that the right of fascist origin has within itself the aspects of hegemony that the liberal right does not have.” Last line for the actress Sabrina Ferilli. “The most interesting thing is that Giuli distances himself from the condemnable things of the fascist period. I don’t think, however, that he denies them. Reading the book you notice a link with certain ideals and passages that also refer to the Risorgimento”, he said.