The balances of Mirafiori

If you look at gate two of the Mirafiori plant from the parking lot on Corso Agnelli, you cannot help but think of the emptiness beyond the hedge, to paraphrase Harper Lee. It is a kind of desert that gives shape to the neighborhood it faces, and to the lives of the people who have tried to inhabit it. Carlo is 52 years old, has two children, and has been here all his life, but the last 15 years have been spent between unemployment benefits, odd jobs, and long stretches of joblessness.

He says, “when May 1st comes I try to stay away from the balcony, I’m afraid that frustration might turn into a sudden gesture […]. May 1st – Carlo continues – has been a day of celebration for many Italians who recall a founding aspect of the Republic built on work, but for those who don’t have a job it is a day of suffering.” And not just for them, but for “all those who live between work and non-work, in that nebulous zone of unstable situations that stand above misery, but below serenity.” The fact is, Carlo goes on, that “unemployment makes you age, you lose your sense of self. You live only by your five senses, there is nothing else, nothing beyond. I even avoid friends so as not to be the one who always complains. The worst part of unemployment is loneliness. Isolation pushes you to bet everything on yourself, your skills, your boldness – which time slowly wears down until in the end nothing is left. You no longer feel like doing anything. In the morning you get up like animals, only by instinct. By instinct you go out, but nothing interests you. Unemployment corrodes your character, makes you always hold back […].”

As Miguel Benasayag wrote, “each of us is called to become the entrepreneur of our own life: autonomous, efficient, dynamic, and – let us not forget… happy! If you feel bad, if you are unemployed, sick, weak, you only have yourself to blame, it is your fault. Sadness and weakness have become real defects, ‘signs’ that we are mismanaging our business (read: our poor person).” At fifty you are slower, and as the years go by you lose your certainties […]. “When you are unemployed – Carlo continues – you even get tired of doing nothing. You have so much time, yet it feels as if you are always in a rush. It is the inner anxiety that makes you feel that way. One, two, three, breathe, inhale, push away the anxiety and think the job will come. Hours pass, days pass, then months that in the end become years. These are difficult times for me, and yet I know that like a chameleon, to know my true color I must settle in the void, but I must do so without falling.”

Tightrope walking in Mirafiori is a duty, emptiness a law, expressions and breath of the joy of those who do not want only to survive the storm, but to dance beyond the hedge.

Fabrizio Floris
NP June/July 2025