Finally summer!

With summer just around the corner, contagion and deaths from Covid finally decreasing, tourists flocking to the beautiful country, restaurants, museums and beaches starting to populate again, even information, newspapers and television, have found new life to draw from to open the bathing season.

Despite the new alarm for the appearance of monkeypox, the general imprint is that of a cautious optimism, wide open to lightheartedness and flip-flops, to more or less distant holiday projects, to the first baths and trips out of town, to projects of holidays more or less distant, to the first baths and trips outside the city with friends. The tragedy of the war in Ukraine has slowly turned into concern for future gas and oil supplies, for the increase in the spending bill and the full tank of petrol for the weekend at the sea and for the sense of danger and insecurity that lurks latent in each of us ...

But it is finally summer and we are well aware of how much the magical alchemy that generates the sun / beach binomial in us Italians is refreshing and able to soothe souls ...

The war has faded into the background, a large part of the refugees have returned to the big Ukrainian cities, the Azov battalion has surrendered to the Russian army and wheat, as it once was, has become the real bargaining chip between the West and Putin. As in a gigantic rewind of history, we went back centuries, to the battles for wheat, in some ways I would say to the essential, to the real substance of man, sophisticated technology of weapons and simple grains of wheat, in the third millennium it would seem a paradox if it were not the tragic reality. We are talking about food, nutrition, sustenance, in short, eating, the primary need of men on a par with the breath that keeps us alive; and for the first time this war 3.0 has been transformed from an image into reality, it has dusted off an ancestral fear buried in the memory of our grandparents, hunger.

Suddenly one of the things we most take for granted, such as air and water, takes on a different connotation, from a licentious vice born of Western opulence and well-being to a necessary and indispensable good; the food that cheers and colors our tables before becoming a right is a conquest, and now we begin to realize it… And it is precisely conquest, together with prisoners and siege, which makes up, as it happens, the terminology / framework that leads back to war. But now it's summer and the history books rest dusty on the shelves while the news shows the images of the first vacationers queuing on the highways, for now autumn is far away.

Michelangelo Dotta

NP Giugno-Luglio 2022