It's a difficult world

Publish date 29-04-2022

by Mauro Tabasso

Every morning, when I wake up, I ask myself how happy I am to have woken up, how happy I am for the day ahead. I try not to think about the problems I will have to solve, imagining them as new challenges, new opportunities to learn. Despite this, life, the difficulties, the period, the last bill and the reserve light that came on yesterday on the car and inside of me are fogging me up a bit, they are making my existence dull, the more tired the my humor, my optimism less marked.

To be honest, at this moment my great poet is Tonino Carotone, a singular (and a bit demented) Spanish singer-songwriter who in 2012 sang "It's a difficult world", and he was right as hell (the song was titled Me cago en el amor - I suffer for love). But it is precisely in times like this that I am happy to have studied history with interest (not at school, it wasn't very interesting there…). The story contains many of the questions we ask ourselves and many of the answers we need, you just need to know how to read it and want to listen to it. Take for example the Renaissance, which has been going up and down since the beginning of the 15th century. at the end of the XVI.

As its wonderful name says, it was a period of great change that led to a new way of conceiving the world and oneself, influencing all fields of art and knowledge, from literature to architecture, from engineering to the figurative arts. , from philosophy to mathematics and physics. A great revolution that has taken man to another orbit, as does an electron after a quantum leap. Perhaps we have forgotten that that transformation occurred at a difficult time like few others in human history. We were from the Middle Ages, from all his superstitions and his brutalities. Europe at the time was the scene of bloody war, political, commercial and religious clashes.

The Ottoman Empire, after the fall of Constantinople, was pressing from the east, the Turks represented much more than a threat, the discovery of the New World had shifted the axis of trade from the Mediterranean Sea to northern Europe and the ocean routes, the Church was split into the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church, the mercantile economy was affirmed and flourished, while agriculture remained in a condition of feudal rigidity ...
This is just to remind you of the context, leaving out the innumerable conflicts that saw the various duchies, lordships, states and states contend for all sorts of interests, with great fury and great bloodshed.

Am I boring you like they did in school? Don't worry, I'm done… Yet it was precisely that period that saw the birth of the Masaccio, the Botticellis, the Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Leonardo da Vinci, the Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. History teaches us that there is still hope for man. And if my great poet (Carotone) is undoubtedly right, it is also true that the darker the sky, the bigger, brighter and more beautiful the stars are.


Mauro Tabasso
NP January 2022

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