TONNI 60. It was 1965. Bruno Lauzi sang You will returnthe following year Caterina Caselli would have ordered Nobody can judge me And in 1967 the Proposal (put flowers in your cannons) de i giants. Three titles remember how we woke up in the morning in those years, dreaming. Love. But also peace. And always in big. Together. And nostalgia is there. Around the corner.
Today novels, theatrical performances, essays give this feeling a new thickness. And who knows that together with memories, amarcords and historical analyzes there is also no inspiration to return to that ’68, or “to the first event of human history that happened simultaneously with the four cardinal points of the world, here and beyond the iron curtain, in the south of the underdevelopment and in the north of opulence” as Marcello Flores and Giovanni Gozzini write in the new 1968. A year watershed (the mill).
The reasons for that revolution, reads, are concentrated in a couple of facts: a wider access to university education and an unprecedented amount of money and expectations invested by parents in “human capital”. Or the children. That of the Sixty -eight is therefore the first generation “spoiled” of the storythey write, because it enjoys an attention never seen until then in every field. And they are some of these former “vitiated young people” who today tell us about it.
March 28, 1968, student event in front of the University in Largo Richini, Milan (Olycom)
The shared solitudes of the 60s
The first is Walter Veltronion tour in Italian theaters with The emotions we have experienced. The sixties, when everything seemed possibleshow of words, videos and unpublished images and accompaniment on the piano of twenty -year -old Gabriele Rossi. “I wanted to feel like when you are in front of an open window. Living a season, in which, on the other hand, the prevalent noise is that of the shutters that lower themselves and sometimes it seems that the air is missing »confesses Veltroni.
“The sixties were a dream come true. Fifteen years earlier Italy is under the rubble, then it is standing that runs. There was hope. Today there is fear. Anxiety and loneliness »he adds. A loneliness that does not make us feel happy subjects, unfortunately, and is therefore very different from that of which Gino Castaldo speaks, another ex -boyfriend of the Sixties, in The boy of the century or the lost revolution (Harpercollins): “I was alone, like a small lighthouse lost in the waves of the sea, but I started to emit light, together with millions of other only guys who were about to discover they were not”.
A solitude lived in an era in which the new exaltation of subjectivity took place through collective experience – that is, processions and events – is very different from today, and this would also be the first of a very long series of comparisons. So much so that Flores and Gozzini, in their book on the “SPAarty” season, write that it is almost impossible to trace all the transformations of those years, whose effect is comparable to that of the “butterfly beat” in the escalation of natural events.
60s, desire for lightness
“We went to the cinema, we had TV and Beatles. But we also went for a lever for 18 months and we had more injustices and less rights than today. One thing, however, never abandoned us and was a full feeling that made us feel united, that’s what I nostalgia “adds Veltroni who already in 1981 had heard this lack and had collected 46 interviews in The dream of the 60s.
«If you walked on the street you saw the masses of young people everywhere. Today only white heads. I don’t want to judge the new generations with this. I have much more confidence in them than in that of the fathers who beat them for the time spent to shake the notifications of social networks. But I miss that atmosphere of serenity and optimism, of discovery. I miss living life together, that permanent summer feeling. I miss youth? Perhaps. But I would be better if I saw a little about that magic around me. And to the boys I say this: invested in the need, the technology is isolating us ».
What are the three symbols of those years that would leave them inheritance? Castaldo replies: «The incipit de The young Holdenthe cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Because it was a world to study. And the face of Gigi Meroni, the Turin player who died in an accident. And then the image of the train that brings the coffin of Bob Kennedy from New York to Washington with the people waiting for him at the passage. It is the closure of a season ». Maybe he will come back? «I never believed in appeals. The story is always original, it presents itself in a form different from the past and if anything you have to learn to recognize it. Sometimes it’s just insidious ».
Sometimes it is only beautiful. Light as the utopias are. And for this reason they submerged from a harder story that came later. That of the seventies, which was spoken very much at the expense of the previous decadeand who made the sixties forget.
To be sure is Serena Dandinianother “young spoiled” of those years who wrote There was the moon (Einaudi)with a fourteen -year -old protagonist who crosses the handful of years from ’67 to ’69. “The drama of the lead years covered the revolutionary spirit of the Sixties,” says Dandini. «Writing was a way to take a step back but not for a nostalgic operation. I think it is important to rediscover that era. It was the naive, clumsy and velleitarian attempt to change the world for the better and turned into a wonderful obsession that belonged to all of us guys that that world also dreamed of it at night. Yes, we were incurable dreamers, “he continues.
“Even if there was nothing. No law on abortion, no contraceptive pills, no divorce, no internet. Just a TV channel and a joy of immense living. Here I wanted to recover that joy by writing, I wanted to make myself submerge from that desire for change »adds Dandini.
Friends in the first place
“There is a precise moment in the life of each of us in which our parents become a blurred and interest vision. For years they are heroic figures of reference to which to rely on affectionate children, and one day they begin to lose authority and connotations and then vanish in oblivion, like unknown ancestors “reads in the book by Serena Dandini. And this is also why friendships become myths, models. Another world to look at, especially then. “The sixties are a hymn to friendship and in this book my friends and those I wanted to have.
There is friendship but also sisterhood. My “sisters” of the past are my friends today. There is a phrase that the protagonist of the book says: “Even if I am out of tune, nobody will notice because I can sing in chorus with friends”. Here in those years among the many discoveries there has been that of the importance of the strength of this network. Where are the goals that support us today? We are surrounded by fake news and a thousand contacts, paradoxically a network envelops us but we live in a state of perennial insecurity. You only have a desire to close in small daily things and live alone, “he adds.
Yet the rights we have today were non -existent. «When you have them, however, you forget them. Remember those moments and the effort of our mothers and grandmothers then becomes fundamental. It is important to know where we come from because it is a moment to go back. I think of what is going on in the USA »Species Dandini who in the choice of the title has thought of the year where everything ends: 1969. The bomb broke out in Piazza Fontana and set foot on the moon. Two events that mark the “loss of innocence”.
The virginity of dreams is lost, the romanticism of the songs. All things that belong to an era in which, in fact, there was the moon: that’s why nostalgia is only in the title. The three symbols of those years that would leave inheritance? «A copy of One hundred years of solitude, With a Little Help from My Friends of the Beatles, and a insignificant. That is, a desire, perhaps the feeling of not surrendering to cynicism ». Maybe a spark. That makes them return.
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