Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
CWhat happened to the virtual hugs that eased our isolation during the lockdown? And the singing at the windows, the tennis dribbles between terraces, the crazy desire, never felt before, to get to know the neighbors? It seems like a lifetime ago.
The reality of our neighborhoods has once again become that of many solitudes that touch each other. This is the meaning of many messages you send me. What’s now?
Someone in Paris had an idea. My colleague Stefano Montefiori writes on Corriere della Sera that «the journalist Patrick Bernard began to reflect on how to revive social relationships in his street of the 14th arrondissement of Paris.”
So «he established his headquarters in a café, and began to say his bonjours, inviting people to meet with him on Saturday mornings to build community and propose activities to do together.”
The success was extraordinary and culminated in a lunch with hundreds of seats in the street. A ritual that is now repeated every year. It is the République des Hyper Voisins, the Republic of Hyper Neighborsan experiment in social engineering, born from the bottom, far from politics but which politics has now embraced.
«The French government – says Montefiori – will allocate 200 million euros to support the project by Patrick Bernard to bring the République des Hyper Voisins to all of Paris: 150 villages in 15 years.”
Nice, I said to myself. But then I thought about that something similar was also done in my neighborhood, using Facebookwhere a social page was created to which many of us signed up.
Result: many advertisements are posted, photos of accidents at intersections or of a lost set of keys or abandoned mattresses. In short, little more than a service page, where at most you can find the rare telephone numbers of local artisans.
And I think that what is missing is the courage of one of us to smile in a bar, inviting the neighbor to sit down, to talk, to invent a different afternoon. Together.
Intent on gazing at ourselves on the screen of a mobile phone, like Narcissus in the fountain, we prefer our reflection to the humanity that passes by us.
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All articles by Antonella Baccaro
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