the Franco-Italian misunderstandings in Stefano Montefiori’s book – Corriere.it

When, one morning in August 1911, the house painter and decorator Vincenzo Peruggia, who emigrated to Paris from Dumelza, Lombardy, removed the most famous painting in the world from its frame, no one noticed. It was a Monday, the closing day of the Louvre museum, and about 24 hours had to pass before the alarm was given the next morning. Security at the Louvre was what it was then, and a month earlier a reporter had spent an entire night in the museum sleeping in a sarcophagus to demonstrate how easy it was to break into it.

The episode — the daring theft of the Giocondaits discovery two years later, the trial that followed – it is just one of many that Stefano Montefiori recalls in his Rendeznous la Joconde! et autres malentendus franco-italiens, just released in France by the Stock editions (pp. 250, euro 19.90). One of many, of episodes, but central to explaining to the “cousins” what is made of that mixed sense of injustice, rivalry, frustrated superiority that divides – by how much? forever? — the Italians from the French and which for some of us (still very numerous) is embodied in the ambiguous smile of Madame Lisa. And never mind if it was Leonardo himself who brought it to France and not Napoleon to steal it, as too many believe.

Montefiori – an atypical Italian, as he defines himself, because he is a convinced Francophile – knows both sides of the coin well: for almost thirteen years he has been the Paris correspondent of the Corriere della Sera. Halfway between the two fronts he tries with this book – which arrives in days when relations between the two governments and between the two diplomacies are very tense – to bring them closer at least a little through the purest glue: mutual knowledge. Separated by minimal differences — but often it is the small differences that generate great conflicts, warns Montefiori quoting Sigmund Freud -, Italians and French look sideways because they are victims of many misunderstandings. The author tries to clarify some of them — always, he warns him, from his personal and, therefore, arbitrary point of view (but certainly informed and also wisely equidistant). To explain Italy to the French – and its localisms, fierce micro-rivalries, contradictions and idiosyncrasies – Montefiori first of all talks about its cities, the ones it has experienced from within, offering them to the French as laboratories of Italianness: La Spezia where he was born, then Genoa, Pisa, Milan. And, today, Paris.

The book, written in French and for the French, ends up becoming an amusing journey of discovery for the Italians as well. The most immediate example is the gastronomic one, with chains of pizzerias and pasta brands sold to Parisians as true Italians but completely unknown to us (read Roland Barthes on spaghetti Panzani, advises the author), Stromboli-temperature cappuccinos with foam friezes in favor of Instagram, crème fraîche carbonaras and other unforgivable culinary crimes. But then there are also sport, parochialism, history, politics: every Italian-French point of contact is fertile ground for new misunderstandings to be disproved and, therefore, for stories to tell.

With a basic caveat: the French, writes Montefiori, love us. Here is the basic misunderstanding: it is we who believe that we are not appreciated by cousins ​​and instead the passion for Italy (we saw it just now at the Parisian Festival du Livre which saw it as guest of honour), despite the recent diplomatic earthquakes, beyond the Alps it is in full bloom (side note: in 2021 in France the consumption of mozzarella exceeded that of camembert, 33,170 tons against 29,230). We can love them too, the French, net of Gioconda.