The “Sanremo blues”: it is the saddest day of the year. Luckily we have controversies

The chat is moribund. The listening group disappeared. Memes are starting to fade from our timelines. The jokes about the songs and the singers’ outfits are no longer funny, and everything appears distant, faded. We find it hard to concentrate: is the “Sanremo blues”. The deadly post Festival depression. It doesn’t matter whether you followed it or not. It doesn’t matter if you sang, became indignant, or remained calm and indifferent while everyone around is making noise. The Festival is not something you watch or don’t watch. With you or without you, Sanremo dictates the country’s agenda. For a week we felt part of a whole. One thing, one body and one soul, one nation that vibrates for you and me. Then suddenly nothing, as usual, as always. We return to the television routine, to the umpteenth Netflix series that we will never finish, alone again, enraged, each one lost inside the facts of him.

The Monday after Sanremo it’s a terrible Monday also because there is also a pressing agenda out there that we had left unfinished: an apocalyptic earthquake, Ukraine, 41-bis, perhaps the aliens (who had the good taste to wait for the Sanremo final before ending up on the front page of the New York Times). But the truth is that we are still head over heels for the Ariston. Because time expands during the week of the Festival. It flows at two speeds: one for us, the other for the rest of the world. If Berlusconi had said what he said about Zelensky on Friday or Saturday, no one would have noticed.

Luckily we have controversies, the aftermath, the political attacks, the backstage videos that “prove that”. This of the controversies, of “Sanremo political case”, is a fundamental cathartic function in a country incapable of detaching itself from the Festival in one go. Here is the indispensable merry-go-round of declarations, explanations, clarifications, with the positions at risk, Fuortes, Coletta, the entire Viale Mazzini board of directors. Anything is fine with us: even Galimberti who analyzes the Fedez-Rosa Chemical kiss explaining that “fluidity is within us”, even a lip from the country cousins ​​who mock Blanco, even an analysis of the Amadeus contract, clause by clause . Anything, as long as this thing continues a little longer.

The “Sanremo blues” starts on Sunday morning. The day after. In chats on WhatsApp we finish off the latest jokes about losers and winners, but we know it’s over. Sunday is still a buffer day. We have spleen, sure, but there’s one last ride. The singers are tired, sleepy, with dark circles under their eyes, but they have to go to Mara Venier. “Domenica In” is the stirrup glass of Sanremo. It’s late, we’ve given, but we don’t want to part, we don’t want to go home. Again and again. Then comes Sunday evening. And this is where it gets bad. The Festival begins to be engulfed in a strange space-time hole. It no longer belongs to us, we don’t want to know about it, but we can’t let go of it. We keep it alive with a week of controversy to cap the horror vacui. Americans have the Superbowl, but it lasts for one day. Our Superbowl could only last a week plus aftermath. The “Blue Monday”, celebrated every year as the “sadest day of the inhabitants of the northern hemisphere”, usually on the third Monday of January, should be rescheduled on the Monday after Sanremo. Perhaps no one has proposed it yet, but this is a battle to be fought for the good of the country. We are there anyway: end of January, beginning of February, what difference does it make.