The vacuous rhetoric that has made our Charter a myth to be exalted regardless

No, it is not the most beautiful Constitution in the world: Piero Calamandrei himself was a severe critic of the text he was working on. Like anything else, it is a historical product linked to its time in its strengths and weaknesses

Benigni’s performance on the Constitution has been talked about a lot, but generally in a superficial way. There are those who wrote (Marzio Breda in the Corriere della Sera) that the Charter was “conjured up as best it could not have been”, while those who criticized the actor for the somewhat cunning way in which he only mentioned the first part of article 11 on Italy which “repudiates war” (but then, speaking of cunning, it should also be noted that after mentioning a Christian Democrat, De Gasperi, among the founding fathers, Benigni mentioned two communists but not the secretary Palmiro Togliatti but Concept Marchesi, illustrious Latinist but unknown to most, and Nilde Iotti). In reality, the only truly significant thing about the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Constitution provided by Benigni is in its vaguely rhetorical modality, therefore in the fact of confirming how for some time now our Charter has become a slogan, a totem, a myth, something to be exalted regardless of: “The most beautiful constitution in the world”, in fact, according to a definition whose senselessness is equal to its diffusion (almost 3 million search results on Google). And all this, the exaltation regardless, just as every day the public opinion is reminded – certainly not with the media power of the Sanremo Festival – various limits of our constitutional charter: from the risks for the unity of the country itself after the reform of Title V to the congenital weakness of the power of the head of government, from the expropriation of the legislative power by the executive through the continuous use of emergency decree to that “flood” of the judiciary in the fields reserved for others powers of the state that Sabino Cassese has insisted on for some time. Benigni could not be expected to deal with such issues, but with his evocation of the Constitution in a mythical key he indirectly confirmed this double track, this sort of bipolar disorder affecting our public discourse: the charter should be reformed in various places / it is a sacred and untouchable text.