Walter Veltroni tells young people about the Constitution – Corriere.it

There is Simona – “my best friend, the girl who lives on our same landing” who one day returned from school with bruises on her face and why she lies in a kiss given to another girl -, there it’s Ada – 12 years old, to whom her brother has entrusted documents to take on a bicycle “to a friend of hers who lives on the mountain road”, beyond the fascist checkpoint -, there’s Luca, who when he grows up wants to the mayor and thinks that for him and his peers we need “all our own places, otherwise we remain prisoners of cell phones and become sad, as during the lockdown”. Kids of yesterday and today, young lives that collide – even without meaning to – in important issues. There are twelve, like the first twelve articles of the Italian Constitution, the “fundamental principles” on which the framework of the state order rests. The coincidence is not accidental because Luca, Ada, Simona and the others serve to give substance to the words of the Charter, making it a living, simple and close matter.

It works like this The most beautiful in the world (Feltrinelli), the book that Walter Veltroni – and with him Francesco Clementi, constitutionalist and professor of Comparative Public Law at the University of Perugia — they wrote for tell the Constitution to today’s girls and boys, aged 11 and up. The formula used is clear and is always the same for each of the “twelve”: the text of the article is followed by the story of a boy or girl who makes him a “person”. Then, the theoretical explanation: a prose version of the constitutional provision that takes into account the historical premises that accompanied its genesis, then the literal and profound meaning of the words of the Charter.

A Constitution, “the most beautiful in the world”, which he will be 75 in January 2023: promulgated on December 27, 1947, it entered into force on the first day of the following year. What does this 20th century lady still have to say to adolescents born beyond the obstacle of the 2000s? Much. Especially if, with Veltroni and Clementi, we read it not as “a photograph, but as an image in continuous movement”. Because this emerges, if one avoids, as in this book, falling into the misunderstanding of the totem: the Constitution, 75 years ago, was born looking ahead, with the clear awareness of being a living force, in potential. A declaration of intent which, by nature, holds within itself the freshness of the possible and not the dusty weakness of a mere list of rules. Our Constitution, writes Veltroni in the introduction, «is the highest collective “intention” codified by law that we can all have at our disposal».

So here it is, this “inventory of social and civil objectives that concern us all, without exception”. The stories, the portraits, serve to confront today’s readers with the concreteness and necessity of the rules: distant events (but which have happened and can still happen, as they happen in other countries) seen through the eyes of their peers (the young man forced to wear the Balilla uniform and to see his country, and his father, go to war; the Jewish boy who escapes being rounded up in the Roman ghetto, and survives for days hidden on a tram). But also very close stories – the schoolmate who arrived on a boat, the grandparents who had to wait for the referendum to be able to divorce, the father was left out of work because the factory closed —. The meaning is clear: the constitutional matter concerns us or could concern us all, and has repercussions on our lives, on our days, on the big knots and on the small daily issues. A reason that, by itself, is enough to want to know it, understand it.

The starting point for doing so – and it is not obvious – is the Charter. His language is clear but in which every word (and every comma, period, semicolon: nothing is accessory) is used for a very specific reason, that and not another. If something remains abstract, the stories — which draw from reality if the protagonists are called Greta and take to the streets for the climate, or Pio and fight against the mafia — serve to immerse us in life. At the end of the reading, the sense of having traveled to a “possible country, in a possible life” remains strong. A place where rights are protected, inequalities are fought, cultural heritage and the landscape are supervised. Italy as imagined, wanted, written by those who, in the aftermath of the war, worked to build its foundations. A “possible” that looks ahead, and reaches up to children. To the future.

The book

Walter Veltroni with Francesco Clementi, «The most beautiful in the world», illustrations by Marcella Onzo, Feltrinelli, pp. 192, 16 euros