"Viva l'Italia, l'Italia liberata,
l'Italia del valzer e l'Italia del caffè...
viva l'Italia, l'Italia che resiste". De Gregori
Songs can sometimes make us see more than words can say, sometimes we have the impression to find in musical synthesis of the great singer-songwriters, the pure essence of an emotion and of the popular sentiment. Sung, whistled, listened for hours or for just a minute, danced and imagined. Memories, come to the surface when one least expect.
De Gregori's song came back to my mind, immediate, when I took a walk in the centre of Mentana, Rome Province, and I bumped in the Garibaldi Museum. Mentana is one of those town you can find in dusty history books, flipping through the epochs from the bronze age to the Italic history, from Roman kings and emperors to the prelates and the Hero of the Two Worlds, Garibaldi, who there struggled an uneven battle against French and their most technologically advanced weapons to defend the Papacy and the secular power of the highest Catholic religious authority. The red coats, attracted in a trap and armed with Prussian needle guns, had to fight against the fearful chassepot. Garibaldi and his soldiers remebered the day bitterly, so that the ossuary was later built in Mentana, for future reference.
The museum was opened in the early XXth century. Forget a majestic celebration place for the people who unified Italy, creating a country from scratch.
But probably in Italy memory has a future only when it can keep intact the true and deep meaning of ideas and realities that inspired the great ideals of freedom.
The ossuary is the 'monument', the little park where young twin and teen agers promise each other ethernal loves, almost looking for a confirmation to their first passions in the solemnity of the place, where youngsters hide while learning how to smoke a sigarette far from their parent's eyes, probably trying to find there the courage to become grown-up teen-agers. On one side there's the citizen's band association, offices of the municipality and round the corner, in a square where from time to time some car pass trying not to bother and the drying racks are on the streets in front of the doors, there is a narrow iron gate, almost safe from prying eyes, that leads to a wooden portal shadowed by cypresses.
When you enter that museum all of sudden everything becomes visible to your eyes and heart.
The small room, the stubborn stoutness of the attendant, kids playing around and the red coats, poignant beauty.
Shirts and jackets with the most diverse styles, varieties of reds that tell of young hearts, of hopes and freedoms. Those jackets, those so unequal coats and the rifles, the Garibaldi's and the French, make understand more than any history book.
It is possible to read simple emotions and purity of ideals in the pieces of textures wangled somehow, hidden in the markets booths, tables or stands and then hand-sewed, without being noticed, with a design that should approximately be that one but who knows, the trimmings obtained from curtain tiebacks hoping well, that some Bible's god or the spirit of a libertarian might protect and wanting to bring back that red wool coat and the skin of the brave risking for the creation of Italy.
Visiting the Garibaldi's museum is a balm for the heart, for the mind and for the ideas, especially to understand that Italy is a small country with many wonderful stories to tell, a country that resist.
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