A hymn to the Constitution, "the most beautiful imaginable", to freedom, a precious and never taken for granted ideal, and to peace.
Roberto Benigni returns to Sanremo to pay homage to the 75th anniversary of the Constitution: the occasion is extraordinary, in the hall - in a place of honor - there is also Sergio Mattarella, the first head of state to attend the festival, with his daughter Laura .
And the Oscar winner excites and involves him too: the president laughs, applauds, puts his hand over his heart twice when the actor and director mentions his father Bernardo among the founding fathers.
Skilled as always in mixing the registers, Benigni begins by recounting his emotion: "My heart is pounding, it's truly a special edition of the festival, everything is new, even the Ariston, the scenography is wonderful, there are so many debutants. And then there
The irony is just around the corner: "I'm happy you're here, president, but let me point out one thing: you're in your second term - he says to Mattarella - Amadeus is in the fourth and has already booked the fifth, are you thinking of doing the sixth, the seventh. I wonder: is it constitutional? President, we need to stop him, it's a coup d'état, he's gone to his head, he wants full powers, he's organizing the march on Sanremo, he wants to take everything, it's a dictatorship".
"But to Amadeus - he continues - we forgive everything, he is truly a very sweet person, a very good presenter, a great artistic director, he managed to host a president of the Republic for the first time in Sanremo: I didn't believe it, indeed I don't believe it even now Amadeus, do you have binoculars? - he jokes, alluding to the Usual Unknowns - President, I don't want to disrespect you,
but please take off your glasses, stand in profile, I want to see if you are the mysterious president". And again, to Amadeus: "But did you tell him how long an evening lasts?
President, if you want to see half of it, you can leave around three in the morning". Then Benigni gets serious: "The Constitution also has something to do with Sanremo, because it is a work of art and sings about freedom and dignity man, every word releases an evocative and revolutionary force like works of art, throws away all the suffocation, oppression, injustice and violence of before, it is a slap to power, it makes us feel that we live in a country that can be just and beautiful, it tells us that the world can be without violence". The Constitution, enthuses the Oscar winner, "is a dream fabricated by smart men
it is something that can happen once in the history of a people, if there is a song that resembles it, it is the incipit of Volare". And if "sometimes it takes years to make a law, they made the Constitution in a very short time, it was like a flash of lightning, a vision, yet there were 556 people who wrote it, divided on everything excluded on being united to write the most beautiful Constitution imaginable". Among the articles there is the embarrassment of the choice, "the 1st, the 2nd, the 3rd, the 4th, the 9th - Benigni enumerates - the 11th very famous, like a poem, which says that Italy repudiates the war: think of the strength, the beauty, the peremptoriness who wrote this sentence.
If this article had also been adopted by the others, war would no longer exist on the face of the earth,
no State could invade another State". In Benigni's heart there is also article 21, "my favorite and the most important: the pillar of all human freedoms". "Everyone has the right to freely demonstrate the own thought", he reads. "A simple language that seems written by a child, of a strength and beauty that leaves you amazed.
But if they wrote it, it was necessary, because during the twenty years of Fascism one could not think freely". And again: "In countries very close to us, opponents are imprisoned and chained, just because they show their faces or hair, or because they dance and sing.
How wonderful and extraordinary it is that in Italy everyone has the right to freely express their thoughts.
We have to remember that.