Is the concept of Friulian identity inherent in young people? Or is the momentum wearing off with the generations that accompanied the rebirth and modernization after the earthquake?
From falling birth rates to work to the environment via health care: where is Friuli going? What are the open and urgent issues to address? Professors Paolo Ermano and Andrea Zannini launched a reflection-provocation that found its agora on the pages of Messaggero Veneto.
The points of view are many and diversified, some shared by others less so, such as the way of turning one’s head and looking backwards to indicate with romanticism and nostalgia the years that were in the Little Homeland.
The Friuli model must be hinged on that historical, political, socio-economic and cultural context.
There were no modern “evils”: there was no talk of population decline, companies expanded. Attention to the environment was very faded, yes.
As Ermano and Zannini write, we cannot disregard an overall reasoning by perpetuating past patterns. The challenges of modernity inevitably lead us to take into account the demographic decline.
How do you deal with it? With support for families – which has become electoral material – but also by not closing our eyes to migratory flows.
What to do? Save the Friulian identity or pretend it never existed by deleting what remains?, wrote Walter Tomada. Vincenzo Martines gave the suggestion of a Friuli at the crossroads.
I would say that it is at a crossroads: looking to the past; take refuge in the anachronistic “fasìn di bessôi” risking being swallowed up by a wider system; bask; aspire to a dynamic future full of even risky challenges, preserving our prerogatives and defending the past, aware that it is a page in the history of this land and not an agenda for tomorrow.