Frankfurt Book Fair, physicist Rovelli’s “May 1 speech” costs dearly: he will no longer represent Italy
The physicist Carlo Rovelli, the heir of Antonino Zichichi and Piero Angela among the darlings of Italian scientific popularization, will not represent Italy at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The extraordinary commissioner of the government for Italy’s participation in the Frankfurt Book Fair, Ricardo Franco Levi, communicated it to him by email, the same Levi who had invited him some time before.
«Dear Professor, it is with great pain that I am about to write you this letter. With great pain but without pretense», this is the beginning of the torpedo that hit and sank the Veronese physicist, author of overrated physics books that have been attacked for a certain superficiality and even some errors in the mathematical formulas. But the point is not the professor’s scientific competence but his “pacifistic” vocation which since the beginning of his career has manifested itself in anachronistic and out of time attitudes that have often seen him engaged in ramshackle attacks on governments of all colors politicians. Rovelli comes from a red-hot past: in the 1970s he took part in Radio Alice in Bologna, the radio of the libertarian area and of Autonomia operaia.
On May 1, excited by the “hip-and-flower” atmosphere of the Concertone di San Giovanni, he could not resist the atavistic call and attacked the Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto: “In Italy, the Minister of Defense was very close to one of the largest arms factories in the world, Leonardo. The Ministry of Defense must serve to defend us from war, not to sell instruments of death”. Then again: “Everyone says peace but adds that you need to win to make peace, wanting peace after victory means wanting war. And the Italian government is deciding to send an aircraft carrier to play the cockerels in front of China, these are the choices that risk destroying our lives”.
And then the pyrotechnic finale: “This is not the world we like: the world does not belong to warlords, but yours, because there are so many of you and you can change the world, together, you can stop the destruction of the country, you can stop the warlords, build a world by working together to solve problems. Dream of a better world and build it, don’t live waiting for unfulfilled dreams. Don’t be afraid to smear the walls, change this world“.
Minister Crosetto had kindly replied by inviting him to a clarifying lunch but the physicist – while thanking him – had replied spades. The spotless one must not be particularly liked in the parts of Palazzo Chigi.
And so Levi’s letter clarified the terms of the question: “The clamor, the echo, the reactions that followed his speech at the May Day concert lead me to think, indeed they give me the almost certainty, that his lesson that I had so strongly imagined and wanted for the ceremony inauguration of the Buchmesse with Italy as Guest of Honor would become an opportunity not to savor, guided by his words, the fascination of research and to glance at the boundaries of knowledge, but, instead, to relive controversies and attacks. What more than anything else I feel the duty to avoid, and for this I take all personal responsibility, is that an occasion of celebration and also of just national pride, turns into a cause of embarrassment for whoever will represent that day Italy. And I won’t hide from you the hope that our country will be represented at the highest institutional level. I am inclined to think that you were the first to have imagined the scenarios that your words would have opened up ». And then the perfidious ending with the attached perculation: “I hope that this letter can at least contribute to not making me lose her friendship and I hope to be able to read a new book soon”.
Ricardo Levi, moreover, is also a man of the left, like Rovelli. He was also Undersecretary of State to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers with responsibility for information and publishing in a government of Romano Prodi, as well as Deputy for the Olive Tree. But Crosetto does not seem to have learned his lesson, despite being a university professor and so recently he released an indignant statement to Ansa: “Italy has asked me to represent it at the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but since I dared to criticize the defense minister, my speech was cancelled”.
And what did he expect? Does he attack the government in the face and then want to be part of it by going to the Frankfurt Book Fair to represent Italy and delegated by the hated government? You can’t have your cake and eat it too, dear Professor. Listen to Levi and write a new book on holes, but since you’ve already run out of black and white ones, make one with another color, like orange, it would also make Schlein and her armochromist happy.
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