Do you hear it, the scream? The scream of Marcell Jacobs, that of Gianmarco Tamberi. But not only theirs. It is not just sports that we are talking about. But of a generation that in the space of three months is changing everything.
I begin Maneskin. They win Eurovision after who knows how many years, they win with rock, which we thought dead, and now they are at the top of the world rankings: it had never happened before. Then, of course the Azzurri ai Europeans and Matteo Berrettini a Wimbledon. But there is also in between a Pixar film, Luca, which for the first time is a hymn to Italy, to its beauty, to our lifestyle. AND Khaby Lame: arrived in Italy when he was one year old, like Marcell Jacobs, but without an Italian mother; here he studies and then works, Covid arrives, they fire him and he invents a new genre on TikTok, silent videos that make you smile, and in a year he becomes the Italian with the most followers in the world, he has nearly 100 million, in a few months we will celebrate its first place overall.
What do all these stories have in common? Italy, of course. And then the young people. Young Italians who, surprisingly, take over the world. They have been locked in the house for months like us, they have ignored the litanies with which we usually tell them (lazy, spoiled, choosy, unable to break their backs like grandparents, to name the last), they have cultivated with serene ferocity their dream and they went to get it. They didn’t ask anyone for help. They won for all of us, but they won alone.
On June 1st there is the Italian Tech launch party and we had decided to dedicate it to the Next Gen: “Only in their twenties on stage” was the rule. It was a beautiful evening, closed, as you know, by the Maneskins. But now it comes back to me the first intervention, that of Benedetta Barone, a student who didn’t know anyone, who had started a blog a few weeks earlier. She said some very nice things, Benedetta, about the fact that the time had come for the young people to be heard, and for us to finally listen to them. Behind her, on the screen, there was the title of his speech. The scream.
Do you feel it, now?
.