Idiocy and idiocy exist, just as there are idiots and idiots. There is a novel, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which is not exactly as light as a foam but has a great reason, just as there is an idiot in the true sense of the word who has no reason but who breaks worse of a hungry mosquito when you want to sleep. I read the novel The Idiot more than thirty years ago during the hours of rehabilitation after knee surgery, I spent so many hours on a table with the physiotherapist who looked after me, and who had known me since I was little, so much so that he he decided to call me The Idiot. Many hours lying with a book which, however, allowed me to read a good part of that remarkable novel, a tome that had fallen into my hands by chance, while I read the rest at home once rehabilitation was finished. That friend of mine, who unfortunately is no longer with us today, had all the reasons in the world to call me that way, given the events, which were all my own making, let it be clear, which had taken me to the operating room weeks earlier. and later on his bed. Every now and then I read him some passages from the book and he nodded with interest, he knew how to distinguish the Idiot from an idiot but in my heart I hoped that that – not only literal – distinction was also valid for me, an article can sometimes make the difference between a beautiful relationship and a first meeting that ends badly. But the idiot we are talking about today, not the one linked to Russian literature, has the extraordinary ability to want to communicate, in various ways, without being capable of it and without a more or less valid message to tell. It is not a small problem because if an idiot limited himself to being one without showing it in various ways or without bothering others he could find a specific role in society, when instead he decides to express his position or his why he does it, to for example, defacing the walls of buildings whether they are historic or not.
In Cremona it is not the first time, and unfortunately it probably won’t be the last either given the refined and innate ability to give continuity to idiocy, in which some idiot – in name and in fact – decides to pass on his very personal message defacing walls of historic buildings. The Duomo, Sant’Omobono and now Santa Rita have seen their walls with personal, if useless, demonstrations of communicative and expressive abilities that are at least reduced as well as being totally irritating. On the side of via dei Rustici a fanciful pink line appears on the bricks of the small – but significant – church of Santa Rita, it is a line, as useless as it is inappropriate, on a structure that has 500 years of history and which can now include, after having seen plagues and wars pass before her, even the passing of a hand of color offered by some idiot. I couldn’t care less that that line, probably recently attributed, is part of a “larger” expressive project. Indeed, in all sincerity, from my point of view it is the practical demonstration of how someone’s expressive and communication capacity is only as an end in itself and does not add anything in a hypothetical dialogue. Seeing walls of any kind smeared is already annoying, when we then talk about a reality with a unique story to tell it becomes unacceptable, it is part of that degradation that is increasingly spreading in various ways in entire areas of the city, a degradation that it is not only represented by what surrounds us but which represents, in a more profound way, the absence of any form of respect and dialogue. Defacing 500 years of history is something so selfish that there is no justification for it, it reduces a place with historical and social value to a sort of personal form of expression to be treated as one prefers, an idiotic choice that makes one understand as well as the others and the building itself, quite simply, do not exist, there is only a brick wall to be treated without respect for what they are or represent. It is so selfish that it cannot even find answers in the fact that, with a city degradation that seems to have accelerated enormously, one line more or less changes little the substance of what we will discover in the space of a few years, because the The idiot is sure that those pink colored bricks will make no difference in the degrading disruption that is being created. They certainly do it, however, they do it as the fact of finding themselves in situations that seem to increasingly get out of hand and which, on their own, certainly cannot improve. The Idiot and the idiot are very different realities, the first tells and makes people understand, the second limits itself to expressing something that we would gladly do without.
