Quality of life, Bergamo's praise between the Goddess and the Nuclear Tactical Penguins
Golden moment for the city of Lombardy, which tops the Sole 24 Ore classification: leader with Atalanta, SuperG with Goggia, in Europe with Gori
3' min read
3' min read
'Maybe I never told you but you are like Bergamo to me'. Thus begins, almost in a whisper, one of the most anomalous love songs in the history of Italian popular music: you fall in love with a girl and can find no better compliment to pay her than to compare her to a quiet and operous provincial town in the deep north. You praise her and praise that town, redeeming it from centuries of dialect clichés and various harlequinades. Because that city is your city and you make a deeper speech: you speak of identity.
When Bergamo - this song - came out, it was February 2020 and to some people's ears it might have sounded curious, at least as curious as the third place at Sanremo of the band that had recorded it: the Pinguini Tattici Nucleari. Five years and a pandemic later, those same six guys from the Seriana Valley are at the top of the album, CD and vinyl charts with Hello World, certified gold disc in just one week, and in the singles chart with Island, while collecting sold out stadiums. While Bergamo in the sense of the city, first in the Sole 24 Ore quality of life ranking, discovers itself overnight cool.
There is something that has happened over all this time and it has to do with the collective imagination, something that has changed perception. You can take it narrow and stick to the numbers, or you can try to take it wide, fishing around for traces of the exceptionality of the phase the city is going through. Here the first stumbling block, compared to the traditional narrative, concerns sport and in particular the solitary primacy of the Atalanta leading the football championship: Gasperini's boys, victorious in the Europa League last year, are trying to break the Scudetto taboo this year, and the ten consecutive victories attest that the 'Dea''s bid for the title is credible and would be the full crowning achievement of the virtuous management Pagliuca-Percassi.
It's not just football, however, that we talk about in Bergamo when it comes to sport, and Sofia Goggia's exploit in the Ski World Cup is here to prove it. Because in Super G you can win even when coming back from a bad injury, if you have talent to spare and a solid work culture to back it up, an attribute that is a bit of a house speciality around here. As was demonstrated at the Paris Olympics by Chiara Consonni's gold in cycling madison and Giorgia Villa's silver in team gymnastics. And as Bergamo's 2024 record in the ranking of the sportsmanship index of Il Sole 24 Ore proves.
When speaking of politics, one's thoughts cannot fail to turn to Giorgio Gori, mayor of Bergamo for ten years and, since last June, elected MEP for the PD (Italian Democratic Party) by popular acclaim: 210,790 preferences, of which 178,343 in Lombardy, have made him the third most voted candidate in Italy for the European elections of 2024. He comes from the world of television and knows a thing or two about collective imagination. His daughter Alice, stage name Chiamamifaro, competed on Channel 5 in the latest edition of Maria De Filippi's Amici. Before arriving on TV, she was discovered and produced by Riccardo Zanotti of the Pinguini Tattici Nucleari. It is well known that today's avant-garde is often tomorrow's mainstream, and so, thinking back on all this history, a street art work that appeared under the porticos of Palazzo della Ragione, in the days of Ringo Starr's Sanremo success, comes to mind: there was a personification of the city taking off its hat in front of six sfeniscidi. Because Bergamo, the sfeniscidi in question would say, is above all 'hope inside the eyes of those who stay/ and understand that sometimes in life you just have to wait'.
