What’s Guns, Books & Cannoli?
Raffaele and Giulia, a nice law-abiding and soon-to-be-married Italian couple, want to share with you thrilling, funny or cute stories from Italy. We want to share our culture, our history, our politics, our food and our laughs, with a special focus for our emigrated brothers and sisters. We hope to rekindle the love for Italy in our second-and-third generation Italian cousins, hoping that maybe one day they’ll decide to come back to their origins.
Because Italy is beautiful and… it needs all the help it can get. But most of all, it needs to start believing again in its worth. Nice to meet you, let’s go!
References
by Raffaele
In this introduction, we quote Jared Diamond’s masterpiece Guns, Germs and Steel, a seminal essay on why Eurasian civilizations, and in the end European civilizations, were able to dominate the world for many centuries and ultimately bring about the world-wide Western capitalist system that we see today. Sure, it has been criticized for being too eurocentric. In our opinion, though, it’s apparent he wrote the book in order to undermine a certain biological – and racist – eurocentrism.
However, we like Diamond’s rigorous determinism: his thinking is very logical and he has and explanation for everything. Except one thing: beauty. So also truth, and also art. In fact, empires can be huge, powerful and can dominate the world as they know it (many did, we like to think about Rome) but we can’t help but feel that there is something special about the center of the Mediterranean and the oddly shaped variety of climates and cultures that have shaped Italy, making it the center of so many illustrious endeavors.
Probably it was the many geographical obstacles this land presents: volcanoes, earthquakes, and mountains that made communications difficult. But the sea made it easy! Invaders on the left and the right, up north and down south, a crossroad of cultures that developed with a strange, weird feeling of belonging to a common past, and to an ethereal future, that blend together in an eternal now blessed and guarded by the Catholic Church.
In the end, our critique to Diamons is this: we agree that the world was dominated by Myceneans, Romans, Huns, Mongols, Dutch, Spanish, British, and American empires for geopolitical, economical and in the end materialistic reasons. So why does everyone feel the need to rest in Esperia, the mythical Italy, to learn the art of living in the past, in the future and in the now?
And yes, of course we are quoting The Godfather. The line “leave the gun, take the cannoli” is embedded in our brains, it’s a meme. And it is also deeply true. Why waste some good fresh cannoli? First things first, guys.
There’s more in life than materialism. Life can end anytime. So it better be enjoyed, with an eye to those who lived before us and one tofuture generations. Italy is here to show it. These are just impressions, but it’s where we’ll be starting our journey from, hoping to find more about it as we go forward.
What about you? Will you accompany us on this journey?