What books does Santa Claus bring to Italians?

Published on December 16, 2024 at 4:00 p.m.

Sales at this time of year are traditionally high. A few journalists with casual and unscrupulous writing know how to take advantage of the lack of demands of Italian buyers.

Tradition has it that more books are sold at Christmas than at any other time of the year. This rule applies to all countries where literacy is widespread and therefore also to Italy, although an OECD international survey of adult skills (“Survey of Adult Skills”) showed there a few days ago, more than a third of Italian adults are illiterate (that is, they have learned to read and write, but no longer know how to do it) and that almost half have difficulty in problem solving (i.e., problem solving). Apparently the other two-thirds do reading, but at Christmas they seem to focus on very little.

Which books brought by Santa Claus have the highest sales? For several years, it is always the same types of works which occupy the top of the ranking. The first on the list, “the God of our fathers” [HarperCollins]a simple-word summary of the Bible that also contains a few easy jokes, is the work not of a theologian or biblical scholar, but of Aldo Cazzullo, a journalist of vast power. Pillar and dominus of “Corriere della Sera”, host of a weekly TV show on the network of the owner of “Corriere”, he has applied a constant recipe for several years: around Christmas, he publishes a book with easy, loose prose on a theme general public.

It all started in 2020 (nearly seven hundred years after Dante's death) with “A riveder le stelle” [Mondadori]a summary of the “Divine Comedy” (the title is taken from the famous final verse of the work), where he indulged in some daring analogies between the current Italian situation and that of the 14th^e century. The book, carried by a methodical tour by the author who neglects neither small villages nor TV sets, was very successful. Once started, Cazzullo didn’t stop. In 2022 (centenary of the fascist takeover), he published a book on Mussolini, with an obvious nod to Giorgia Meloni. In 2023, without worrying too much about the centenarians, one on the Roman Empire and its greatness, which the current majority never loses the opportunity to exalt.

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The subjects are disparate and call for unparalleled erudition, but Cazzullo completed the writing in around ten months, while writing countless articles in the “Corriere della Sera” and running his show. He therefore rivals Stendhal who wrote “La Chartreuse de Parme” in fifty-two days, but lost to Alexandre Dumas, who only needed two years to produce the 1,500 pages of “The Count of Monte Cristo”.

Art of tightrope walking

The formula of these quickly written, well-selling books is not original. Its real inventor was Bruno Vespa, also a journalist, this time from RAI television of which he is the undisputed and untouchable boss. Hired in the 1960s, he is still there: since 1996, he has had a weekly show to which a daily one was recently added. For several years, he has appeared in the most incongruous places: at the beginning of December, at La Scala in Milan he explained to the crowds “La forza del destino”, the opera by Giuseppe Verdi which inaugurated the season, without being either a musician or a musicologist . His power is measured by the fact that he is still in service (and how!) although he is well beyond retirement age and that, to receive a salary higher than the miserable 240,000 euros that the law imposes as a limit in the public, he was classified not as the journalist he is supposed to be, but as… an artist – a category whose remuneration is free.

However, since 1997, Vespa has published a book every year. These are history books, light and captivating, cleverly integrating interviews and talks with the powerful of the moment, which allows him to promote the works in the company of celebrities. Vespa goes to every show imaginable, public and private. He will even talk about his book on cooking shows (or, as the Italian media say today, about cooking). It is true that he has a luxurious resort in Puglia, where he produces wine and invites the powerful. It has been calculated that he makes between 60 and 70 promotional appearances each year. The 2021 book was a review of the presidents of the Republic “between public and private”that of 2022 a catalog of women in power. In 2023 he made a breviary of the history of Italy from post-war to the present, and this year he wrote about Hitler and Mussolini. The nod to fascism and, more recently, to Giorgia Meloni shows her strong bloodhound nose and her imperturbable tightrope walk. An athlete from the archives, like Ernest Renan, Marc Bloch or Pierre Nora? No one would believe it: he's still on stage. Still, with unrivaled promotional support, his books are among the best-selling each year.

Whose fault is it?

The two journalists have developed a refined method, which we could call “the tripod”, because it rests on three legs: an uninterrupted presence on television, in newspapers and in bookstores. Jumping acrobatically from cock to donkey, with casual writing and without too many scruples, creating clever analogies between the past and current events, all these publications would be classified among quasi-books, made to last three months and intended to leave as a trace, at most, a sad deforestation. But Italians who have survived the return of illiteracy reported by the OECD are confidently buying hundreds of thousands of copies, perhaps imagining that what they have in their hands are history books .

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Who is to blame for this dangerous ambiguity? To true historians, who would not know how to write in a readable and fascinating manner? Or on television, “bad mistress” (according to the famous formula of Karl Popper), all the more so in Italy, where thirty years of competition between Berlusconi's television (three private networks) and that of RAI (three public networks) only had the effect of exhaust people's cultural resistance by degrading their taste and leaving them helpless and inert in the face of any salad?