Why?
It is the only question that arises spontaneously after the images that are doing the rounds on social chats and immortalize an ancient country newsstand gutted with the statue of the Madonnina contained therein broken into a thousand shreds.
A difficult fact to accept for the inhabitants of Guazzolo and Castelletto Merli and the entire Moncalve area because that blasphemous gesture affects everyone, believers and non-believers. The full question should actually be more complex than a simple “why.”
Perhaps it would be better to ask the unknown authors of that gesture the reasons for attacking a place that belongs to everyone: certainly not only to those who have Christian faith but also simply to those who built and looked after that shrine over time or even just to anyone who has ever passed through those parts. A good for everyone, to be respected, like every good. But then a day comes and everything is swept away in a few moments thanks to someone’s gratuitous cruelty.
Perhaps out of existential boredom, perhaps to show the courage to take it out on a sacred statue. Maybe even recording the scene to proudly spread the result of a “modern” test of strength (or weakness?) between chats and virtual message boards, as in today’s most inexplicable social challenges.
The facts take place a few hundred meters from the town of Guazzolo, a hamlet of Castelletto Merli where, since time immemorial, there has been a lovely aedicule dedicated to the Madonna and equipped with a small glass door inside which the statue surrounded by flowers is positioned. A pleasant place, located at a crossroads of country roads frequented mostly by walkers from the area in search of tranquility and contemplation of nature. Whoever first destroyed the glass and then the statuette, leaving it in a thousand small pieces on the lawn, certainly must have known of the existence of this small building, far from houses and passing roads. And he planned it all. Those who are fond of that place do not accept the term “stunt”. “You can’t justify everything as a stunt. Otherwise nothing makes sense anymore”, is the thought of some.
And in fact the meaning is not found. What we feel instead is a sense of deep wound. That newsstand belonged and belongs to everyone: of the territory, of history, it is the energy of the past that lives in the present, it is support and hope, it is art of economic value perhaps small but emotionally very great.
Some people come to think that, although there are wars, diseases and other much worse things, if you are not shocked by a similar gesture you also understand how someone could have had the thought and ability to actually do it.
The author or authors – whoever they are – do not feel like heroes, nor “alternatives”, nor modern media stars of today. They don’t feel strong but very weak. They feel unable to really enjoy themselves, they feel disrespectful of the place where they live and which probably gives them the living conditions from which they benefit.
Of this ugly story still without names and surnames, what remains is the equally ugly image of a chapel raped in the sign of non-civilization and of a Madonnina torn to shreds.
The latter is no longer a sacred icon but the decomposed portrait of a society that has long since overcome decadence to embrace its civil bankruptcy.
Perhaps whoever has committed this gesture will have already forgotten it in the wake of rampant superficiality. Instead, it will remain imprinted for longer in those who continue to ask themselves the reasons for what happened and perhaps will never have answers… also because sensible answers – really – are difficult to imagine.
