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L'Italia al plurale
The sentence Francesca makes Alex delete is the one most visitors write, and the whole of Block C is an argument against it. The country was assembled between 1859 and 1870 out of seven states with different laws, currencies, school systems and ruling houses, and in 1861 something like two and a half per cent of the population used Italian in daily life — the rest spoke languages that were not dialects of it but siblings of it. Television, conscription and internal migration did in sixty years what the state could not do in its first sixty, which is why the grandparents in Lessons 85 and 87 are the hinge: they are the last generation for whom Italian was something learnt at school. What survived the flattening is the attachment Alex names in the dialogue. Italians identify with a city or a province before a nation, and there is a word for the extreme form of it, campanilismo, from campanile, the bell tower — loyalty to the territory your own church bell can be heard from. It shows up in food orthodoxy, in football, and in the insults neighbouring towns keep ready for each other. Note that none of this is experienced as a weakness. The useful lesson of Block C is not that Italy is divided but that it is plural, and that the plural is what the place is proud of.