From the Middle Ages to the new millennium, 2026 brings with it some clear anniversaries in Italian and European cultural history. Not a calendar exercise, but an invitation to return to figures that continue to speak to us, if we are willing to reread them, listen to them again, go through them
Every beginning of the year has its preliminary gesture: looking back, and not out of nostalgia, but to understand which voices deserve to be brought back into the present. The round numbers help, simplify, schedule, force you to choose. And 2026 offers a handful of anniversaries that do not ask for rhetorical celebrations, but for real attention.
Eight hundred years since Saint Francis
Eight hundred years ago, in 1226, Saint Francis of Assisi died. Returning to Francis today does not mean evoking a holy card, but measuring ourselves with one of Europe’s highest roots. In his death – as often happens to greats – the meaning of a life becomes clear: an idea of concrete brotherhood, a non-predatory relationship with creation, a language that becomes song and enters history. In a time that struggles to recognize what holds it together, Francis reminds us that Europe is not born only from institutions and borders, but from radical yet simple visions of man, and precedes capitalism, and can still sink into asceticism and the search for what matters and what is worth. Let’s remember this even just by reading a foil – these are writings always accused of reductionism! – even the most famous, that of the Wolf of Gubbio: we will find a man who courageously faces a wolf, a strong and angry enemy, and that the only way to resolve an unfortunate situation is to actively work for peace, courageously dialogue, requesting with one hand and guaranteeing something with the other. A banal story, for a superficial reading. A story that we need, rereading it with the desire to grow with the text and find meaning in it here and now.
One hundred years since the death of Piero Gobetti
One hundred years ago, in 1926, Piero Gobetti’s life came to an abrupt end. Here memory is never pacified, and it must not be. Gobetti is one of those authors who risk being cited rather than read or studied in depth. Precisely for this reason the work of Paolo Di Paolo is precious, who in A new world every day succeeds in a rare operation: remembering as one should, without locking Gobetti in a civil mausoleum – “to forget him a little more quickly” – but restoring the urgency, discomfort and vitality of his “happy fury of twenty years”. A fury that has nothing of brute force or instinct, but which is born, on the contrary, from the desire to do something great with one’s life. The book encourages us to return to the works, articles, positions taken, but also to photographs, in an operation that also involves emotion and which ends up making us love Piero, Ada and little Paolo. Not only that, however, Di Paolo, together with the research, explains why it is necessary to treat Gobetti today and carries out an operation that should be the basis of every presentation of a work or author: history and literature should not be understood as simple erudition. It is not enough to “follow virtue and knowledge” to save oneself – Ulysses, we know, is damned – but it is necessary to study, love, and ensure that knowledge enters the vital and political flow of everyone’s existence. Gobetti, in this sense, is not a memory: it is an open question and a spur especially for young people, for those who deal with young people, for those who care about young people.
The bicentenary of Carlo Collodi
One hundred years earlier, in 1826, Carlo Collodi was born, and today the risk is to believe we already know him. Pinocchio it belongs to that group of texts that we encounter too soon, and not in original, or integral, or literary format, and that we should have the courage to encounter again from scratch. Rereading it as adults means discovering a profound reflection on education, freedom, error, growth. The bicentenary is a good excuse to return to the pages, but also to rely on itineraries and thematic visits, on places, on a literary geography that makes clear how that history is anything but harmless or tame. It’s worth a visit to Collodi, but also finding yourself reading – who knows, for the first time? – the opening chapters of Pinocchiowith Mastro Ciliegia and Mastro Geppetto arguing furiously as they give shape to a language that takes inspiration from Manzoni but soon falls back towards the vitality of the Tuscan dialect. It is an admirable text, still alive, which was the basis of the first Italian lessons for all the little Italians in primary schools between the 19th and 20th centuries and which must be rediscovered, in one way or another.
Fifty years without Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie died in 1976. Fifty years later, the debate on the literary dignity of crime fiction continues to reappear with a certain obstinacy in school classrooms, even though the commercial success – and not only in the book sector – of the genre has probably calmed the debate and it now matters little whether it is a consumer genre or, in some cases, something more. Perhaps the way out is the simplest: reread. Take a Christie novel – one that is at home, because it will probably be like that for many – and read it in one sitting. The precision of the plot, the control of the rhythm, the construction of the characters speak for themselves. And if further confirmation were needed, the numerous television adaptations – in particular those by the BBC – show how those stories still work, without the need for theoretical justifications.
Ten years without Bowie, Cohen and George Michael
Finally, 2016, and with this date, international music. Ten years ago David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and George Michael passed away. Three very different trajectories, which however tell a lot about what auteur music has been in recent decades. Bowie, capable of making aesthetics a form of knowledge; Cohen, touched by a poetic grace that held Bible and song together, said with enormous reductiveness; George Michael, highly successful and quality pop author. Remembering them today is not to indulge in nostalgia, but to recognize that music can also be a serious way of inhabiting the world.
In the end, these round figures serve this purpose: not to close accounts with the past, but to reopen them. Because some rumors, if they really circulate again, continue to tell us something essential about our present.
