The Urban "Freedom"

In popular language the term "stoic" is to identify a person who courageously bears suffering and hardship, and who shows exemplary fortitude in the face of misfortune and fate.This term derives from one of the most important philosophical spiritual currents of Ancient Greece: Stoicism.

1. The three "moires" of Greek mythology, or "parches" in Roman mythology. They are daughters of the night and the gods, and personification of inevitable fate. Their effort is to weave the thread of the destiny of every man, remove it and finally cut it when death looms. In the Sardinian tradition this activity is carried out by the figure of the "filanzona".

Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Cytius, who insinuated in the minds of his interlocutors the idea that the attainment of moral and intellectual freedom was helped by detachment from material things, and that the perfect peace of the soul arises from the liberation of vices, of the passions, of the necessities, against which man fights every day. An almost utopian doctrine, if you try to apply it to the model of our society, which stands on the unavoidability of work, production, consumption, and in which we always find a hierarchical scale in which someone must always, necessarily submit to someone else.

Within his boundless literary production, Cicero, whose formation was deeply nourished by the Stoic school, proposed the subject from a conflictual point of view within the civil sphere, stating that "Freedom does not consist in having a good master, but in not having one at all" (De re publica, book II). Only with this premise is it possible to dedicate one’s time to the attainment of the moral freedom professed by Zeno.

2. The caesaricidium during the Ides of March in the work "The death of Caesar" by Vincenzo Camuccini , Naples, Museum of Capodimonte.

One of his contemporaries, as well as fellow senator in the last years of Republican Rome, Marco Bruto, was among the main organizers and executors of the assassination of Julius Caesar, while the latter was increasing its dictatorial power and the hope of a restoration of the Res publica was weakened: according to Brutus "it is better not to command anyone than to serve someone, because without command it is allowed to live honestly, in servitude there is no possibility of living". How, then, would it ever be possible to pursue these virtues for a person whose thread of destiny has reserved its closure within a context in which there are laws restricting his freedom? Where one’s existence is confined to the borders of an ordered and hierarchical state, whether it be democracy, oligarchy or dictatorship?

3. "The Freedom that guides the people" by Eugène Delacroix (1830), Paris, Louvre Museum.

One of the most frequent consequences for those who "can’t" is delinquency, circumvention of the rules. Where an individual is unable to pay taxes but is forced to be part of the welfare state, here he begins to devote himself to theft, corruption, mischief, tax evasion.The latter, for example, still deeply rooted in the Italian social fabric, is not only the result of laws that are not very restrictive, but is a phenomenon that has its roots in the time when the peninsula was fragmented into duchies, marquisates, counties and small or large kingdoms, often led by foreign authorities. Avoiding the payment of taxes was the way to communicate to the upper social strata not to recognize the foreign invader.An attitude so widespread throughout the centuries that it still does not seem to disappear, and the Italian State has in turn converted, like its predecessors, into a "thief’s state".

4. "peasants who are threshing". Photo by Paolo Lombardi (1827-1890

Just as numerous are the examples of people snatched from their homes, or deluded by the promises of some general, who were recruited in battle to drive out the foreign king and who, if they had the good fortune to survive, They discovered that back to their strip of land everything was as before, poorer than before.

Here then arises the spirit of honor and courage of the man who, through work and cunning, wants to win his master, climb this much hated hierarchy, even with so much sweat, and with teeth and nails, and perhaps with some subterfuge;but in the meantime the years pass and the dissatisfaction persists. The writer Giovanni Verga in all his literary production exposed this perennial condition of obstinate search for wealth. In the novel "La roba" (1880) set in the countryside of Syracuse and contained within the collection "Novelle rusticane", the landowner Mazzarò fully embodies the symbol. He gradually begins to take over all the lands that once belonged to his baron, to try to become "richer than the King":

"All Mazzarò’s stuff.It seemed that it was Mazzarò’s even the sun that set [.. ] It seemed that Mazzarò was stretched out all great as the earth was great. - Instead he was a murderer [.. ] and he had nothing but the belly of fat, and it was not known how he could fill it, because he ate nothing but two loaves of bread [...] For he had gathered up all that stuff, where he came from morning to evening to dig, to prune, to reap, with the sun, with the water, with the wind, without shoes on his feet, and without a rag of a coat; and all remembered that they had kicked him in the back, those who now gave him excellence, and spoke to him with their hats in their hands..[...] So when they told him it was time to leave his stuff, to think of the soul, he went out into the courtyard like a madman, staggering, and went killing with a stick his ducks and his turkeys, and shouted: - My stuff, come with me! - ".