WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY SICILY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, Sicilie Libertaria #452: Confcommercio - Palermo between pomp and misfortune (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The dinner of the 400, that's how they called it without fearing

high-soundingness and pomposity in an increasingly disadvantaged
Palermo. It's the event organized for the celebrations of the 80 years
of Confcommercio Palermo, a tempting opportunity to wink at the festival
par excellence, that of the Santuzza, which this year marks, in fact,
the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the bones. ---- A
table of about 130 meters was set up on September 12 in Piazza
Parlamento, under the Palazzo dei Normanni, to all intents and purposes
a private room in a public square. Four starred chefs were invited to
challenge each other with dishes halfway between tradition and
innovation (Trentacosti, Ferreri, Costa and Lo Coco), four hundred
diners - not one more, not one less - to adhere with a worrying and
irrelevant symmetry to the symbolic numbers of this whole avoidable affair.

What Santa Rosalia has to do with the 80 years of the Confederation, in
fact, is not clear to anyone. What was evident, however, was the
exaggeration, the offensive sumptuousness, the waste and the
senselessness of the statements released to justify its alleged value.

"The dinner of the 400 was a one-of-a-kind event for the city of
Palermo, an opportunity to celebrate the rich history and cultural
heritage of our territory: it can become an annual event to strengthen
the charm of the city, stimulating the growth of food and wine tourism."
declared the president Patrizia Di Dio, continuing "The long table,
typical of the culture of Palermo, was the visual representation of how,
for us, teamwork is built through dialogue, discussion and the
centrality of the person."

The dialogue certainly did not take place with the city and its
inhabitants, who saw the area concerned restricted and who had no need
or pleasure in having a visual experience (which was also effectively
denied) of a ridiculous invasive formality like that.

So while what was supposed to be a company party took on the appearance
of an event with great scenic impact on public land, a few meters away
the people of Palermo were living their daily tragedies of poverty,
social loneliness, crack and crime. In a Ballarò increasingly corroded
by drugs, where already after the first days of school the school
dropout rate is skyrocketing, where episodes of violence are now the
norm, people lived electrified by anger for the presence of the police
and for all that dictatorship of preparations, which in a few hours
turned into a violent slap in the face, handed out as an occasion for pomp.

Moving weighed down by food between the long table and the carpets that
accompanied it scattered here and there, there was the crème de la crème
among authorities, company representatives and the heads of trade
associations, to give us yet another embarrassing postcard moment.

This city, which is now increasingly cloaked in emptiness, is meanwhile
preparing for water rationing, scheduled for Monday, October 7,
structured for the entire outskirts, sparing the historic center and the
wealthy residential neighborhoods, those who have the arduous task of
maintaining the image of the city at its highest with this flywheel of
symbols, dates, numbers and candlelight.

And, as in all realities torn apart by the most ferocious
contradictions, while the elegant 400 began their dinner with four
amuse-bouche between fusion and street food of tomato tacos, avocado and
tuna sausage, the Piana degli Albanesi lake, a great water supply for
Palermo, began to leave the deadly traces of its drying up: along its
little beach, since mid-September, a desolate cemetery of carcasses of
all those fish that didn't make it has begun to form. An image that does
not exactly evoke the same sensation of enjoyment that the fish bones on
the plates of the 400 illustrious and satiated diners of Confcommercio
Palermo will have evoked.

Désirée Carruba Toscano.

http://sicilialibertaria.it
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca