While the great secession of the North from the rest of Italy is still looming, small local secessions are also appearing again, of towns that want to separate from a province and maybe tomorrow (who knows?) of a neighborhood from a city. Except that if the first was, eloquently, defined as the “secession of the rich” (so Gianfranco Viesti), we wouldn’t even know what to call these others and many times we even find it difficult to identify the reasons. From macro to micro things seem to get complicated, because it often happens that we are dealing more with the field of perceptions than with data analysis, more with feelings than with the spheres of institutional issues, economics or history.
It is true that the Calabrian towns are mobile and “move”, with movements (think of landslides or earthquakes) that have their effects on things and people, as Vito Teti has well shown, but here we risk finding ourselves in the category of “false movement”, of apparent motion generated by a defect in observation.
Thus it happens that what makes the news is the renewed desire expressed by some mayors of the Serre mountain area to abandon the province of Vibo Valentia to move to the original provincial structure of Catanzaro, apparently deemed more suitable for the development of this area. The widespread perception is, in fact, that going with Vibo represented nothing other than an unstoppable impoverishment, of which the dismantling of the Serra San Bruno hospital is a visible embodiment. However, the question must perhaps be observed from a different perspective, which forces us to shift our gaze from the relationship between a single area and its province of reference to the more general one of the role and presence of areas of the same type (mountain areas) within the regional configuration.
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* Writer, historian and anthropologist