With a very varied prime time television offer on Wednesdays, our choice as simple viewers is devoted to the special days of La 7 entrusted to Aldo Cazzullo.
Our subconscious probably imagines combining the pleasure of entertainment with the usefulness of culture, which allows us to learn names, facts, people and cities, which someone has taken the trouble to study, synthesize and amalgamate in scripted form, serving them up on television for the benefit of the dissemination of knowledge.
The “Special Day”, is obviously a pretext, because, in fact, “the day” itself, on which the whole episode revolves, comes after an extensive account of the events that preceded it and which, as it turns out, begins at least a couple of years before, but in the meantime we have learned – at least from “hearsay” – the entire history and literature program of the third year of high school.
So Aldo Cazzullo, whose gifts as a storyteller must be universally recognized, walks several kilometers back and forth in the library of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza or under the porticoes and, often with an ironic touch and always with great colloquialism, takes us around history in the hope of reducing, at least a little, our ignorance.
Once upon a time the only certified television popularizer was Piero Angela, for years the undisputed custodian of knowledge that had to be transmitted in the form of Quark, to be taken even in pills. His son Alberto has fully taken up his legacy, enriching it with his skills as a paleontologist and, at present, he seems to be the only one to whom Raiuno relies to recover those users who do not grasp the notional-informative aftertaste of the “Heritage” and even less feel represented by the packages.
In recent years Alberto Angela has created programs of undoubted interest also from a technical point of view, such as the story about Pompeii shot in a single take, and considering that Alberto Angela and Aldo Cazzullo belong to the same generation, we have always wondered if there is any competition between the two, despite the difference in styles. A few weeks ago we got our answer. Aldo Cazzullo brought the life of Saint Francis to the stage from Assisi, the theme of one of his books which climbed the charts, as did Alberto Angela shortly afterwards, with the evening event from the Colosseum on Caesar, to whom he dedicated a tome of countless pages. Two best sellers, two great evenings: the Cazzullo-Angela match ended in a draw.
