This post evolves from a couple of comments I recently gave at Carletto Darwin's.
Carletto, who if I understand it well is italian but lives abroad, offered a reasonable complaint on how little Italy is considered abroad, how little attention it gets on international mainstream media - as opposed to the boasting news on our foreign policy as we can watch it or read it in Italy (and, I may add, as opposed to the idealized postcard most people have of Italy. See in picture, a better Venice with cars, gambling machines, pollution and baptist churches).
He suggested we all should travel abroad (which is always a good advice) so to understand how little we count as a nation in Europe. He stated that, compared to our great past, the arts and everything we gave to the world, it is really pathetic how Italy is downsized to near zero right now.
I instinctively resisted to this apparently faultless argument, which after all rings with a lot of things I happen to say on this blog. I mean, I would never object to the fact that the italian role in the world is near zero.
What happened though, is that few points came out from this resistance of mine, points of which I had no knowledge before.

First, a lot of countries get no or few mainstream media attention, and you wouldn't think they are countries of losers or uninteresting countries.
Last time I heard from Canada? Can't recall. Could be something about the whales... So that makes of Canada another worthless country, but it is not, right? Must be a nice place. Like Switzerland, or Lithuania.

Second, Italy has a great History alright, but what cultural heritage has to do with media attention? All countries do have a past, but when it comes to foreign policy and media attention what counts is a powerful economy, or better, a powerful army. What does that means? It means that media attention doesn't worth shit, because it's driven to where's the money, and the bloodsheds.

Third, this undeniable international insignificance of Italy is definitively a good thing. Yep.
It is true, as Haramlik says, that Italy is hard to take seriously, for its complete, enthusiastic unawareness on what goes on in the world.
Instead, without taking away nothing to the obvious misery of the indigenous situation, the global irrelevance of Italy abroad is very instructive and desirable.

It's instructive, because it gives an insight on what really lies under the cover of the media, the real proportions of the forces in the battle. Since the economic, political planet out there is no kids' game, to be left at the margins would help us to glimpse the real monstrous shape of things.

It's desirable, because no matter how much the Media can blather about our leading role, or what beautiful friends we have, or complain here and there our petty forgotten role expecting and preparing for some magic reform that will makes us bigger, richer and stronger, a lot of people here instinctively feel that whenever we would have any leading role in Europe or at the UN council, it won't be a nice thing going. Instead, it will mean just more and more things to lie about for us.

You know, the last time Italy counted something in global decisions, we ended up bombing Belgrade from Aviano and denying it afterwards.
I am not here craving to have any authority to join any more bombing anywhere in the world, right?

What I learned, thinking about it, is that to me even if those brown-nosing articles full of lies were true, that would mean nothing.
Because I have no expectations for Italy. No Hope.
There will be goals to reach alright, to make this country a better place indeed, but I know that none of those goals will have anything to do with what warms me up. Our past, our culture, the way it was. Those goals all speak about modernization, industry, competition, China, high speed, economic bills, new soccer rules, innovation, southern, northern... all the vices of this sleepy onanistic emarginated deluded sort of people.
They are filling me with boredom already, in advance, with their lousy progress to come.

On the contrary, whenever Italy would go back to that past tender lifestyle, made of love, creativeness, fights, townish life, rural life, poetizing in the midst of the most black poverty (such is the Italian History in one line) that might be beautiful or at least not boring: but that day, definitively nobody would ever give a shit about us anymore. Not even the illegal migrants.

There's no way back, I know. Who really wants to go back?
But there's no worthwhile way forward either, so as I said I have no real expectations. I'll just stay here, like a pigeon, and watch Italy crumble as a soaked biscuit.