In the clash between Meloni and Ferragni, it is Italy that loses

In television, the phrase «jumping the shark» refers to the moment when a certain serial narrative reaches a point of absurdity such that it testifies not only to the exhaustion of ideas but also to a collapse of narrative quality. And in a society in which entertainment, news reporting and marketing now move as a single entity, the narrative arc of Chiara Ferragni's Balocco pandoro, which also saw Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni intervene in public and Fedez respond to her, marked a new low point for Italian public debate. «Just another commercial operation», ha detto Ferragni scusandosi, «like I do every day». And now a new article by Selvaggia Lucarelli hints that a similar case may have been repeated with the Easter Eggs sold by Dolci Preziosi in 2021 and 2022. «I should add that after a few phone calls to elaborate on the egg topic occurred yesterday, the old posts promoting Easter eggs on Ferragni's Instagram page quickly disappeared», Lucarelli wrote. In short, the picture that is set up is not the best. While legal responsibility will indeed be discussed in more appropriate places, the whole debacle demonstrates the aberrant state of culture in this country. A triangular squalor: a manipulable public that buys Ferragni's pandoro by succumbing for clout and not charity; an influencer who surrenders her image for shocking cachets; a prime minister who, populistically, comments on the affair to arouse the easy indignation of the manipulable public mentioned above. None of the three parties involved meant what they said, said what they meant, or acted according to any genuine value or principle of recognized ethics - in this debacle, and in the manner in which it immediately became a meme, there is a reflection of a country with a flat encephalogram.

Dwelling on Ferragni for a moment, the relevance and importance with which this influencer is covered is exaggerated, absurd, unmotivated. If the digital entrepreneur's career is a gigantic masterpiece of self-branding and self-marketing, in which a person sacrifices every nook and cranny of her private life to the attention of audiences who either love her, or love to hate her, her figure has risen to a new level of fame, becoming a national-popular character carved into the depths of the collective consciousness. But Ferragni has gone further, far beyond influencing. With her socials, she addresses the whole nation, she does not have feuds with other influencers but with politicians and bodies such as the Antitrust or Codacons, she and her husband are called a "royal couple" by the newspapers, her every action conquers newspaper headlines, she interfaces with high state officials, she offers and defends her political views-she is a public figure in her own right. But the only reason for the importance the public attaches to her is her visibility, and in a vicious circle, visibility translates into perceived importance. This same perceived importance, then, testifies to how Ferragni's is the only offering that meets the demand the public has for a cultural figure of reference: in short, if Ferragni is the worst example, we possess no better ones. Her absurd celebrity exists because she fills the void in the heart of a country that no longer has heroes, sages or saints.

Culture needs a face, a figure around whom it can aggregate, and rose-tinted capitalism is simply what's on our plate. Society, of course, adapts to this glorification of consumerism that goes beyond money and becomes personal: subjected to constant public attention, the public consumes Ferragni's branded products and Ferragni's personal life in the same way. But every now and then the public seems to suffer, rather than feed, this fame. So much so that every manifestation of Ferragni is met with resentment, her public slips followed with ill-concealed sadism. Think of her participation in Sanremo: it almost pained the way Ferragni could not open her mouth or move a step without being bombarded with derision or impatience on social media - she was on that stage precisely because of her fame, but a toxic fame that made her the target of an entire country. You can't just be beautiful, famous rich, you also have to be good to make up for your privilege. In an age when a brutal, unfiltered authenticity is slowly making a comeback, Ferragni's mistake has been to want to paint herself as a beacon of progressive culture and charity - the toxicity of which she is a victim stems precisely from her ambition and emancipating herself from a role, that of the superficial influencer, that she cannot in fact abandon. Had she resigned herself to frivolity, you would not be reading this article and she would be enjoying the sun on a tropical beach.

In this sense Meloni's criticism is not unfounded in itself: it is right to point out as a positive model those who produce and not those who promote, the arduous and narrow path instead of the easy and scenic shortcut. But the public seeks that shortcut because they find themselves in a country where the path more than arduous and narrow is just closed up, where to enter the social elevator one has to turn tricks, become famous as and when one can: with work alone one does not amass dough. This would be an issue to discuss: if we are obsessed with Ferragni's success story, it is because it is a fairy tale that tells us that being an influencer is the best way to drag oneself out of the poverty line since study and hard work are clearly not enough. There is also something wrong with the choice to discuss the figure of Ferragni from a political podium: first, because this confirms her importance, the absolute domination exercised over the collective consciousness; second, because the problems of politics are other, and they certainly do not concern the private initiatives of a given entrepreneur, even more so an influencer; third, for a matter of dignity of discourse, because that comment so designed to tickle the low instincts of the electorate, the easy anger that Ferragni arouses in the impoverished masses who suffer from her fame is pure populism, demagoguery at the terminal stage. Especially since Ferragni is not a political figure, while others are who to this day are under investigation for false accounting, embezzlement, fraudulent misappropriation, and fraud and are still in the halls of power. The only thing that comes out of this whole affair is the impressive, profound cowardice of everything and everyone. Even more impressive is that in six months we will have already forgotten all about it. A bitter pill, in short - almost like a pandoro from the pink colored package.