Mattarella’s wry remark, accompanied by a smile and a yawn, on the excessive number of national holidays on the calendar

It seemed somewhat hyperbolic and irreverent when commentators noted that, in Milan, Beppe Sala’s ‘weeks’ now outnumber the weeks on the calendar. Then along came the wise President, Sergio Mattarella, who never needs to resort to exaggeration. He worked out that in Italy we have 51 ‘national days’ – one a week, excluding Ferragosto – and, pen and paper in hand, he said: ‘Calm down a bit.’

The occasion was the enactment of the law establishing the National Paper Recycling Day—will this really be necessary, isn’t public awareness campaigning enough?—just a few days after signing the ‘Meraviglia’ bill. He signed it because there were no ‘obvious signs of unconstitutionality’, then he snorted (if you’ll pardon the expression) and wrote to the Presidents of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate: “The number of laws establishing days to highlight values, events, intentions, emotions or aspects of life is rising at a dizzying rate,” it reads. “I therefore feel the need to urge that the tendency to increase the number of such days be kept within reasonable limits.”

One birthday a day is no longer a birthday. The president notes that, since many of these unofficial celebrations are intended to encourage social virtues amongst young people, the expectation that schools will always have time to mark them properly “is becoming increasingly difficult, even implausible”. These commemorative days almost always arise from joint parliamentary initiatives, often in the wake of tragic events.

The Meloni government clearly has a soft spot for them, given that it has established around twenty such days. However, the meaning behind Mattarella’s remark is clear. Apart from Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Day for the Victims of Terrorism and Massacres, the Day for the Victims of the Mafia, National Unity Day and others of tragic and universally recognised significance (though there has been much controversy surrounding Remembrance Day), there are many that seem somewhat redundant, with all due respect. It is as though everyone wanted a corner of the calendar all to themselves, for their own hopes or suffering in the world. There is the National Day against the denigration of people’s physical appearance (body shaming), but there is also a day dedicated to the catering industry, in a country where we are all ‘MasterChef’. Shouldn’t education and prevention against violence towards healthcare and social care workers simply be a daily priority? And do urban suburbs, in and of themselves, deserve their own day of commemoration? Furthermore, some of it feels a bit repetitive: there are the victims of the coronavirus and those of earthquakes. Perhaps Mattarella was also thinking of this catalogue of victims, which is sometimes even polemically pitted against one another (mine, yours). Or perhaps he simply let out a yawn and a smile: on National Day of Wonder, even he was filled with wonder.