Kimi’s tears are preferable to the whingeing of his peers in the town squares.

Kimi Antonelli’s uncontrollable tears, which bathe his sensational achievement in emotion, are the perfect antithesis to the generational whingeing that fuels the angry protests of his peers. Is this an unfair, inappropriate comparison, deaf to the desperation of those who, even resorting to violence, express the unbearable nature of a non-existent future? Yet Kimi’s future—which has become a radiant present—was not handed to him on a plate, nor granted by a government decree generous with subsidies. “He was owed nothing,” said the father of the newly crowned world champion, himself with tears in his eyes at a result that seemed incredible. He was owed nothing: he built his future himself, through self-sacrifice, talent, training, gruelling discipline, determination, courage and a fighting spirit. It is the realisation of the modern dream, the ‘Little Corporal’ Napoleon Bonaparte, who, through merit and his own efforts alone, climbed the social ladder (the lift had not yet been invented, let alone the ‘social lift’) to become a general and an emperor – the dream of freeing oneself from a bitter fate, of not being trapped in a disadvantaged position, of breaking the chains of social immobility. Today, Western societies—which have, after all, enjoyed a level of widespread prosperity unprecedented in history, a wealth of consumer goods and opportunities that even the wealthiest by birth in pre-capitalist societies could not have had—no longer believe in that dream. Yet the struggle against a fate of subordination, misery and social deprivation has its own epic, its own literature, its own heroism: the heroism of those who have achieved their redemption through hard work and tenacity, like Kimi, not like the followers of the nihilistic rage of the casseurs. A heroism I have always admired, because I have had privilege on my side.

The heroism of young Stardi—who reads that ponderous, heavy-going tome "Cuore" by De Amicis these days?—the son of an extremely poor family, a lad with an ‘iron will’ always described as having ‘his fists pressed to his temples’ whilst grappling with the culture that could become his weapon of redemption – who, as soon as he manages to scrape together ‘ten soldi’, buys a book to build his little library until ‘his eyes ache from reading so much’. Stubbornness, relying solely on oneself, the courageous escape from starting conditions that were unjustly and unbearably disadvantageous. Today, merit is regarded as a dirty word, the ultimate evil in a world ravaged by cut-throat competition; and if you try to praise it in public, you’ll get a cobblestone thrown at your head. But in a society characterised by social mobility, the alternative to merit is cronyism, privilege, stagnation and a reliance on welfare.

Carlo Fruttero, one of the most refined and non-conformist intellectuals in our cultural history, had done a myriad of gruelling jobs to become what he became without any help, support or subsidies: a waiter, a labourer, a factory worker, a plumber, a painter and decorator. Romano Montroni, the great bookseller whom we recently lost, was born into a home where books were unknown; his future seemed already sealed. Yet he began carrying parcels full of mysterious volumes, became captivated by their contents, started reading like a man possessed, built his future and became the king of Italian bookshops. Consider Arnoldo Mondadori: his father took his own life when he was still a child; he was sent to the Martinitt Boarding School; he earned his first meagre wages as a reader of film captions at the village cinema; and then he went on to found a publishing empire. Hadn’t his ‘future’ been ‘stolen’ from him? Like Angelo Rizzoli, the son of an illiterate cobbler. Like Bernard Malamud, who spent his early years as a Russian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn in a home miserably devoid of books, and who set about studying hard on the meagre earnings he made as a teacher of evening classes. Like Coco Chanel, who grew up in an orphanage and learnt her craft whilst working as a humble shop assistant in a dressmaker’s. Like Edith Piaf, whose childhood was spent with her grandmother, the owner of a brothel, and travelling with her father, begging or singing on the pavements to scrape a living from alms. All of them overcame obstacles that seemed insurmountable; they did not succumb to resignation about their origins; on the contrary, they rebelled against the curse of their origins. They believed in ‘progress’ – not in its abstract concept, but in the earth-shattering novelty of a world in which you could, perhaps for the first time in history, forge a future different from the one to which you were chained by an immutable tradition, a ruthless and unchangeable class system dictated by birth, oblivious to notions now scorned such as ‘talent’ and ‘merit’.

Kimi is one of those heroes of the modern dream, not because his family background is so terribly disadvantaged – quite the opposite, in fact – but because, as his father says, he took action and forged his own destiny without the certainty that anything was ‘owed’ to him. The general lament of the children of mass education—of the ubiquitous smartphone that immortalises their exploits amidst the clatter of smashed shop windows, of those who hate the West and spit at police officers simply doing their job, believing that everything is ‘owed’ to them—reflects the fading of the dream of modernity. Only Kimi Antonelli is keeping it alive. And without it being owed to him.