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Article by Francis Rizzo – Editor-in-Chief of Sips and Bites
It’s 2026. In two days, we’ll be celebrating the 159th anniversary of Luigi Pirandello’s birth, and we’re approaching the 90th anniversary of his death. When I look out the window, when I listen to the buzz of this country, I can’t help but smile a bitter, almost Pirandellian smile: we’ve changed our customs, we’ve updated our language, we’ve transformed our public squares into metadata, but the play has remained the same. In fact, it has become more obsessive, more claustrophobic. The truth—and I hope no one will hold it against me for saying this—is that in Italy, over the last century, Absolutely nothing has changed.
We’re convinced we’ve made giant strides. We look down on early 20th-century Italy—the one described by the Master of Agrigento—convinced that its anxieties were the legacy of an archaic world, of an era defined by salons and bourgeois conventions. But take a closer look: what are our social media profiles, if not the hyperbolic, digital version of that desperate need for “form” that tormented Mattia Pascal? Our need to make an impression, to be recognized, to create a persona that is “socially acceptable” and “successful,” It’s an exact replica of that theater where Pirandello’s characters moved about. We’ve simply replaced the mirror at home with a smartphone screen. The essence of the drama—the conflict between who we are on the inside and who we must be on the outside—has remained the same.
Take politics, that theater of the absurd that defines us. Reading today’s news is like rereading the pages of The Old and the Young. Power plays, sudden transformations, and the visceral opportunism of a political class that changes its skin (and allegiances) depending on which way the wind blows are nothing new in this decade. They are the DNA of our public life. We are a country that loves form because it is terrified of substance. We tear each other apart over a law, a statement, or a social media post, but deep down we know that all of this is pure theater. Italian politics is a script that is rewritten every day so that the ending never changes: the perpetuation of a system in which appearances are the only currency.
Even when it comes to intergenerational relationships, Pirandello looked deep into our souls a hundred years ago. The conflict I experience today with my children is no different from the one fathers in 1926 experienced with their own children. There is always the same disconnect, the same inability to communicate because we are both prisoners of rigid roles. I am the father who must represent “stability”; they are the children who must represent “the new.” We look at each other through a veil of expectations that neither of us has chosen. Time has passed, technology has evolved, but the loneliness that arises when we stop playing our parts and find ourselves, stripped bare, in the silence of our home, is the exact same loneliness as a century ago.
We haven't made any progress. We've just been stockpiling masks. We have become a nation that has perfected the art of pretense, turning it into a technical skill. The Italian of 2026 is the final result of this century-long experiment: an individual who has forgotten how to be themselves, because being oneself means being vulnerable—it means being “nobody.” And in this country, being nobody is the only crime that is not forgiven. We’d rather be “one hundred thousand”; we’d rather be clones of a pre-packaged model, just so we don’t have to look into the eyes of the emptiness we carry inside.
Pirandello’s greatness did not lie in having predicted the future, but in having understood that the human present is static. Man is an animal who is afraid of himself and who, for this reason, builds himself a cage of conventions. In Italy, we have elevated that cage to the status of a national monument. Celebrating Pirandello today means admitting our defeat: we haven’t grown, we haven’t matured, and we haven’t found a way out. We’re still there, in Agrigento or Rome, on a stage that never closes, acting out roles we didn’t write and that, deep down, we don’t care about at all.
Perhaps, after 159 years, the only true act of rebellion would be to stop celebrating the Master as an archaeological artifact and start using his words as a crowbar to pry open this door that keeps us locked inside ourselves. But I fear that, once again, we’ll prefer to don the mask of the “thoughtful commentator,” publish our nice celebratory post, and carry on, undeterred, with our charade. Because, in the end, a country that never changes is the perfect mirror of those who, out of fear, have decided never to change.
