International Balzan Foundation Luigi Luca Cavalli

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
These projects are all slow: a second project had begun earlier, around 1995,
and has therefore almost reached its conclusion. It is an encyclopedia called
“Italian Culture”. I use the word “Culture” in the widest possible sense: everything
that we learn at any age and from anybody. It is, in substance, the contribution
to our personality that does not come from our genetic constitution
(what we inherit with DNA), but that which comes from the environment in
which we grew and continue to live, our socialization. From the maternal womb
to what we learn from parents and relatives, teachers, schoolfellows, colleagues,
friends and enemies, all those we encountered in our lives and who taught us
something about real life, in writing, through words or examples, and via many
other modes. Today we can study our genetic constitution in depth, even though
things are not as simple as we hoped at first, and genetics can be more than plain
DNA. And perhaps the contribution of genes and culture can be equally important,
or vary a lot in individual cases.
I have tried to learn more about how we Italians are made, and why. I paid a lot
of attention to history, which is always a great teacher (at the beginning, the idea
was to call the opus “History of Italian Culture”). Perhaps my curiosity was
sharpened by having spent much time in other cultures, American, English,
French and a little bit German. One of the reasons that impelled me was the disagreeable
discovery that Italian-Americans are the Americans least interested in
their origin, at least in the US, and have perhaps the least national pride. One
understands the reasons, remembering that they needed much courage to face
enormous difficulties in a new culture, in order to get away from a country that
had condemned them to hopeless poverty, leaving 80% of them illiterate.
But also Italians who remained in Italy know little about their countrypeople.
Superficially at least, they seem to be divided into two groups: a large one believing
they are better than everybody else, and an equally large one, also equally
wrong, believing we are worse than everybody else. This work tries to tell us
objectively who we were and who we became, with highs and lows, and tries to
answer many questions that one may ask oneself. It was possible to do it because
after many unsatisfactory trials I came across Vittorio Bo, who at the time was a
director at Einaudi publishing house and later founded Codice Edizioni, and he
was willing to take on himself a good share of the directing load. He also convinced
UTET of Turin, a major publishing house with a great tradition, to accept
the challenge. When the work is finished it will consist of twelve large size
volumes, the last two of which are a very detailed index. The contents of the ten
volumes of the text are: 1. Land and People, 2. Tongues and Languages, 3. City,
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