Piero Angela reminded us once again why we loved him so much
One last time lost in the ice of the great north 13.5% share, equal to more of one and a half million viewers. This is the tribute that the Italian public wanted to give to Piero Angela, to his latest episode on SuperQuark, completed in July, another piece of a program that has passed from generation to generation, almost as part of compulsory schooling, a rite of passage. , the common heritage of a people that remains incredibly contradictory. Pay no attention to the mad loners who tried to tarnish the work of Piero Angela on social networks, the reality is that this journalist, absolutely atypical in terms of background, training, characteristics and talent, has played a fundamental role in our existence. Denying it is pure madness.
Hello Piero Angela (22 December 1928, 13 August 2022) The beloved science writer and journalist died at 93: this was announced by his son Alberto via Twitter. With Superquark, he was on TV again this summer
In Italy before Quark (SuperQuark since 1995), before Piero Angela, scientific dissemination was embryonic in terms of impact on the public, of being something more than a background in a television landscape than when he peeped there, after a life spent being a correspondent, paradoxically he was moving towards commercialism. It was 1981, and in the same period Silvio Berlusconi began to shape a country with his cathodic power in the image and likeness of him. But at the same time Piero Angela, with his calm manner, his reassuring and eloquent stage presence, began his great journey inside our mind.
he did it by revealing the secrets of that nature which for us, lost in an ever less punctual and incisive school system, has become less and less important and central.
Because after all Piero Angela did this: a work of rebalancing, perhaps also of compensation, reminded us that knowledge was not something elitist, unfathomable and tiring, exclusive to a few, but a joyful discovery that never ended within everyone's reach, perhaps the greatest adventure that our mind and our life could contain.
A different way of conceiving disclosure If we think about it, we realize that SuperQuark and its elegant presence had become a fixed appointment, but above all a stumbling block to cling to in the face of the cultural degeneration of a country, which in his time he was able to give cultural awards to something like the first edition of Big Brother. Piero Angela was a model from which many colleagues were inspired; he contained in himself, in his clarity of exposition, in his elegant passion, in the ability to be immediate but never simplistic, the dream that we all had since childhood about the ideal of a teacher who had to guide us in the classroom.
5 things we learned from Quark On March 18, 1981 the first episode of Quark was on the air, here's what we learned in all these years of documentaries and scientific dissemination
Why give knowledge it's a mission and Angela knew it, and she honored this idea right up to the end, up to this "The Last Ice" which last night at 9pm held a nice slice of Italy in front of the screen and for which he fought with unusual and feverish intensity. "We didn't understand why he insisted so much, there was a kind of anxiety. Then we realized that he felt the end was coming and he wanted to close it before leaving" declared the producer Marco Visalberghi, for over 40 years alongside Angela, and for three fundamental parts of a production of great difficulty and complexity of realization.
The watchword has been that of the last few years: climate change, a theme that Piero Angela has always held dear.
For him it was the mirror of a world that rebels against man, against the fact that we have brought our existence to a point of no return. Angela for years has wanted to explain it to us, like him many others popularizers, experts and scientists, all of whom remained unheard due to the affection for a style and model of life that (he knew) could not and will not change, how dramatically it is up to us to decide. A reality that on balance puts the category to which Piero Angela belonged to the livel it of a sort of Cassandra, destined not so much not to be believed, but not to be listened to due to a total rejection of reality that we are unable to reverse.
Changing our lives from inside a television Piero Angela tackled every possible theme with us, from animals to physics, from the mysteries of Space to the human body, from the incredible richness of our planet today to the mysteries of the past prehistoric. "Well, this was the last service tonight. See you again at the next episode with new videos and new topics. Until we meet again" . How many times, for how many years have we heard him greet us like this? Last night was the last, certainly something that many of us will remember for the tear it represents, for the disappearance of the symbol of a different way of conceiving the space-time dimension of public television.
Those who want to denounce Piero Angela (and not only) for having called chemtrails a hoax. social unease ", for having branded the news on" artificial spraying in the atmosphere "as fake. All black and white in a document
The R in him had an extraordinary proof of what public service is, before the share, the earnings, the ratings, the commerciality overflowed further the walls like an invading army, before outreach programs were replaced by sterile talk shows, talent and company. Piero Angela was immutable yet capable of adapting, not to the empty form but to the contents that changed by priority, importance and even emergency. How many times has Quark warned us even in our daily dimension? He tried to make us understand that we should not take our existence on this planet for granted, of which we are guests for a substantially forgettable period of time.
In his voice many times there was the supreme truth: we are damaging our planet but he will survive us, we will disappear by our hand. How many of us have decided to be biologists, doctors, physicists, teachers, paleontologists, archaeologists or other thanks to him, how many have awakened a passion that was simply dormant? It was the same one that he communicated with tireless conviction, as the world changed, technology became more and more central. Here too, he has always indicated the difference between progress and technological advancement, well before many others. Last night, lost between Inuit and glacial mills, we said goodbye to a mutual friend, perhaps the best we have had in many ways.
