Introduzione: di sardine e d’altri linguaggi politici

At the market in via Drapperie, in Bologna, in mid-November 2019, sardines were sold for three euros a kilo. In more than one fish shop, the price was the same as always, no significant variation. Yet nearby, in the immense Piazza Maggiore, in those very days sixteen thousand and more sardines were playing the leading role, tight squeezes, not only producing an unexpected result against the aggressiveness of the right, the league and populist sovereignty, but inventing a new form of political expression: an ironic flash mob in the name of a world figure – the Sardinian, in fact – not particularly heroic or in any way handsome. A figure who – based on the well-known media mechanism of "contagion" which, when it happens, never ceases to amaze those who caused it in the first place - in a very short time it has depopulated the squares of half of Italy and, it seems, beyond. Everyone wants them, everyone wants them: with great enthusiasm and lots and lots of uncertainty for the immediate future.