“Canta che ti passa”

“Canta che ti passa” is a familiar call to sing away one’s troubles, but in the book it lands less as reassurance than as a measure of Italy’s postwar disarray. Its appearance beside songs of opposing political camps makes cheerfulness sound both practical and inadequate: a way to endure the day while the country seems to be sliding toward catastrophe.

A saying in a country on edge

The expression surfaces amid a summer of national depression. The government has decided to abandon the protectorate of Albania, one of the few gains left from the war, and the narrator describes a country whose institutions and social classes seem to be sinking together into confusion. Political upheaval is reduced to local episodes that flare into national news, while the broader sense of defeat persists. Against that backdrop, the saying advises people to sing a happy tune and keep going. Its consolation is deliberately small beside the scale of the crisis.

The passage makes the gap especially sharp by setting this cheerful counsel among songs with sharply different political meanings. The popular Neapolitan song “’A tazza ’e cafè” and the socialist “Bandiera rossa” appear in the same catalogue of things Italians might sing. The juxtaposition does not erase their differences; it makes them part of a noisy repertoire through which a divided country tries to live with uncertainty. The expression’s lightness thus carries an edge: singing may ease the moment, but it cannot settle the conflicts that give the moment its pressure.

Cheerfulness against catastrophe

The phrase belongs to a wider atmosphere in which disaster is anticipated as much as experienced. At the Milan rally in April 1919, tens of thousands of workers gather with the expectation that a cataclysm may be near. A breakaway group moves from the procession toward the city center, and the confrontation between socialist marchers and their opponents turns rapidly from demonstration to armed violence. In this setting, ordinary life seems unable to wait for history to become less urgent. The appeal to sing and carry on offers no remedy for that political acceleration; it registers the effort to persist inside it.

Elsewhere, the book presents the postwar public as shaped by death and mass return. Its narrator imagines Europe as a stage emptied by the war and describes five million veterans pressing back across national borders. The contrast helps explain why a small, everyday saying can acquire more than a merely comic function. It speaks to a society trying to resume ordinary habits after a catastrophe that has not yielded to peace, even as the returning survivors become part of the political landscape.

Songs, spectacle, and political belonging

Music in these episodes does not belong only to private consolation. At the 1919 confrontation, women at the head of the socialist column carry a portrait of Lenin and a red flag and sing for liberation and a better life for their children. Across the cordon, the opposing group consists of men formed by years of daily coexistence with killing. When the cordon opens and gunfire follows, the singing stops. The scene gives song a public, collective force—and shows how quickly that shared expression can be broken by violence.

The book repeatedly places words, music, and ceremony alongside political spectacle. At a fascist gathering in Milan, a wartime Very rocket rises above the piazza, its light drawing the crowd’s attention before Ferruccio Vecchi addresses them. The flare functions as the starting signal for the event; the crowd’s response gathers around a theatrical image rather than around the speech alone. The episode differs sharply from the modest counsel of “Canta che ti passa”: one is a private-sounding formula for getting through trouble, the other a staged scene in which collective feeling is directed toward political action.

Consolation beside mourning

The saying’s levity also contrasts with the book’s public rituals for the dead. At the burial of the Unknown Soldier, an unidentified body is chosen by lot to represent the fallen as a whole. The ceremony makes the anonymous dead a focus of national devotion, while the accompanying reflection stresses the collective and impersonal character of wartime death. Against that solemnity, singing to make trouble pass can sound almost impossibly modest. It belongs to the scale of individual endurance; the ceremony turns loss into a national symbol.

That contrast returns at Giacomo Matteotti’s reburial in Fratta Polesine. His wife, Velia, chooses a funeral in his home region rather than a political burial in Rome. Along the railway tracks, peasants, laborers, and railway workers kneel as the coffin passes; tens of thousands await it in Fratta, calling for justice and liberty. Here, neither song nor cheerful counsel resolves grief or political anger. The expression’s significance lies instead in the tension it preserves: the desire to carry on in ordinary life persists beside public mourning, while the upheavals that prompted the saying remain unresolved.