Europa, tra Muro e muri

The date of 9 November 1989 is full of meaning and open to multiple interpretations. On the one hand, it represents the epilogue, with more or less tragic overtones, of the realized socialisms that had marked a significant part of the European continent for over half a century. This is the most immediate historical interpretation that can be given of the fall of the Wall, which for almost thirty years had divided one of the most important European capitals in two. It is a lectio facilior behind which one can attempt to trace a panoply of symbolic meanings that go beyond the immediate historical fact. Looking from another perspective, in fact, the fall of the Wall represents, not only symbolically, but also physically, the fall of a spiritual before physical division, which characterized the way of thinking about the Europeans long before the Wall was built. In this paper, I will focus on some readings given, in the course of history, to the problem of «Europe», with particular reference to the Italian panorama, trying to show how 1989 and the subsequent events, with the progressive enlargement of the community areas to countries once adhering to the Warsaw Pact, can be read as the end of a paradigm that had been dominant for centuries in Europeanist literature, leading to the inauguration of a new idea of Europe, or how this change should not, in the end, prove illusory.