The opening ceremonies of the last two Winter Games vibrated with political undertones. In Pyeongchang, South Korea, a joint team from North and South Korea competed, which was interpreted as a sign of hope – wrongly, as we know today; There is more ice age than ever between the feuding brothers. In Beijing four years later, a small Chinese trumpeter played a patriotic song that spoke of his country’s greatness and ambitions. And Wladimir Putin demonstratively took a nap in the official gallery during the Ukrainian team’s appearance, which seemed like a foreshadowing of the nightmare that actually began a short time later with his attack on Ukraine.
Given this, the opening of the Winter Games in Milan and Cortina was a happy event. The mood around San Siro was already spring-like hours before the show began, and the 100-year-old football temple (sadly soon to be demolished) glowed in the sunset as if it had come out of an Italian Renaissance painting. The hosts only countered the madness of the past Olympics with new technical breakthroughs with a world first: there had never been an opening ceremony in four locations at the same time.
The idea was born somewhat out of necessity, as the locations of these games are so far apart that no cross-country skier, no snowboarder, no bobsleigh crew can follow from the mountain heights of Predazzo, Livigno or Cortina Milan would have managed without diminishing your own competitive chances. Under the motto “Armonia” they all somehow came together, the mountains and the plain, for a celebration of Italianità, of beauty, fantasy and bella figura. Harmony is not simply the theme of the show, its creative head Marco Balich had previously explained, but a way of seeing the world.
The Milan Cathedral and a coffee pot become a whole
As proof of this, he didn’t shy away from calling some key witnesses that the common sports fan probably hasn’t heard of. The neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova, for example, whose sculptures made a prominent appearance in the first act. Of course, the big three of Italian music were not left out: Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini and Gioachino Rossini. But the fact that real poetry was included in the performance is rather unusual in Olympic showbizz, especially a poem like Giacomo Leopardi’s The infinity: “And so my thoughts sink / into the immeasurable, / and shipwreck is sweet to me in this sea.”
You have to have that much self-confidence and pride in yourself in order to present something like this to an audience numbering in the billions. But the Italians are also world champions in the UNESCO World Heritage Site. From the Colosseum to the cuisine – no country can boast as many outstanding cultural products as Italy. And this evening is remembered with a lightness in which even the Milan Cathedral and the famous Bialetti coffee pot can become a chic full-body costume.
