The relationship that has always existed between the speaker and the listener, sitting around a fire, telling a story, listening to it, discussing it remains unsurpassed today”. That’s why Edoardo Camurri, writer, journalist, author and Rai television presenter , once the ‘Maestri’ experience is over, he lands on TV with a new program “Discovering the golden branch” from Monday 31 October at 3.25 pm on Rai 3 and at 5.50 pm on Rai Storia. “We will have a studio that will be a forest, a garden, and after all, the golden branch for the ancients, it was the branch of knowledge and rebirth, where it is found everywhere within us but also outside us”. A new program that believes in culture “as an activity for the change and awareness of each and every one of us”.
Our times are characterized by a recurring and cynical instinct for destruction and it is precisely for this reason that Rai3 aims to instead inhabit hope and meaning by trying to grasp, through Edoardo Camurri’s daily conversations with important exponents of Italian culture, “the branch of gold” of knowledge.
Culture as change and awareness. What is “the golden branch” of knowledge? How can culture provide concrete tools to give hope and fight what appears to be an instinct of “destruction”? Questions to which, for 141 episodes – Camurri tries to answer with his programme, a title that refers to Virgil’s Aeneid, in which it is precisely that symbolic branch that allows Aeneas to descend into Hades to get to know from his father Anchises the destiny that awaits you.
With the same spirit of “knowing”, Edoardo Camurri – every day, from Monday to Thursday – meets important exponents of Italian culture, under the banner of multidisciplinarity in a sort of great encyclopaedia of knowledge. “In each episode – says Camurri – we will symbolically cultivate an ever-changing plant, for an idea of open and interdisciplinary culture which, in the course of its journey, will try to create an imaginary forest of meanings from which to patiently try to rebuild a new environment and open. ‘Discovering the Golden Bough’ would therefore like to be that garden that Voltaire asked us to occupy in order to respond to barbarism”. Ultimately, “trying to discover our golden branch in each episode, we will adopt a famous poem by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “The Righteous” as a programmatic manifesto”.
Camurri continues “the idea of cultural transmission as the possibility of opening connections, and shaping the world through culture and knowledge”. What kind of program are you? “We are Paleolithic TV” he says with a hint of sarcasm “and then adds,” taking care of the word, comparison, knowing, may seem out of fashion in a social era, instead in my opinion people are hungry for this .
We don’t aim at a specific type of public, frankly I’ve never asked myself that, whoever wants to follow us simply does so”. For Alessandra Viola, scientific popularizer and professor of communication sciences at the Sapienza University of Rome, however, the task of “treating” the program garden and its plants, symbols of the growth of knowledge.
The protagonists of the first week, from Monday 31 October, will be Professor Maurizio Bettini, anthropologist, philologist and director of the Center for Anthropology and the Ancient World of the University of Siena who will focus on the teachings of ancient civilizations, while on Tuesday Telmo Pievani – evolutionist, professor of Philosophy of biological sciences at the University of Padua – tells the different stages of evolution that led to the birth of homo sapiens.
Wednesday is the turn of professor Ines Testoni, professor of Applied Psychology at the University of Padua who delves into one of the taboos of our age, death; and the first week ends on Thursday with the art historian Maria Grazia Messina, who analyzes art as an expression and, at the same time, an instrument of protest. Camurri has an ability, just remembering his programs, all appreciated, but also unique to draw from his interlocutors, historians, academics, points of view capable of offering new perspectives, and with his questions he offers the viewer the sensation of having dealt with the matter being discussed all his life, merit of simplicity and clarity of the language used in transmission
