In two weeks’ time, Christopher Nolan’s latest film will be released in cinemas, dedicated to one of the founding stories of our civilisation: the Odyssey, the epic tale of Ulysses’s exploits.

An ancient tale that takes us back to the dawn of epic poetry, when great stories were a heritage to be passed down orally and immortalised in history.

And it is precisely in that passing from voice to voice, from ear to ear, that the exploits of the warriors of the past slowly became legend, enriched with new meanings and new dimensions with every retelling.

One might say that, a few days ago, the epic of one of the great myths of our time also came to a formal end: the PNRR (national plan for NGEU funds allocation).

The European Commission’s funding plan, transformed by those then in government into a colossal promise of national rebirth – an almost magical artefact, secured through cunning and charisma and wrested from the austere bureaucrats in Brussels – echoed the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give it to mortals.

It is a pity that so little of the miraculous virtues of this salvific panacea has survived the ruthless reality check. Today, rather than national redemption – given that only a few scraps of those funds remain to be spent – we can speak of one of the most impressive political marketing campaigns in the history of the Republic.

Few people, in fact, remember what the real battle fought by the valiant Giuseppe Conte was – the champion who, according to the dominant narrative, wrested this extraordinary treasure from Europe, putting an end to years of fierce austerity imposed by Brussels. That battle was not so much about securing the funds as it was about weakening the structural reform conditions to which their disbursement was to be made conditional.

‘He saved us from diktats!’, some might say. It’s a pity that, once the buzz of sovereign self-indulgence has worn off, a far less poetic reality remains: very little has come of that enormous expenditure. Growth continues to limp along at around zero point something, productivity is languishing, and none of the key indicators of the Italian economy can be said to have improved significantly.

The reason is simple. For a country now addicted to public spending, governed by a political class hungry for immediate approval – and therefore constantly on the lookout for money to hand out and debts to offload onto someone else, preferably tomorrow’s voters – a financial amnesty on this scale was an irresistible treat.
The opportunity to finance a vast amount of spending in exchange for a handful of half-hearted reforms – ones that could be watered down and continually renegotiated – was, for Italian politics, little short of a state-sanctioned drug.

And this is exactly what the PNRR has become: not a catalyst for change, but a powerful anaesthetic capable of once again postponing a proper reckoning with the country’s chronic ills, transforming the grand European plan designed to revive the continent’s economy after the post-pandemic crisis into yet another, colossal pretext for leaving everything essentially as it was. A perfect ‘Gattopardo’-style fetish, in short.

Thus, whilst billions of euros flowed through the system, the structural problems of the Italian economy have stubbornly remained in place: an oppressive tax system, a stifling bureaucracy, a civil justice system with some of the longest processing times in the Western hemisphere, and competition still stifled by the weight of corporate interests and vested interests, despite years of reprimands from Brussels.

And then there’s the elephant in the room, the one everyone pretends not to see: public debt. Partly due to the ‘bonus season’ – from the 110 per cent Superbonus to other so-called miraculous schemes with a virtually non-existent multiplier effect on growth – the debt-to-GDP ratio hovers around 138 per cent.

In short, much of the Italian political establishment continues to extol a measure which has, without doubt, yielded some benefits – and indeed it would have been surprising if it had not, given the enormous amount of public money poured into the European economy; but the next time someone takes to the stage to argue that Italy’s real problem is not being able to spend enough – or, indeed, that the time has come to review those supposedly dreadful European budgetary constraints – perhaps someone should find the courage, for the sake of truth alone, to present them with a couple of figures on the latest great binge of public money that we have decided to call the PNRR, perhaps ushering in a new form of prohibition – in place of those far more senseless measures reserved for other substances – against the most insidious of state-sanctioned drugs: public spending.