There are reports that, rather than describing a single year, reveal a collective posture. The 2025 Censis Report belongs to this category: it offers not only percentages, but a sort of moral radiography of the country. Economic fragility, the erosion of the middle class, fears concerning welfare or urban safety form the backdrop; yet the crucial point — the wound pulsating behind the numbers — is cultural. It lies in the way Italians today read, listen, interpret. In the way they seek meaning, often without realizing it.

Censis records a phenomenon that in recent years has become evident to the most attentive observers: traditional culture recedes, but is not abandoned; it restructures itself, disguises itself, changes channels, alters its own metabolism. Theatre suffers, reading slows, musical consumption becomes ubiquitous and rarefied; and yet, in an almost underground fashion, the demand for hybrid, experiential, immediate forms grows. Immersive exhibitions that transform painting into environment, concerts that become multisensory rituals, podcasts that replace light nonfiction, short videos that aspire to a universal educational function. This is not decline: it is a semiological metamorphosis. Culture does not withdraw: it changes skin to survive the digital ecosystem.

This transformation, however, contains a deep tension. The collective imagination still desires complexity, yet desires it in reduced form, as though depth were a luxury and time a capital to be handled sparingly. The report identifies, in filigree, an Italy that has not lost interest in knowledge, but has lost the willingness to dwell within knowledge. The cultural object — book, concert, performance, essay — is still perceived as a value, yet it is expected to adapt to the rhythms of discontinuous consumption, to the logics of intermittent attention. It is the paradox of a country that loves culture, yet fears duration.

Within this scenario lies another decisive element: the collapse of trust in institutions. The figure, striking in itself, does not concern politics in the strict sense alone: it concerns all forms of mediation. When symbolic authority wavers — school, university, publishing, newspapers, theatre, museums — their primary function also weakens: transforming information into knowledge and knowledge into orientation. The risk is to replace interpretive slowness with atomized consumption, in which everything can be understood quickly and therefore forgotten just as quickly. In such an ecosystem, culture itself becomes a flow rather than a horizon; a succession of stimuli competing with thousands of others.

And yet it would be wrong — and deeply unfair to our country — to read these data as a surrender. Italians, in moments of disorientation, have always responded by increasing their demand for meaning. It is no coincidence that, even amid economic crisis, private investment in immaterial cultural goods grows: from artistic experiences to meditative practices, from writing courses to popular philosophy lectures, from music platforms to theatricalized guided tours. Culture, when the ground beneath one’s feet becomes unstable, becomes a kind of ancestral compass. It does not console: it orients.

The demographic data — a country that is ageing, yet at the same time exhibits new forms of youth participation — reveal a further tension: culture is no longer a deposit, but a process. It was so in the past, but today it is unmistakably so. It is no longer enough to possess books, records, subscriptions: these objects must build interpretive micro-communities, social bonds, shared rituals. Cultural consumption becomes a form of relation, and this explains why the contents that work best are those that embed themselves within a collective narrative fabric, however minimal.

In this context, the relationship between Italians and culture seems to oscillate between two poles: on one side the nostalgia for slow consumption, on the other the allure of a performative, instantaneous, fragmented model. Between these poles a space opens that Censis does not explicitly name, yet its data suggest clearly: the space of cultural responsibility. If society is frightened — and the numbers confirm that it is — culture cannot limit itself to being a more refined entertainment. It must once again become a method for thinking the world. Not an escape, but a return: a return to lucidity, precision, density, patience.

Every linguistic shift tells an anthropological shift. Today the language of culture is a language at risk of dissolution: hyper-connected and fragile, immensely rich yet thin, omnipresent yet unable to make itself truly heard. Italy in 2025 does not reject culture: it consumes it without measure, desires it and dilutes it, seeks it and disperses it, displays it and forgets it. None of these gestures is anyone’s fault: they are the physiology of a new regime of attention. And precisely for this reason, culture must assume a further function: restoring form to time, order to noise, quality to desire.

If a people no longer recognizes its own narratives, it ends up inhabiting narratives constructed elsewhere. This is where the cultural debate must rediscover its civic vocation. Not to offer definitive answers — which would be illusory — but to reopen questions. Not to denounce superficiality — which would be sterile — but to rebuild depth through clarity. Not to oppose present and tradition, but to articulate a possible continuity in which the heritage of the past is not a museum repertoire but a reserve of critical tools for reading the present.

The Censis Report does not invite pessimism. It invites care. Care of the gaze, of the word, of time. Care of attention, which becomes a common good. Care of a community that, though lost, has never ceased seeking reference points. Culture, if it wishes to be equal to this task, must become once more a form of collective intelligence: a silent workshop in which one learns to distinguish, to interpret, to give things their names. Not out of nostalgia for a vanished age, but out of necessity for the present.