The Dark Heart of Italy Page 3

  If you’re outside the clerical class, though, you begin to understand the contempt Italians feel for their own state. You have to be painfully deferential to the clerics, you have to plead or lobby for the simplest things in the most wordy, sycophantic way. Or else, you can employ a faccendiere, a ‘fixer’, to smooth your way through the offices. After about a year in Italy, I was queueing at the post office, furious because I was having to pay the state monopoly Telecom Italia vast amounts of money for two phone lines which hadn’t existed for months. I met one of my middle-aged students, ‘Lucky’ Luciano, and started grumbling to him. He laughed and shook his head as if that were nothing. He was, he said, still waiting for a 28 million lire refund from the state because he had paid too much tax back in the 1980s. Most of his friends had dodged the tax because they knew it was about to be revoked; he, having been honest, had paid a hefty price. Then, someone next to us in the queue began listing her woes, which went back to a rip-off she had suffered at the hands of the state during the 1970s. Within minutes, three parallel queues were all complaining, each person coming out with a horror story of governmental avarice and bureaucratic incompetence.

  To attempt to reason, of course, is as futile as Canute defying the tide. ‘We’re not citizens,’ the mother of my ‘betrothed’told me, ‘but subjects.’ The distance between government and its people, and the them-and-us mentality it breeds, is central to any understanding of Italy. Everyone feels so badly treated, everything is so legalistic, that people feel justified in being a little lawless. ‘Impotence in front of a blocked political system, incapable of change … the negation of democratic logic’,4 was even offered in the 1970s as one of the central reasons for Italian terrorism. Italians, the argument went, felt it a ‘metaphysical curse’ to be Italian, to be subjected to those grinding, inefficient but very powerful ‘offices’.

  The political consequences of the Italians’ disdain for the Italian state is that the sense of community and of the common weal is minimal. The distancing from anything statale breeds individualism and an unusual attitude towards law-abiding. I have never lived in a country where so many people thought the state so criminal, and where, therefore, breaking that state’s laws was so often, and indulgently, smiled upon. Few other countries have citizens with such an ‘each to his own’ mentality, or so much menefreghismo, ‘I don’t carism’ (signalled with the back of the fingers thrown forward from the throat to the chin). It often seems as if everyone is trying to beat the system instead of trying to uphold it. Fatta la legge trovato l’inganno goes a common proverb: no sooner is a law made than someone will find a way round it.

  Thus furbo, cunning, is the adjective most usually used by Italians to describe, with both admiration and dismay, their fellow countrymen: Italiani, furba gente (‘cunning people’… the hand signal is the thumb nail scratching the cheek, implying someone who’s ‘cut’ or ‘cunning’). It can also mean sly, someone who gets by or gets ahead by being smart. A furbo watches his money, and probably casts a wistful eye on his neighbours’; he doesn’t worry unduly about the rules. It’s a very attractive trait (unless the cunning is at your own expense). Its opposite, ingenuità, implies gullibility. It’s much better, of course, to be furbo, mildly dodgy, than ingenuo, naive (which originally implied virtue, because an ingenuo was one ‘born free’ rather than into slavery).

  In Italy there’s a morality that is unlike anything I have ever come across before. It’s best summed up by Jacob Burckhardt in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy:

  Machiavelli … said openly ‘We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above others.’ Another man would have perhaps said, ‘We are individually highly developed; we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion which were natural to us in our undeveloped state, and we despise outward law, because our rulers are illegitimate, and their judges and officers wicked men.’ Machiavelli adds, ‘because the Church and her representatives set us the worst example’ … 5

  Therein lies the irony. Wrong-doing is invariably excused by the fact that political or church leaders are thought to be up to much worse things, and a little tax-dodging or bribery by us lesser beings really isn’t that important. Which, of course, continues the vicious circle: everyone’s up to something, and you’re stupid if you’re not too. Judgements are, in fact, rarely moral. Linguistically, as in so much else, the country is based upon aesthetics rather than ethics. The judgement words most used are not good or bad, but rather beautiful (bello) or ugly (brutto). Bello is an adjective trotted out with such regularity that it entirely obscures a concept like ‘good’; it can then be trumped by troppo bello, when something is overwhelmingly ‘too beautiful’. Thus immorality is less frowned upon than inelegance; to be beautiful, or to be somewhere beautiful or with someone beautiful, is more of an achievement than righteousness. That obsession with outward appearance is at the root of the word figura, which implies the ‘figure’ you’ve achieved … not only physically, but in the sense of creating an attractive or ugly impression. Fare una figura, to make a bad impression, is an error not necessarily of morals, but of presentation.

  Strangely, the immorality is also intimately related to the Catholic church. There’s a confessionalism in which it doesn’t matter what you do, whether you’re good or bad, as long as you remain ‘in the ranks’, as long as you profess your intention to get better. Italian Catholicism is all-embracing (the origin of the word, katholikos, implies exactly that): everyone is included, which means that everyone’s forgiven, pardoned. There’s nothing that a humble nod towards the purple cassocks or judicial ‘togas’ can’t resolve. Politicians may be criminals, everyone may even acknowledge as much, but it doesn’t matter: everything is whitewashed. History, personal or political, is quickly forgotten.

  Another type of figura, this time financial, is an integral part of that presentation. Whereas in Britain talking about or overtly displaying money is rather vulgar, in Italy it’s the opposite. No one must appear poor. If in Britain politicians yearn to present themselves as ordinary human beings, in Italy they try and show how superhuman and super-wealthy they are. For the European elections in 1999, Silvio Berlusconi hired a cruise ship, at his own expense, to campaign around the peninsula. His enormous personal wealth was an asset, not a handicap: people admire him for the money he’s made, and even for the furbo way in which he might have come by that money. Not to be outdone, his rival Massimo D’Alema, the then Prime Minister and former Communist, would be pictured on his yacht, keen to prove that he, too, wasn’t short of a quattrino, a penny. Ricchezza and bellezza, wealth and beauty, are the foundations for any decent figura. Personal probity seems to be a side-issue.

  The upside of this famous Italian ‘a-legality’ or ‘a-morality’ is that, compared to slavish Britain, no one really feels obliged to do anything they don’t really want to. Only dress and dining codes are rigorously obeyed; any other rules – red lights or speed limits or no-smoking signs – are only suggestions. Slowing for pedestrians on zebra-crossings or wearing seatbelts are optional. There is also a completely different work ethic. Maybe it’s because it’s harder to be hurried and industrious in the heat, or else because the beaches and lakes and ski-resorts are all so close. Italy has more bank holidays (rather, saints’ days and feast days) than any other country in Europe. These wonderful, entirely unexpected days off are sometimes announced, if national, on TV; otherwise you have to know that Saint Hilary is Parma’s patron saint, and therefore the 13 January you will never, for as long you’re within the city’s missing walls, work on that day. They’re also called ponti, ‘bridges’, which arch over the week and give you an opportunity to go to the sea from Thursday until maybe Tuesday. Invariably, one of the unions calls a crafty strike the day before, or immediately after, the ‘bridge’, so that their grateful card-carriers can get a better tan.

  There’s such a lack of guilt about taking time off, there’s such a ridiculing of workaholics (another nickname I was given was Il Calvinista)
, that I often felt my working week had barely begun before another blessed saint offered me a quick break, and the opportunity for a pleasant family lunch in the mountains. I also noticed, during the skiing season, that my favourite barman had left a note outside his bar, hand-written on cardboard. ‘Closed because of illness. I’ve gone to recuperate in the Dolomites. I will be better on Monday 18.’

  The more I enjoyed the leisurely beauty, the bellezza, of Italy, the more sophisticated it seemed. The purpose, I was told, of beauty in Italy, quite apart from simply being beautiful, is that it’s a form of fancy dress: an opportunity to seduce or sedate observers. Italy was a country, I read, ‘peerless in the art of illusionism’. Bisogna far buon viso a cattivo gioco goes a proverb: appearances are important, and it’s therefore ‘necessary to disguise a bad game with a good face’. It’s a bit like stiff upper lip, but subtly different: it implies not stoicism, but ‘presentation’. Everything is dressed up, beautified and embellished. One Italian writer once described that peacock-syndrome, in which everything becomes part of a great show and subtle disguise:

  … dull and insignificant moments in life must be made decorous and agreeable with suitable decorations and rituals. Ugly things must be hidden, unpleasant and tragic facts swept under the carpet whenever possible. Everything must be made to sparkle, a simple meal, an ordinary transaction, a dreary speech, a cowardly capitulation must be embellished and ennobled with euphemisms, adornments and pathos … show is as important as, many times more important than, reality.6

  There were two occasions on which I began to realise how disguised everything was, or at least was thought to be. One Sunday afternoon I was sitting on the terrace of a house in the Apennines. A friend put on the coffee, which came to the boil like an aircraft, arriving from nowhere with a growl and receding with a hiss and a vapour trail. ‘You see,’ said the friend, smiling, ‘this says everything about the differences between English and Italian.’ He was pointing at the icing sugar on his croissant. ‘You call that icing sugar, right? We call it “veil sugar”. Apart from the fact that our term,’ he was nodding, smiling because he knew he was right, ‘is infinitely more elegant than yours, it’s also much more subtle. “Icing on the cake” implies ostentation, right? Ours is a veil, romantic, beautiful, concealing something within …’

  Then, a little later, I was in Parma’s football stadium watching a match. Everyone was sitting on their personalised blue-and-yellow cushions, until the ref made a bad decision and they were on their feet, insinuating that he was being cheated on by his wife: Arbitro cornuto! Arbitro cornuto! (‘The referee’s a cuckold! The referee’s a cuckold!’) It’s an amusing and apt insult (in Britain the referee is just an onanist): apart from the fact that it sounds Shakespearean when translated into English, it implies that even the black shirt of authority, controlling the game, doesn’t know quite what’s going on (be it in the match itself or in his marital bed).

  Receiving street directions in Parma is rather like leafing through a calendar at random: go down 22 July, turn left, and then right onto 20th March. All over the city there are plaques, memorials and statues of partisans from the Resistance, guns in hand, who are sculpted to look suspiciously as if they’ve been shot in the back. On street corners, copies of the Socialist or Communist papers are pinned up on public boards. Often you see graffiti imploring ‘Barricade Yourselves!’, though I’m never sure whether it’s politicking or just an advert for a nearby restaurant, ‘The Barricades’.

  Before living in Italy I had never really heard the words ‘Fascist’ and ‘Communist’ used. In England, such political labels are only used as critical hyperbole, or for historical debates about the early part of the last century. Here, although they are thinner on the ground than a few years ago, there are still many politicians who earnestly and proudly describe themselves as ‘Fascists’, ‘post-Fascists’ or ‘Communists’. Even the flags of the political parties maintain insignia relevant to their Fascist or Communist origins, and graffiti artists follow suit. In Parma, hammers-and-sickles are standard fare; elsewhere, especially in Rome, there are swastikas or celtic crosses. ‘There must be a reason,’ an Italian academic wrote recently, ‘why it was Italy which was the fatherland of Fascism and of the largest Communist party in the western world, why the two most important secular religions of the twentieth century had their greatest success in Italy.’7 His explanation was that Italian politics is quasi-religious, expressing the ‘hopes and fears’ of its people. Whatever the reason, Fascism and Communism are bedded in the Italian soul, and their collision was the cause of the country’s guerra civile, its ‘civil war’.

  Civil war is a concept that has been increasingly (and controversially) used to describe phases of Italian history since 1943. Two books published on the war between Italian Fascists and partisans between 1943 and 1945 are called La Guerra Civile, and La Storia della Guerra Civile. Recently, though, it’s come to be used also for the period of political terrorism from the late 1960s to the early 1980s: ‘a low intensity civil war’. Those years were called Italy’s anni di piombo, its ‘years of lead’: there were almost 15,000 terrorist attacks, and 491 people were killed. I was told it was one of the enduring features of Italian history, a sort of on-going, costly conflict between civilians. The country has always been divided into two warring halves. Dante, having experienced another Italian civil war – the Guelph/Ghibelline conflict – wrote of Italy that:

  … the living cannot, without shame

  Of war reside in you, and man wounds man

  Though guarded by one wall, one moat, the same.8

  The more I became interested in those ‘civil’ and ‘civilian’ wars, in the Fascists and Communists who were aligned one against the other, the more I came across another elegant phrase: the muro di gomma, the impenetrable ‘rubber wall’ off which all investigations bounce. Any research, I was told, would be futile. Nothing ever comes out into the open. There may be intrecci and trame, threads and tracks, which criss-cross the peninsula, linking politicians to the Mafia or terrorist groups, but they are all buried by omissis (omission) and omertà (the silence of the mafioso). Investigations go on for years, sometimes decades. When someone is finally brought to court it seems almost de rigueur that if they’ve been condemned in Primo Grado (‘first grade’), they will be absolved in Secondo Grado or else in cassazione (the Supreme Court). No one is ever entirely guilty, no one ever simply innocent. It’s part of the rewiring process of living in Italy that you can never say, even about the most crooked criminal, that they are factually, legally guilty: there’s always the qualifier that they’re ‘both innocent and guilty’. Sooner or later the accusation will be dropped anyway, because the deadline for a judicial decision has been superseded.

  Thus when I talk politics with Italian friends, they are always astonished by, and envious of, the way in which British politicians are held accountable. ‘He just took money to help a friend get a passport, and for that he’s in the political wilderness? Incredible.’ ‘You mean he lied in court to protect his wife from the knowledge of his infidelity, and he’s gone to prison?’ After one recent British political scandal, one newspaper wrote on its front page that ‘if the same were to happen in Italy, there would be no parliamentarians left …’ The amazement of Italians is two-fold: first astonishment that such paltry infringements represent political wrong-doing and, second, incredulity and envy that powerful men (they are only ever men) can be held to account for their actions, can ever be given a conclusive, ‘guilty’ stamp.

  Thus, surrounding any crime or political event, there is always confusion, suspicion and ‘the bacillus of secrecy’. So much so that dietrologia has become a sort of national pastime. It means literally ‘behindology’, or the attempt to trump even the most fanciful and contorted conspiracy theory. Dietrologia is the ‘critical analysis of events in an effort to detect, behind the apparent causes, true and hidden designs.’9 La Stampa has called it ‘the science of imagination, the culture of suspic
ion, the philosophy of mistrust, the technique of the double, triple, quadruple hypothesis’. It’s an indispensable sport for a society in which appearance very rarely begets reality. Stendhal wrote about it in The Charterhouse of Parma: ‘Italian hearts are much more tormented than ours by the suspicions and the wild ideas which a burning imagination presents to them …’ As a result of the conspiracy theorising, probably the largest genre in publishing is the misteri d’Italia industry. There are whole publishing houses and film production companies that survive solely by revisiting the epic mysteries of Italian post-war history.

  And the more I read, the more Italy’s recent history seems dark and intriguing. Leonardo Sciascia and his literary mentor, Luigi Pirandello, both wrote of their native Sicily and Italy as places of illusionism and secrecy, where nothing can ever be understood. For Sciascia, Italy was so plagued by sophistry and deceit that it had become ‘a country without truth … there’s not a criminal episode which, having some relationship with politics, has had a rational explanation or just punishment’. Many history books on modern Italy open with a resigned apology at the outset, suggesting that the whole thing is unfathomable. It’s the same story with Pirandello’s plays, which mock anyone’s attempt to work out quite what was going on in the world. Players become puppets, pushed and pulled by unseen forces. Everything is so confusing that searching for evidence, the famous ‘document’, becomes entirely futile: