Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  I recall my first visit to Sicily in 1953, where I was taken under the wing of Michele Sala, mayor and deputy of Piana degli Albanesi, a red stronghold since 1893 when the noble Dr Nicola Barbato had preached the gospel of socialism to the inhabitants of what was then Piana dei Greci from the rock in the remote mountain pass of Portella della Ginestra, still known as the Barbato Stone. (In his youth Michele Sala, born in the neighbourhood, had himself heard the good word from the apostle’s lips.)8 Rain or shine, war, peace or fascism, some Pianesi had never since then failed on the first of May to send a demonstration to this place. The occasion in 1947 when the bandit Giuliano massacred this May Day meeting has been wonderfully reconstructed in Francesco Rosi’s superb film Salvatore Giuliano. Shortly after this the Party had sent Sala to take charge of this complicated part of Sicily. He had the Sicilian sense of realism. In his youth he had signed up, among others, Giuseppe Berti, a leading communist in the Comintern era, and then a student in Palermo, because having carefully situated the socialist office strategically in an apartment facing the exit to a brothel, he could rely on meeting potential recruits ready for red propaganda in a relaxed mood. He had combined this with the hardnosed political experience of Brooklyn, where he spent twenty years of political emigration and learned enough English to show me the masses of masonry with which he was filling the outskirts of town (‘lotta guys need jobs’), as we criss-crossed it in his mayoral car, greeting citizens to the right and left (‘In this town I know who I gotta say hello to!’).

  I was shown the cemetery, or rather the necropolis of the Matrangas, Schiròs, Barbatos, Loyacanos and the rest of the Albanian Christian families who had emigrated to southern Italy and Sicily in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Every modern gravestone, large or small, had the photograph of the departed. Death, respected and unforgotten, was always present in Piana. I saw what was still taken for granted, the silent black-clad women sitting in the street, but always facing indoors. We were walking along one side of the piazza – the anti-communists and Mafiosi walked on the other side – when he stopped me for a moment. ‘Don’t tell anyone here you are English,’ he warned. ‘There are people here, they don’t like it if they see you with me. I tell them you are from Bologna.’ It was logical enough: even in Sicily they knew that Bologna was red, and it was therefore natural that one communist should visit another. There was only one flaw. We had been together all day audibly speaking English. Sala, who knew his people, dismissed this problem. ‘What do these guys know how they talk in Bologna?’ Indeed, ninety-odd years before, shortly after the unification of Italy, this had been literally true. In 1865 the first schoolmasters sent by the new kingdom to teach the Sicilian children Dante’s Italian language were taken for Englishmen. In this respect nothing fundamental changed in inland Sicily until national television programming. But even less backward parts of Italy still had something of the Third World about them. For the bulk of its inhabitants – even the bilingual ones who spoke it instead of Sicilian, Calabrian or Piedmontese – Italian consisted of two languages: the spoken daily language and the formal language still rooted in baroque usage, in which newspapers and books were written and official speeches were made. It remained a relic of the past even in its public respect for, and reliance on, intellectuals as such. I cannot think of another European country in which an unconcealed intellectual such as Bruno Trentin, child of a family of anti-fascist academic emigrants, would have been acceptable as the leader of a major industrial trade union, and later of the major national organization of labour unions.

  Learning about Italy was different in another respect. After 1945 tourism without a bad conscience once again became possible, for art and fun, in a country that had so clamorously broken with its fascist past. I was lucky to have the best possible guides: Francis Haskell, who planned, and Enzo Crea, with his encyclopedic knowledge of all the arts, who revealed the remotest corners and the most celebrated treasures of Italy to his friends with equal enthusiasm. What is more, I rarely went to Italy alone, or, when I arrived there, I was rarely without Italian friends, After I married again, they included the friends of Marlene, who had lived in Rome for several years before we met. Moreover, I had the enormous advantage of introductions by a man whose name opened all doors on the Italian left and a good many others besides, Piero Sraffa. Long established in Cambridge in a wonderful set of rooms in Trinity, opposite the rooms of Maurice Dobb, with whom he was producing a monumental edition of the works of the economist David Ricardo, this small, courteous and grizzled man who avoided loquacity and wrote little, was known as an intellect of formidable critical power. His natural habitat was behind the scenes. Though he was taciturn about his political views, as about everything else, it was known that he had been a close friend of Antonio Gramsci and from 1926 until Gramsci’s death in 1937 the chief contact of the jailed communist leader with the outside world. He had been the conduit through which Gramsci’s prison writings were preserved after his death, with the help of another influential friend in banking. What was not known was the fact that without him Gramsci’s remarkable manuscripts could probably not have been written at all, for, after the arrest, Sraffa (from a well-to-do Turinese family) had immediately opened an unlimited account for the prisoner at a Milanese bookshop. He had been a trusted friend of the current leader of the Party, Togliatti, since their university days. It is said that he had considered returning to Italy after the war, but abandoned the idea after the result of the 1948 election, disastrous for the socialist– communist alliance.

  As he knew everybody on the anti-fascist scene – after all, Turin had been the capital of both liberal and communist anti-fascism – Sraffa’s name made me immediately accepted among the Party’s intellectuals. In those days a foreign communist was automatically a member of the brotherhood, a ‘compagno’ addressed as ‘tu’ and not ‘lei’. Indeed the first name on Sraffa’s list I telephoned in Rome, the most senior communist historian at the time, Delio Cantimori, a slow-moving, stout expert on the heretics of the sixteenth century, who had a wicked wit and looked older than his age, immediately invited me to stay with him and his Marx-translating wife, Emma, in their apartment in Trastevere. From there, with his help, I made contact with the Rome-based anti-fascist intellectuals, at that time overwhelmingly communist or Party-sympathizing. One way or another, most of what I learned about Italy – landscape and art history apart – came to me via Italian communists or those Italians still close to them in the early 1950s. It was my luck that my friends among Italian left-wing intellectuals, and especially historians, combining practice with theory, often doubled as observant and analytical journalists.

  However, almost anyone who travelled in the remoter rural parts of Italy in the 1950s found people ready to ask and answer questions from foreigners. This was, after all, still a country of oral communication, face to face. In places like Spezzano Albanese (Cosenza, Calabria) such few papers as reached the place still had to be read aloud to the illiterates in cafés, artisan workshops and the PCI ‘Sezione’. In 1955 the telephone had reached San Giovanni in Fiore, the home of the great medieval millennial theorist, Abbot Joachim of Flora, only a few months ago. Strangers, Italian or foreign, brought news – even to people who whether they liked it or not knew that new times were inevitably coming. ‘Things are changing,’ I was told more than once in 1955 Sicily. ‘Our customs are getting like those of the North, for instance women going out. In the end I expect we’ll be like the Northerners.’

  At that time the PCI seemed the main gateway into these new times. It had a membership of about two million – about one quarter of the national electorate – which continued to rise with every election until at its peak in the later 1970s it more or less equalled – enthusiasts claimed it was about to pass – the 34 per cent of the party of permanent government, the Christian Democrats. Socially the PCI was a cross-section of Italian society as much as a class party, especially in its massive strongholds in north–central Italy: Emilia-Romagna, Tus
cany, Umbria – regions of culture, prosperity, technological and business dynamism, and honest administration. Italian communism was not the whole of Italy, but a central and a wonderfully civilizing element of it. But, like nonconformity in Britain, it was and remained a minority.

  Nevertheless, it was a huge and deeply rooted movement. The popolo comunista (communist people), as the cadres called it, was more than merely a collection of crosses on ballot-papers or annually renewed membership cards. Its major regular manifestation, nominally a way of organizing financial support for the Party’s daily newspaper, L’Unità (which the vast majority of communists read no more than most Italians read any daily paper), was a pyramid of regular popular festivals with its base in every village or city district, which culminated in the annual Festa Nazionale de l’Unità in some major centre. My connection with Italian politics began when I was described as a ‘fraternal delegate’ and had to address such an occasion, God knows how, in 1953 in a village near the Po. The Festa was essentially a collective national family holiday excursion to spend money for the cause and to have a collective good time with wives, children, friends and trusted leaders. It is said that, on the first occasion it was held in Naples, the population of that great city, conscious that the influx of visitors was not tourists to be fleeced, but plain folks and compagni, listened to the appeal of its leaders and for twenty-four hours abstained from its proverbial activities. The Festa was, of course, also a political rally, for in the days before television, political oratory by a visiting star, its merit proportionate to its length, and its technique based on that of open-air thespians, was also the biggest public entertainment likely to be seen by the faithful. Since the ‘communist people’ were also the only part of non-middle-class Italy given to self-improvement and reading, progressive publishers relied on these occasions, especially the national Festa, for a major part of their annual sales, particularly for the multi-volume series of encyclopedias, histories and other intellectual consumer durables. With his usual sense of the national market, my publisher Giulio Einaudi chose to launch the multi-volume Storia del Marxismo (which I co-edited with others) at what was both the peak of the PCI under Enrico Berlinguer and the start of its (unforeseen) decline, the great Genoa Festa of 1978. Unfortunately, like the PCI, the popular interest in Marxism was also about to dwindle, though the first volume of the Storia still sold well. It was the only one translated into English. Nevertheless, this was an unforgettable occasion of oratory in the vast amphitheatre above the blue sea, food-loaded tables in great marquees full of family parties and the greetings of friends, and hopeful communist leaders (except for the quiet Berlinguer), chatting and joking in the hotel lounge.

  I was lucky to be guided into Italy by a strikingly impressive group of pre-war and Resistance communists. The full-time politicians among those I knew tended to maintain their standing as intellectuals and writers – Giorgio Napolitano, Bruno Trentin, the large Giorgio Amendola and the small, chubby and universally erudite Emilio Sereni, from one of the most ancient Jewish families of Rome, jailed by the Germans in wartime Rome, who wrote with equal originality about the history of the Italian landscape and the prehistory of Liguria. The academics among them tended also to double as politicians. Several were on the Central Committee. Renato Zangheri, an economic historian, was brilliantly successful as mayor of the wonderfully preserved yet modern medieval city of Bologna, Italy’s greatest ‘red’ metropolis; Giuliano Procacci and Rosario Villari (with his wife, Anna Rosa, our closest friends) had spells in the Italian Parliament.

  From the start I found myself getting on exceptionally well with Italian communists, possibly because so many were intellectuals, but also because they were disarmingly kind. Not every national leader would have quietly visited Cambridge, as Giorgio Napolitano did, simply to hold hands with the dying Piero Sraffa, desperately fighting senility; or, for that matter, would have interrupted his work as the country’s Minister of the Interior for a few hours, to take part in a public celebration of my eightieth birthday in Genoa. Within a few years of first arriving I found myself drawn into the penumbra of the PCI establishment as an official patron of, and the only person from Britain present at, the Congress of Gramsci Studies in January 1958, the occasion for the first formal recognition of the Italian communists’ theorist by the watchdogs of ideological orthodoxy in Moscow. It was also the only occasion on which I met the Party’s leader, Palmiro Togliatti, himself. In turn, I took to Italian communism, found its dead guru Gramsci marvellously stimulating, and after 1956 its political position welcome. Unlike in Britain, in Italy it was still worth joining the Party after 1956.

  Why was it so easy to get on with the Italians? Unlike the French or the English, Italians are charmed, flattered, and even encouraged by foreigners’ interest in their affairs, even or perhaps especially when these outsiders are visibly unlike themselves, or – as in my case – when their knowledge of the Italian language is shaky and that of the country superficial. It is, I think, partly due to a lengthy history of belonging to a country treated by the outside world as enchanting but not totally serious, a country united since 1860 but underperforming in peace and war. I think this led to an ingrained feeling of marginality and provincialism. Italians had reconciled themselves to the belief that the real historical action, the centres of civilization and intellectual authorities were elsewhere. Since the seventeenth century nobody had actually looked to Italy for models of cultural and intellectual achievement and example outside music; since the nineteenth century not even in opera. Fascism, though in some sense strengthening a feeling of national identity, had tried and failed to cure the Italian sense of political and military inferiority, and certainly did nothing to deprovincialize Italian culture. Post-fascist Italy, it was felt, had an enormous amount of cultural catching-up to do, and, one way or another, the place to look for it was abroad. Translations of foreign authors still remain more prominent on the Italian book market than in any other country of comparable size. And almost any foreign recognition of Italian achievement was welcomed. Giulio Einaudi knew very well what he was doing even as late as 1979, when he launched the publication of Gerratana’s superb critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, not in Rome but in Paris, as he had launched his great multi-volume Storia d’Italia (History of Italy) in Oxford. The stamp of Paris approval or Oxford prestige was still the way to market them in Italy. And of course after the eighteenth century Italian culture was largely provincial, as is evident from Gramsci’s own reading and writing. Even at its best, leaving aside mathematics, opera and a temporary interest in futurism, nobody had taken much notice of Italian productions outside.

  Perhaps the most impressive and unexpected achievement of the Italian Republic born of the anti-fascist Resistance was to change all this, and in doing so to demonstrate what was always evident to any unprejudiced foreigner, namely that Italians had not lost any of the intellectual, artistic and entrepreneurial gifts that had produced such amazing and universally admired achievements between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. In some ways the postwar paths of French and Italian culture have followed opposite directions. While France after 1945 lost the cultural hegemony it had so long taken for granted, and retreated into what was, in effect, a francophone ghetto, the prestige of Italian art, science, industry, design and lifestyle was rising, the image of Italy was moving from the margins to the centre of western culture. Even the talents that had flourished or been tolerated under fascism – such major figures of Italian cinema as Rossellini, Visconti and de Sica were in action well before Mussolini fell – were liberated by Resistance. In the 1950s it would have been inconceivable that the international high-fashion industry would one day look to Milan and Florence rather than to Paris.