Italian literature after the war evolved in similar fashion to cinema. Neo-realism and impegno were the first essentials, and radical commitment remained almost compulsory, but writers in due course drifted away from realism towards innovation and avant-garde ‘experimentalism’. By the late 1950s intellectuals were agonizing over the future of the novel, trying to work out new roles for writers and new ‘paths’ for their writing. Literary journals sent questionnaires to authors and printed their answers to questions about the place of ‘social realism’ in contemporary fiction. Pasolini even invented rules for writing poems which could make poetry ‘radically innovative but regulated by an awareness of political and social realities’.15
In Spain a number of intellectuals who in the 1930s had supported the Falange, a blue-shirted fascist party, recanted and became democratic critics of Franco even during the most repressive years of the dictatorship. One young poet, Dionisio Ridruejo, rose to be chief of nationalist propaganda before repudiating fascism completely; in atonement for his youthful years in the Falange, he founded an illegal social democratic party and spent the rest of his life criticizing Franco and frequently going to jail. Few of Italy’s fascist writers became social democrats. Indeed, many of them travelled from the far Right to the far Left without feeling the need to stop anywhere, even temporarily, on the way. The novelist Curzio Malaparte was in turn a nationalist, a fascist, a communist and an enthusiast for maoist China. Other fascist writers who anchored themselves on the Left included the Sicilian Vitaliano Brancati, a one-time eulogist of Mussolini, and the Tuscan Vasco Pratolini, who distanced himself from his black-shirted youth by adopting realismo socialista to write about the Florentine working class.
In his novel of the Resistance, Uomini e no (Men and not Men), Elio Vittorini even extended the idea of good versus bad to the corpses of the combatants – dignified partisan against fascist ‘dog’ or ‘carrion’. Yet this communist intellectual had been a fascist who had toadied to the leadership, approved of its censorship and praised the invasion of Ethiopia. He only turned against Mussolini after the dictator had backed Franco and his supporters, whom Vittorini regarded as too Catholic and reactionary – and insufficiently fascist – to deserve support. Later he bolstered his anti-fascist credentials (which hardly existed until the regime’s fall) by joining the communists and putting himself in charge of what he called the ‘modern renovation of literature’.16 Vittorini epitomized that near uniformity of intellectual standpoint that made it so hard for anti-communist writers to achieve success. Committed left-wingers were regularly preferred and promoted above more deserving liberals and conservatives. The writer Salvatore Quasimodo, who was a communist, acquired a status so exalted in Italy that in 1959 the Nobel Prize Committee was persuaded to choose him ahead of Eugenio Montale, a much finer poet, who had to wait until 1975 for the Committee to recognize his merits.
One writer who suffered discrimination was Giorgio Bassani, who had been persecuted at the end of fascism because he was a Jew and was now belittled by the Left because he was not a marxist. His nostalgic semi-autobiographical novels set in Ferrara had no place in Vittorini’s ‘renovation’. Nor did Lampedusa’s The Leopard, a novel that Bassani discovered and arranged for publication after its author’s death. Vittorini had already done his best to bury the work by rejecting it for publication, once as an adviser for Mondadori and again as a director of Einaudi. But he could not stop Feltrinelli from publishing it on Bassani’s advice in 1958. Nor could he or his left-wing allies prevent large numbers of Italians from enjoying this beautiful novel, one that Luigi Barzini suggested ‘made all us Italians understand our life and history to the depths’17 – a work, moreover, that made no concessions to socialist realism or avant-garde experimentalism. Yet Vittorini made an effort, and his fatuous complaint that The Leopard was ‘right-wing’ was repeated by other writers and by the heavy guns of the communist press, which blasted the book’s ‘ideological deficiency’. The campaign of denigration was blunted, however, by the French writer Louis Aragon, one of the leading marxist intellectuals in Europe, who mocked Alberto Moravia’s grumble that Lampedusa’s work was ‘right-wing’ and a success for the Right. Even more disconcerting was Aragon’s assertion that The Leopard was ‘one of the great novels of this century, one of the great novels of all time’, and most crushingly, ‘perhaps … the only Italian novel’.18 Italian readers sided with Aragon. In an opinion poll carried out by a literary weekly in 1985, The Leopard was chosen as ‘the most loved’ novel of the twentieth century; it was also voted, together with Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, as one of the two ‘most important’.19
AFFLUENT ITALY
Italians had been the richest people in Europe from the early Middle Ages to the end of the sixteenth century. They had subsequently dropped behind the French, the Dutch and the English, and in the years after unification, Italy was the poorest nation in western Europe outside the Iberian peninsula. Italians after the Second World War were still impoverished, as the neo-realist films remind us, and their country was much the least prosperous of the six founder members of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952.
Yet the 1950s and 1960s turned out to be the most successful decades in the economic history of united Italy. Between 1951 and 1969 the economy increased by an average of nearly 6 per cent a year, and the rate of export expansion was even higher. Considering that Italy had been a predominantly agricultural country at the beginning of the 1950s, the industrial statistics are astonishing. By 1967 Olivetti was producing nearly a million typewriters a year, FIAT had become the largest car manufacturer in Europe, and the nation was annually making over 3 million refrigerators, more than any country in the world except for the United States and Japan. Within the space of a single generation, Italy had become a consumer society. Its people could afford not only fridges but also cars, televisions, washing-machines and good clothes. They spoke with some justice of an ‘economic miracle’.
In 1948 the young Piero Ottone was sent to London as the correspondent of an Italian newspaper. At Calais he parked his car in the wrong queue for Dover, whereupon a gendarme came up, lectured him on his mistake and, on observing the number plate, sighed contemptuously, ‘Ah, les Italiens …’ An outraged Ottone was tempted to make an official complaint. Born in 1924, he had been educated to believe that Italy was a great country, that Mussolini was a great ruler, and that Britain, France and the United States were ‘old, grey and decadent’ powers, worthy of an Italian’s disdain. Admittedly Italy had just lost a war, but that could happen to anyone, and to be patronized by a French policeman was intolerable.20 Ottone, who later became editor of the Corriere della Sera, soon understood why his country’s reputation was so low, and he was naturally delighted when, by its own efforts, it began to rise. The prestige of Italy eventually grew not as Crispi and Victor Emanuel and Mussolini had intended – by becoming a mighty power – but because the country was an innovator in such peaceful and productive fields as film, fashion and industrial design. The Ferrari factory outside Modena was one of many enterprises that made Italy seem chic and stylish, just as the manufacture of Vespa scooters in the Arno Valley made it feel ‘cool’ – especially when Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn rode one in the film Roman Holiday. The fashion business, based first in Florence and later in Milan, was another success for Italian style. The country may have been infected by London and the ‘Swinging Sixties’, by the Beatles and by Carnaby Street, but the infection was temporary. Carnaby Street is now folklore, but Gucci and Armani are great international brands.
Italy’s rise owed much to Marshall Aid and much also to the dynamism and skills of its people. The government too played its part. Although Italy was a full member of NATO, it allotted barely 1 per cent of its GDP to defence and, without wars to fight or colonies to conquer, it could now invest money in infrastructure, especially motorways, which were built quickly and well. Only eight years were needed to complete the whole Autostrada del Sole, running 755 kilome
tres from Milan to Naples, a project that included the construction of thirty-eight tunnels, 113 bridges and five chapels. Motorways in the north are today often congested, partly because Italians have more cars than other Europeans, and partly because governments invested a lot of money in roads and very little in railways. The first thing you notice about travelling by train in Italy is that everything is very old: network, tracks, coaches, locomotives, goods wagons and, except in certain large cities, stations. Those of us who like to meander about the country by rail soon become aware that the so-called accelerato is the slowest train in Italy. Even the rest are slow compared to their equivalents in other parts of western Europe, and in some cases they are getting slower. The Inter-City service from Milan to Turin now takes ten minutes longer than it did in 1987. If you get up early to go from one end of Sicily to the other, from Ragusa in the south-east to Trapani in the north-west, you will spend nine and a half hours in trains, waiting-rooms and a connecting bus to travel 440 kilometres.21
Italy suffered along with other western countries from the economic crisis of the 1970s, but it recovered more quickly than most. It owed this success to the rise of the ‘Third Italy’, thus termed to differentiate it from the industrialized north-west and the agricultural south. Located in the central regions and the Veneto, ‘Third Italy’s’ chief characteristic was the small family business, which often stayed small as well as successful but sometimes became huge and international, as in the case of the Benetton family near Treviso, which, sensing a market for colourful knitted clothes, started off with one second-hand knitting machine and came to acquire over 6,000 stores in 120 countries. In the provinces of Third Italy Italians rediscovered those talents and that entrepreneurial flair with which they had led the European economy in the Middle Ages. Concentrating on quality and style, they came to be ranked among the world’s finest manufacturers of ceramics, glass, shoes, clothes and furniture. At a time when such skills were vanishing in Britain, it was not surprising that by 1986 the Italian economy was larger than the British. Italians were jubilant about this sorpasso (overtaking), which made their economy the fifth largest in the world, and some predicted they would soon overtake France and become the fourth biggest. Italy at the end of the 1980s was a success story.
One of the casualties of the ‘economic miracle’ was the natural environment. The post-war constitution had specified the protection of Italy’s landscape as a government duty, but the stipulation has been very largely ignored. The city centres of the north and the centre have generally been well preserved, but their suburbs are invariably ugly, sprawly and chaotic. To the outsider it often seems as if there had been a tacit agreement between citizens and the state whereby, in return for keeping their medieval centres intact, Italians were allowed to build whatever they liked in whatever style they chose outside them: fruitful plains, scenic woods, Alpine valleys – few of them have been safe from the industrialist or the building speculator. Even where there were regulations about spaces and population density, these were widely disregarded, especially in the south. Some regions looked after their landscapes better than others. Tuscany was the best, while Sicily was among the worst; anyone who had known Palermo’s plain, the Conca d’Oro, in 1950 would not have recognized it in 1970 because its citrus groves had been concreted over to enrich both the Mafia and the city council, whose personnel overlapped. During the boom years Italy’s coastline suffered as tragically and irreversibly as Spain’s Mediterranean shores and the Balearic Islands. In an effort to appear modern and industrial, Italy built far more oil refineries than it needed and sited them, along with petrochemical works and other factories, in unsuitable places such as the eastern seaboard of Sicily or the Venetian lagoon. Almost any sandy patch on the peninsula was regarded as suitable for development, and those few areas of shoreline beauty that survive – such as the Amalfi coast and the Ligurian Cinque Terre – have done so because they are rocky, difficult to reach and unembellished by convenient beaches.
Another consequence of the miracle – one shared by all industrializing states – was a massive exodus from the land. Although its productivity increased, agricultural acreage shrank, and new machinery meant that farmers no longer needed to employ so much labour. In 1950 nearly half the population worked the land: a half-century later, only one Italian in fifteen earned a living from agriculture. Millions of young men, mainly from the south, began leaving in the 1950s, boarding the trains from Palermo and Apulia or catching the ferries from Sardinia, country boys saying farewell to their families and carrying their possessions in parcels or in cardboard boxes tied with string, eventually arriving outside a factory in Turin or somewhere else in the unwelcoming north and having to adjust to an unfamiliar life in a shanty town or a concrete block on the outskirts of a frightening city. Their departure left countless villages populated mainly by women and the old; most farmers and labourers you saw in the early 1970s were born before the First World War.
The southerners who remained became richer, though, as in the village where Carlo Levi had lived, less as a result of their own efforts than because they received government handouts and remittances from those who had emigrated. Italy’s economic miracle did not reduce the gap between the north and the south, and in 1997 income per capita was still more than twice as high in Emilia-Romagna as it was in Campania, Calabria, Basilicata and Sicily. Yet without government intervention the gap would presumably have been even wider. In their early days the christian democrats implemented some measure of land reform, which enabled about 120,000 peasant families to settle on land expropriated from the latifondi. More importantly, De Gasperi created the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (Development Fund for the South), which in its first years accomplished valuable work on the infrastructure, building roads, aqueducts and irrigation systems. In the 1960s, however, it began to invest in industry – with less happy results. Vast sums were spent on building huge factories in places where skilled labour and suitable communications were absent. Before long it became obvious that the christian democrats were using the Cassa for purposes that previous democratic governments from Depretis onwards would have appreciated: they were bribing the south, providing jobs and projects for their clients and receiving votes and political power in return.
At Gioia Tauro in Calabria a beautiful and fertile landscape of olive trees and orange groves was flattened to make way for a huge industrial complex to be dominated by a steel works that had to be abandoned before an ounce of steel was produced. The chief effect of this choice, apart from the environmental desecration, was vicious warfare among local gangs vying for building contracts which resulted in the murder of hundreds of people. Other schemes in the south – in Sicily, Apulia and Sardinia – also collapsed because they were selected for political rather than economic reasons: some failed to produce anything at all, and others were closed down soon after construction. Such projects were known as ‘cathedrals in the desert’, but at least real cathedrals functioned and were visited. The Cassa ceased to operate in 1984, a victim of its investment policies but also of its failure to prevent local criminals from stealing so much of its money. One of the worst examples of southern corruption took place after the 1980 earthquake near Naples, in which 2,400 people were killed: funds allocated by the government to rebuild the area were simply diverted to enrich a new breed of businessman linked to the criminal gangs of the Camorra.
Unhealthy though it was to gain votes through bribery, it was still more poisonous to acquire them by protecting criminals. In the years after the war the christian democrats had increasingly come to rely on Sicily and the Veneto as their strongholds of electoral support. Yet while the people of the north-east voted democratically, in accordance with their interests and traditions, many Sicilians voted according to the wishes of the Mafia bosses. The christian democrats needed the mafiosi to obtain these votes, and the mafiosi needed the politicians to protect them from prosecution. Although this relationship was resented and denounced by party members in other areas
of Italy, it endured and became ever more shameful and in the end dangerous. Leading Sicilian christian democrats had to play a dual role, national politician and sometimes government minister in Rome, and protector of the Mafia in Sicily. They may not themselves have been ‘men of honour’ (mafiosi), but they were ‘friends’ who, as E. M. Forster put it in another context, preferred to betray their country than to betray their friends.
The most controversial figure at the heart of the DC–Mafia connection was Giulio Andreotti, a man who was scrupulous about religion but not about politics and who was regularly described as wily, ‘machiavellian’ and even ‘Jesuitical’. Andreotti came from Lazio, where his power base was small, and he needed and acquired Sicily to have himself installed with such frequency in the cabinet, seven times as prime minister of coalition governments in the twenty years after 1972. Although he evidently had connections with the Mafia – and could be perceived as its ultimate protector – he operated on the island through two infamous lieutenants, Salvo Lima and Vito Ciancimino. However particular in his personal habits, Andreotti was not fastidious in his choice of subordinates. Both men served as mayors of Palermo and city councillors for public works, jobs that enabled them to carry out the ‘sack’ of the Sicilian capital by issuing thousands of building permits to Mafia frontmen and enriching themselves in the process. Ciancimino was a notorious figure whose power was so far-reaching that he personally decided which singers should be employed by the Palermo opera house; yet eventually he overplayed his hand, was arrested in 1984 and later convicted of corruption and collusion with the Mafia. Lima was luckier for a time, and he even became a minister under Andreotti in Rome. He personified the dual role of the Sicilian christian democrat, a man regarded simultaneously as the Mafia’s ambassador to Rome and Andreotti’s viceroy in Palermo.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 44
