The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  The economic sorpasso was by now a memory. The British economy had caught up with Italy’s and then surged ahead; France remained out of reach; even more depressing was the discovery, a little later on, that Spain’s GDP per capita had surpassed Italy’s. Further gloom was caused by the industrial rise of China which, at a fraction of the cost, was able to manufacture goods the Italians had become experts in making such as spectacles, shoes, glass and clothing; in June 2010 Venetian police seized 11 million objects for sale in their city as Murano glass which were in fact fakes made in China.25 Yet the pessimism was not only induced by comparisons with what was happening abroad. That economic dynamism which had characterized the 1960s had been replaced – at any rate in public schemes – by lethargy, corruption and indecision. Any large project in Sicily, the construction of Palermo’s ring-road for example, was now likely to need a quarter of a century to complete. It had taken just eight years in the late 1950s and early 1960s to build the 755 kilometres of motorway from Milan to Naples, but thirty-four years were required to open (in 2008) just the first stretch of an autostrada planned to run the mere 140 kilometres from Syracuse to Gela.26

  The most conspicuous economic activity over the last generation has been the construction of illegal housing, which has made Italy the biggest producer and consumer of cement in Europe, producing twice as much of the substance as France and four times as much as Britain. Speculators built hundreds of thousands of houses without permission wherever they could buy land, preferably in fields or along the coast, confident that bribery would win them retrospective permission or that they would be beneficiaries of the amnesties which the government periodically and incomprehensibly offered. Three-quarters of the illegal construction took place in the south and, although Sardinia was able to preserve most of its coasts, those of Sicily, Calabria and much of Apulia were irredeemably ruined. Cement was poured over much of the north as well, particularly the shores of Lake Garda, the coastline of Liguria and the valley of the Po. The old Lombard landscape of brick barns and bell-towers, of poplar trees and great fields of maize, virtually disappeared as land equivalent to twenty football pitches was daily consumed by asphalt and cement. Italians still talk about their bel paese without seeming to realize that much of it is no longer bello; for many of them, a picnic in a field is a picnic in the country even if the neighbouring field contains a factory. Most of the Po Valley is now neither town nor country but periferìa, an endless and unplanned sprawl (a noun that has entered the Italian vocabulary) of factories, fields, car-parks, pylons and largely treeless suburbs. Destruction of the landscape under the christian democrats was bad enough, but it accelerated after they had gone. Between 1990 and 2005 rural Italy lost 2 million hectares, an area the size of the entire region of Lazio. Nearly a half of Liguria’s farmland disappeared under concrete in that period.27

  The Clean Hands campaign may have limited the scope of political corruption, but it did little to stem avarice and fraud in other spheres. In 2004 Transparency International’s corruption index rated Italy more corrupt than any other country in Europe except Greece and more than many states in the developing world, including Jordan, Oman, Costa Rica and Barbados.28 In one spectacular incident a senior official of the ministry of health was found to have embezzled enough money to hold fourteen Swiss bank accounts, large quantities of gold and diamonds, $120 million hidden in cushions in his homes and an art collection that included works by Modigliani and De Chirico.

  The most lethal forms of corruption were inevitably those linked to organized crime in the south. There is an obvious connection between two statistics for Casal di Principe, a nondescript town a few miles north of Naples which in the 1990s had both the highest murder rate in Europe and one of the highest volumes of Mercedes car sales in the world. In his brilliant and courageous exposé of the Camorra, published in 2006, the journalist Roberto Saviano observed that what he called ‘Gomorrah’ or ‘Italy’s other Mafia’ had turned his region of Campania into the homicidal record-holder of Europe, the most violent place in Italy, the drugs capital of the continent, the toxic waste dump of the West and a world centre of illegal arms trafficking.29

  While most Italians might remain unaffected by crime and corruption, few were able to circumvent the obstacles set up by a slow, cumbersome and extremely inefficient bureaucracy. Even a minister for the civil service once admitted that Italians wasted between fifteen and twenty days a year simply trying to cope with the problems it caused. The tax system was so complicated and confusing that citizens often found it difficult to calculate even roughly how much they might have to pay. Nor was it easy to navigate the nation’s legal system because, according to different reckonings, Italy had between five and twelve times as many laws as France or Germany.30 The law was perhaps the most frustrating of all aspects of Italian life. In the late 1990s it was estimated that there were 2 million criminal cases and 3 million civil cases pending, and the figure had apparently risen to a total of 9 million early in the next century. It is not surprising, then, that most civil cases are abandoned, four out of five crimes have gone unpunished and, even when a guilty verdict has been returned, the convicted in non-violent cases could spend an average of eight years at liberty before being in danger of going to prison.31

  Politicians remained the principal focus of their electorate’s disdain. In 2009 the veteran journalist Piero Ottone argued that Spain’s economy had overtaken Italy’s because the ruling class in Madrid was greatly superior to the one in Rome; Italy’s inferiority could be traced among other things to its leaders’ lack of ‘moral sense’.32 Spain’s constitutional progress after Franco’s death in 1975 had indeed been remarkable. Within a few years the country possessed a stable two-party system and had peacefully elected a socialist government in spite of threats from the army and a terrorist campaign in the Basque provinces. Nearly a century and a half after unification – and more than sixty years after Mussolini’s death – Italian politics had still been unable to settle into any kind of rhythm or consistency. To many of their compatriots, politicians seem an innately frivolous breed. As Beppe Severgnini observes, they prefer ‘brilliant declarations to unostentatious planning. They like first nights but not rehearsals and want to be onstage rather than behind the scenes.’33 When they have to retire backstage, they spend their time playing number games, plotting new combinations, making and unmaking coalitions. And journalists abet these activities, endlessly interviewing politicians, discussing possible alliances, wondering how factions will react and speculating on who might desert one grouping and team up with another. Italy has had more political parties than any other country, so many of them including the word democratico in their name that it is not always easy to distinguish them clearly.‡ Perhaps that explains the recent proliferation of ‘nature’ names, not only the Ulivo and Margherita whom we know, but also the Girasole (Sunflower), a small left-wing group founded in 2001, and the Arcobaleno (Rainbow), an unsuccessful alliance of Greens and hardline communists in 2008.

  Many Italians resent the wealth and lifestyle of their parliamentarians. In the 1950s few deputies had a telephone or a private office or even a secretary at the Chamber of Deputies in the Palazzo Montecitorio; many were too poor to rent a Roman flat with a bathroom, and some came to the capital only for Thursdays, the day when bills were voted on. Yet at the beginning of the twenty-first century Italians were the richest parliamentarians in the world, earning over twice as much as their counterparts in France and three times that of deputies in the Swedish Riksdag. They were driven around in chauffeured cars and often lived in suites in Rome’s smartest hotels; perks included free haircuts, free cellphones, subsidized meals and life pensions even after spending only a few years in parliament. Extravagance permeated every level of official life, from the foreign junkets of regional councillors to the splendours of living for the president of the republic. It cost four times as much to keep the Italian president in the Quirinale as it did to maintain the Queen of England in Bucking
ham Palace.34

  Another cause for dissatisfaction was the performance of Italian members of the European parliament. Italy has long been vocally enthusiastic about the European Union and a supporter of closer integration among its members. A federal Europe was naturally an attractive idea to what had become the least nationalistic state on the continent, and such a goal had after all been the dream of Mazzini and Garibaldi. Instead of moaning about the ‘tyranny of Brussels’, Italians have long believed that the EU, with its regional funds and insistence on free trade, would help modernize the economy: a survey made in the spring of 2004 found that nearly two-thirds of Italians ‘trusted’ the Community, compared to barely one-quarter of the British.35 Yet this enthusiasm was not reflected in the behaviour of the government, which regarded Brussels as a sort of exile for its politicians and supplied commissioners who, with a few notable exceptions, were second-rate performers, both unskilled and unprepared in international negotiation. Italy has seldom had a European policy and as a result it has not enjoyed the degree of influence possessed by France or Germany, fellow co-founders, or even by notoriously eurosceptical Britain. During Berlusconi’s second government its attitude changed for the worse, from negligent to obstreperous: Italy even threatened to sabotage much of the EU’s programme if Helsinki was selected instead of Parma as the headquarters of the European Food Safety Agency. The country also acquired the worst record among member states for compliance with EU laws.

  Like their colleagues in Rome, Italian deputies in the Strasbourg parliament are paid far more than other Europeans. Yet they play little part in the deliberations of the assembly, many of them seldom taking part in debates or even opening their mouths in public. Despite their high salaries, most of them regard Strasbourg as a place of banishment, as a hotel in which to live comfortably while they plot to acquire more attractive jobs at home. This practice, which is followed by few deputies from other countries, is remarkably successful. Nearly half of Italy’s MEPs elected in 2004 resigned before the end of their term to take up more tempting posts such as a job in the Rome government or the presidency of their own region. Since while serving at Strasbourg they were allowed to retain their domestic jobs as mayors or provincial presidents, they consequently had poor attendance records and rarely bothered to turn up on days when no votes were scheduled. One MEP for the National Alliance was absent for two-thirds of the sessions because she found it more congenial to stay at home and concentrate on two of her other jobs, mayor of Lecce and party boss in Apulia.36

  In recent years it has been rare to hear impartial Italians make appreciative remarks about their leaders unless they are talking about certain unusual individuals such as Di Pietro (a politician by accident), Fini (an extremist turned moderate), Prodi (who twice defeated Berlusconi), Emma Bonino (a veteran civil rights campaigner) or Nichi Vendola (the gay communist president of conservative Apulia). An international survey in the spring of 2008 discovered that only 16 per cent of Italians have faith in their politicians, the lowest proportion, along with the Poles and Bulgarians, in Europe.37 The low calibre of the country’s politicians has prompted some people to wonder whether Italians are congenitally incapable of producing great leaders. Two of the best, it was pointed out, had been more or less foreigners, De Gasperi, once a member of the Austrian parliament, and Cavour, who was francophone, anglophile and half-Swiss.38 One writer lamented the fact that Italy even produced inferior villains, less remarkable xenophobes and dictators than other countries. Franco had been better – and more successful – than Mussolini; the Austrian JÖrg Haider and the French Jean-Marie Le Pen were more cultured chauvinists than Umberto Bossi; and Nicolas Sarkozy’s romance with Carla Bruni had seemed more glamorous than Berlusconi’s escapades with prostitutes and aspiring actresses. When asked abroad how things were going in his country, Piero Ottone found himself replying that three institutions still functioned there: the navy, the Bank of Italy and the ministry of foreign affairs.39 Perhaps he might have added the carabinieri.

  Italy’s unease at the start of the millennium was exacerbated by intellectuals who demonstrated their anxieties by writing books with titles as stark as The Death of the Fatherland, If We Cease to Be a Nation and Is Italy a Civilized Country?, sometimes containing an equally pessimistic subtitle such as Why Italy Cannot Succeed in Becoming a Modern Country. Many were fixated by the ‘problem’ of the national character, and one newspaper editor ascribed the country’s shortcomings to the nature of its people, who were wily, deceitful and amoral, who possessed no ‘spirit of service’ and who were too attached to their mothers.40 The sense of national identity, such as it had been, seemed to have disappeared, and increasing numbers of Italians were now questioning the legitimacy of the state. The Northern League, which became the third party in Italy in 2008, had long denounced the Risorgimento and claimed that unification had been a mistake. Now the Resistance, the second sacred experience of modern Italian history, was being discredited by politicians of the Right. A mayor of Rome publicly denied that fascism was evil, a minister of defence praised the brutal soldiery of Salò, and a speaker of the Senate pronounced the Resistance to be a myth that ought to be abandoned. Berlusconi made his own opinions clear in 2002 by refusing to lay a wreath to the partisans and going on holiday to his villa in Sardinia instead.

  By the start of the millennium it was hard to discern a sense of pride in being Italian, unless the country’s football team was playing well, except for that pride understandably engendered by the high quality of exports exhibiting ‘Italian style’ and ‘made in Italy’. Although Italy was still a unitary state, it was evidently not a united one. Even the name Padania, an entirely imaginary idea, attracted more loyalty and enthusiasm than the name Italy. According to the journalist Massimo Nicolazzi, Italy had been ‘a state without a language but has now become a language (almost) without a state’:41 la patria had not evolved into la nazione. In his book Italiani senza Italia (Italians without Italy), Aldo Schiavone suggested that what Italians had always really wanted was to be ‘a people without a nation but with a distant identity’.42 Dante would have agreed.

  As the 150th anniversary of the Italian state approached in 2011, commentators found it hard to see how it could be celebrated with any genuine enthusiasm. The first fifty years had been commemorated with nationalist gusto in 1911, the centenary had been held at a time of economic optimism in 1961, but the 150th birthday was being organized by a government whose second-largest component condemned unification and daily disparaged the southern half of the country. As the journalist Ilvo Diamanti observed in the summer of 2009, the antics of the Northern League – and the reactions to them around the peninsula – meant that Italians had never felt less united or part of the same nation.43

  Italian grumbles are directed chiefly at the state, which is widely regarded with disdain and dislike and as an obstacle to be negotiated in the pursuit of happiness. Yet the state is weak and cannot prevent its citizens from enjoying their lives beyond its reach. Italians may be tired of the foreigners who tell them that, though they are incapable of running their own country, they know how to live, they possess ‘the secret of life’, yet there is more than a superficial truth in this view. Britons I have known living in Italy, as well as Italians I have known living in Britain, have generally agreed that people are happier near the Mediterranean than near the North Sea. I have a Modenese friend who chooses to live in Edinburgh, and a Lucchese acquaintance who prefers to live in the London borough of Ealing, but they do not deny that pleasure and happiness are more accessible in Italy; like a group of Neapolitan friends, who chose to open a restaurant in Scotland, they found themselves unable to deal with the corruption and bureaucracy at home: ‘too many problems’, they say with a sad smile. Italy has a visible vibrancy and a degree of economic activity that makes it hard to believe some of the statistical indications of malaise. In any case, one cannot measure the ‘quality of life’ by simply comparing GDP per capita between countries and regions. Using
other criteria, such as health care and the environment, an international survey in 2009 found that, while Lombardy is the richest region in Italy, its population has a lower quality of living than seven poorer regions, including Tuscany, the Marches and Friuli-Venezia Giulia.44

  Italian society revolves around the family to an extent unimaginable in what are still bizarrely called the Anglo-Saxon countries. Whether the family is, as Luigi Barzini claimed, ‘the only fundamental institution in the country’, it is certainly, as the historian Paul Ginsborg has written, ‘very important, both as metaphor and as reality’.45 Northerners may snigger at the ubiquitous molly-coddling, at the way Italian parents pamper their children, keeping them up late, stuffing them with ice-cream, spending twice as much money on their clothes as other nations do. Yet they may also notice that such genuine and enthusiastic affection rarely leads to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ problems of hooliganism, alcoholism and teenage pregnancies. Fellini’s comedy of 1953, I Vitelloni, mocked Italian men who remain tied to their mothers, which is another subject for northern ribaldry. British newspapers relish reporting about ‘mammoni’, ‘mamma’s boys’ who are still living at home in their thirties – not looking for work though perhaps vaguely doing a degree – especially when law courts take their side and order divorced fathers to maintain adult sons living idly with their mothers.46 Yet whatever else this custom is, it is a sign of social cohesion.