The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  A more serious criticism of the Italian family was made in 1958 by the American political scientist Edward Banfield, who employed the phrase ‘amoral familism’ to describe the ‘inability of villagers [in Basilicata] to act together for their common good, or indeed for any good transcending the immediate material interests of the family’.47 Rather than use their skills and energy for the good of the state or the community, they were applying them exclusively for the benefit of their relations. Banfield’s research was done long ago in the south, and there was clearly some validity to this argument, which is illustrated today in a hideous, concave distortion in the southern criminal organizations. But its thesis could not be accepted, especially today, in northern or central Italy. Family strength has anyway been both a result as well as a cause of the traditional weakness of Italian government. As the BBC’s Matt Frei once observed, the family is ‘Italy’s secret shock absorber in times of social upheaval’.48 It provides what the state fails to provide, a point often made to justify the Italians’ propensity to evade taxes.

  The benefits of belonging to an Italian family far outweigh the drawbacks. In his book La Bella Figura Beppe Severgnini enumerated them, starting with the family as a bank, lending its children money without interest for buying cars, homes and holidays. Next it is a ‘form of insurance coverage with no policy to sign’, and ‘an employment agency’ that allows children to inherit their parents’ professions: two-fifths of Italy’s dentists and half of its engineers have simply taken over from their fathers.49 So long as the children are qualified, this may not matter, but nepotism is a problem in universities and medical schools when supposedly open competitions are regularly won by relatives of senior figures in the departments; in 2008, at the University of Palermo, 230 teachers were relatives of other teachers.50 Some of the benefits traditionally offered by the family have been eroded by modernity and contemporary life. It was easier, as Severgnini pointed out, for the family to be a residential care home in a farmhouse than in a city flat, although many Italians still manage to live very near their parents. The family also used to be a restaurant ‘where you didn’t have to reserve a table’ but, now that mamma no longer spends seven hours a day in the kitchen (as she did in 1950), ‘it’s a sort of snack bar where you can always get something to eat’. Yet it remains ‘a dormitory when you’re at university (average age at graduation – twenty-eight) and a bachelor pad for those between relationships’. Half of Italy’s parents still live with adult children.51

  The social strength of Italy is based not only on the family but also on communal loyalties and a network of charities and aid associations that have been set up to campaign for social, cultural and political goals. Between 4 and 5 million Italians work as volunteers – for society rather than the state – in nearly 40,000 organizations established by individuals to improve the health and civic life of the nation; in recent years it has been difficult to cross a piazza without encountering reformed addicts who firmly but politely urge you to support the fight against drugs. Yet Italians campaign for the good things of the earth as well as attempt to remedy the bad ones. One of the most typical and successful is the Slow Food Movement, set up in 1986 after McDonald’s had committed the ultimate sacrilege of selling burgers in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna. The organization offered a programme, since imitated in many other countries, that emphasizes the relationship between man and nature and promoted regional cuisine based on local, natural and healthy ingredients. Slow Food owed its success to the receptiveness of a people who abhor frozen food, who have far fewer supermarkets than the French and many times as many food shops as the Germans, a people who treat food with such seriousness that they even establish confraternities in Bologna to safeguard the quality of the city’s tortellini and in Genoa to protect the purity of pesto sauce.§52

  Essential Italy remains the Italy of its communes, as it was in the Middle Ages. Campanilismo – parochialism or loyalty to the municipal bell-tower – has always been strong, so strong perhaps that, as Giordano Bruno Guerri has suggested, it has helped make Italians a ‘non-people with a non-state’.53 Campanilismo is by definition limiting and has thus been mocked, as Lampedusa mocked it, as a breeder of narrow minds. The prince once recalled how, on reaching Palermo’s Porta Felice after an absence of two days, one of his friends crossed herself, thanked God for allowing her to see her native city once more and quoted words from Verdi’s I vespri siciliani, ‘O tu, Palermo, terra adorata’. Such a country, argued Lampedusa, could never produce a writer like Joseph Conrad, who found subjects for his novels by roaming the oceans, or Rudyard Kipling, who distilled the Indian experience of living in the Victorian empire.54

  Yet provincialism in Italy is less parochial than in any other country I know. How many nations have towns like Modena, with a population of 180,000, that can hold a festival of philosophy attended by thousands of its citizens, many hundreds of them sitting for hours in the Piazza Grande to watch a television screen broadcasting lectures delivered to another audience in a different part of the city?

  Campanilismo is not like loyalty to a football club, which is a form of tribal loyalty. It is fidelity to an historical and essentially self-contained form of society designed many centuries ago to cater to the needs of its citizens. The well-preserved condition of the city-centres is testament not to the provincialism of their inhabitants but to their pride and sense of responsibility. It is not provincial for the Lucchesi to prefer their nineteenth-century cafés and shop fronts to rows of modern chain-stores: these older places belong to a living heritage that citizens want to protect not because they are good for tourism but because they are part of their identity. Nor are people being provincial if they stroll regularly to their main square, where they find their friends and favourite cafés as well as their cathedral and their bank, their theatre, town council, law courts and police headquarters. Campanilismo brings reassurance and a sense of identity to a society which perceives the state to be hostile or indifferent. Local administration regulates an urban life as civilized as any on the planet in scores of towns such as Trento and Bergamo, Pistoia and Arezzo, Mantua and Verona, Lecce and Bressanone. Cremona in Lombardy is a fine example: a lovely city of pinks and duns, of yellows and ochres, a place of slow rhythms and old, unhurried cyclists, of clean streets and well-kept museums, of small workshops where master craftsmen still fashion exquisite violins. So agreeable and well run is the town that its children want to live there, remain there and die there. If you looked at the marriage register in the town hall at the beginning of the twenty-first century, you would have found that nearly all the weddings were still between boys and girls born in Cremona; the closest the town got to a ‘mixed marriage’ in one season was that between a local man and a girl from Naples.

  Even for a ‘refounded’ communist like the Apulian Nichi Vendola, campanilismo is a vital ingredient in Italian life. From an early age, he remarks, children used to derive an identity from the piazza, the cathedral, the priests and the town walls; now they have little to hold on to because they are brought up in the periferìa, where they have neither piazza nor city walls, pray in no cathedral and seldom see priests.55 Beppe Severgnini, a liberal journalist, has a similar view: Italians, he says, traditionally have three ‘lines of defence’, their home, their piazza and their city walls. He is a travelling Lombard who lived for years in London and Washington, who has reported on war in Lebanon and sport in Beijing, and who is also the honorary president of a football club in Kabul. Yet he returned to Crema, a town near Milan with only 33,000 inhabitants, where he lives in the house he was born in, works in an office near the cathedral and is married to a woman brought up a hundred yards away. An Italian who combines provincialism and internationalism (without much nationalism in between), he has explained why he returned to Crema and what he likes about living there.

  In a small town, we don’t just want a congenial barber and a well-stocked news-stand. We want professionally made coffee and a proper pizza. We want a coup
le of streets to stroll down, an avenue to jog along, a pool to swim in and a cinema for a bit of entertainment. We want a functioning courthouse, a reassuring hospital, a consoling church and an unintimidating cemetery. We want a new university and an old theatre house. We want football fields and town councillors we can pester in the bar. We want to see the mountains beyond the level crossing when the weather’s good and the air is clear. We want footsteps on cobbled streets in the night, yellow lights to tinge the mist and bell towers we can recognize from a distance. We want doctors and lawyers who can translate abstract concepts into our dialect – my father can – and people with a kind word and a smile for everyone … We want all these things and in Crema we have them.56

  It is hard not to see this as the real Italy, the one trampled on by the Risorgimento: the communal Italy, result of a millennium of natural evolution, not the nationalist Italy, product of a drastic and insensitive imposition. In its three periods of cultural and economic affluence – the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the half-century after Mussolini – Italy was either divided or effectively de-nationalized. It was the peninsula’s misfortune that in the nineteenth century a victorious national movement tried to make its inhabitants less Italian and more like other peoples, to turn them into conquerors and colonialists, men to be feared and respected by their adversaries. For eight decades Italy’s leaders followed the same policy, leading their new and fragile nation on a mistaken journey to poverty, colonial disaster, the fascist experiment and the humiliation of the Second World War. It was not until the 1940s that numbers of people began to wonder whether Italy had abandoned its vocation.

  Geography and the vicissitudes of history made certain countries, including France and Britain, more important than the sum of their parts might have indicated. In Italy the opposite was true. The parts are so stupendous that a single region – either Tuscany or the Veneto – would rival every other country in the world in the quality of its art and the civilization of its past. But the parts have not added up to a coherent or identifiable whole. United Italy never became the nation its founders had hoped for because its making had been flawed both in conception and in execution, because it had been truly what Fortunato was told by his father, ‘a sin against history and geography’.** It was thus predestined to be a disappointment, to be what Luigi Barzini regretfully recognized many years ago, a country that ‘has never been as good as the sum of all her people.’57 Those people have created much of the world’s greatest art, architecture and music, and have produced one of its finest cuisines, some of its most beautiful landscapes and many of its most stylish manufactures. Yet the millennia of their past and the vulnerability of their placement have made it impossible for them to create a successful nation-state.

  A jumble of Romes: the classical, the papal and the nationalist. The Capitoline is on the left, the Victor Emanuel monument beyond, the Forum in front and the dome of San Martino and San Luca on the right

  Cicero (left) and Virgil: great Romans and perhaps proto-Italians

  Theodora, the formidable Byzantine empress, immortalized in mosaic in Ravenna

  Dante reciting The Divine Comedy beside the dome built by Brunelleschi long after his death. Painted by Domenico di Michelino in the fifteenth century

  Medieval Bologna

  Apulian Romanesque: the Cathedral of Trani. For many crusaders embarking for the Holy Land, this was their last sight of western Europe

  Pisan Romanesque: the Church of San Michele in Lucca, with the archangel on the top

  Gothic Florence: the Palazzo Vecchio, headquarters of the republic, with the Chianti hills behind

  Renaissance Florence: Alberti’s Church of Santa Maria Novella

  RENAISSANCE RULERS

  Isabella d’Este, daughter of Ferrara, ruler of Mantua, by Titian

  Federigo da Montefeltro, builder and warrior, by Piero della Francesca

  Cosimo de’ Medici, first Grand Duke of Tuscany, by Agnolo Bronzino

  The irascible Julius II, most martial of all popes, by Raphael

  The Doges’ Palace by John Ruskin, self-proclaimed ‘foster child’ of Venice

  The Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross on the Rialto, painted by Vittore Carpaccio in 1494, when the bridge was still wooden

  Enlightened Despots: the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II (right) with his brother Peter Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, by Pompeo Batoni

  Napoleon Bonaparte at the bridge of Lodi (1796), one of his first Italian victories, by Louis Lejeune

  Milan’s La Scala in the mid-nineteenth century, by Angelo Inganni

  ‘The Bear of Busseto’: Giuseppe Verdi mellowing in old age

  Massimo d’Azeglio, artist turned statesman, by Francesco Hayez

  Giuseppe Mazzini, the prophet in exile

  Camillo Benso di Cavour, the arch-pragmatist of Risorgimento politics

  Ferdinand of Savoy, Duke of Genoa, steadfast on his dying horse, by Alfonso Balzico

  His brother, Victor Emanuel, first King of Italy, by P. Litta

  Francesco II, last King of the Two Sicilies, with his wife Maria Sofia in exile

  Pius IX, longest-serving of all popes and last sovereign of the Papal States

  Crestfallen on Caprera: Giuseppe Garibaldi on his island home, by Vincenzo Cabianca and Pietro Senno

  The Piedmontese camp at Magenta (1859) by Giovanni Fattori, a proclaimed victory although in fact the Italian troops arrived too late to affect the outcome of the battle

  Nineteenth-century Naples from the sea

  Piazza Castello, the heart of Turin

  Mussolini declaims in the early years of his dictatorship

  The March on Rome (1922): fascists destroy photographs of Lenin and Karl Marx

  In love with Olivetti: female emancipation begins its very long march

  Fascist style: a nude Roman, a rearing horse and the Palace of Italian Civilization at EUR in Rome.

  The young leopard: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (right) with his cousin, the poet Lucio Piccolo

  Communist charisma: the Sardinian Enrico Berlinguer

  Christian statesmanship: the Trentino Alcide De Gasperi

  Populist and seducer: Silvio Berlusconi with friends

  List of Books Used and Cited in the Text

  (The years given refer not to the time of original publication but to the date of the edition consulted.)

  David Abulafia, Frederick II, Allen Lane, London, 1988.

  David Abulafia (ed.), Italy in the Central Middle Ages, Oxford University Press, 2004.

  Harold Acton, The Bourbons of Naples, Methuen, London, 1974.

  Harold Acton, The Last Bourbons of Naples, Methuen, London, 1961.

  Harold Acton, The Last Medici, Faber and Faber, London, 1932.

  Harold Acton, The Pazzi Conspiracy, Thames and Hudson, London, 1979.

  P. A. Allaun, Politics and Society in Post-War Naples, Cambridge University Press, 1973.

  Robert Alter, A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986.

  Grant Amyot, The Italian Communist Party, Croom Helm, London, 1981.

  Geoff Andrews, Not a Normal Country: Italy after Berlusconi, Pluto Press, London, 2005.

  Anon, ‘The Poisoned Fruits of the Risorgimento’, Times Literary Supplement, 16 June 1972.

  Pino Arlacchi, Mafia Business, Verso, London, 1986.

  Girolamo Arnaldi, Italy and Its Invaders, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2005.

  Mario Ascheri, Le città-Stato, Mulino, Bologna, 2006.

  Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg (eds.), Making and Remaking Italy, Berg, Oxford, 2001.

  Corrado Augias, The Secrets of Rome, Rizzoli, New York, 2007.

  Massimo d’Azeglio, Things I Remember, Oxford University Press, 1966.

  Edward Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Free Press, New York, 1958.

  Alberto Mario Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, Einaudi, Turin, 2000.

  Alberto
Mario Banti, Il Risorgimento italiano, Laterza, Bari, 2006.

  Zygmunt G. Barański and Rebecca J. West (eds.), Modern Italian Culture, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

  Vernon Bartlett, Tuscan Harvest, Chatto and Windus, London, 1971.

  Vernon Bartlett, Tuscan Retreat, Chatto and Windus, London, 1965.

  Luigi Barzini, From Caesar to the Mafia, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1971.

  Luigi Barzini, The Italians, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1964.

  Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Quartet, London, 1989.

  Timothy Baycraft and Mark Hewitson (eds.), What Is a Nation? Europe 1789–1914, Oxford University Press, 2006.

  Derek Beales, England and Italy 1859–60, Thomas Nelson, Edinburgh, 1961.

  Derek Beales, Joseph II: Against the World, 1780–1790, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

  Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, Pearson, London, 2002.

  Gilberto Bedini and Giovanni Fanelli, Lucca: spazio e tempo dall’Ottocento ad oggi, Maria Pacini Fazzi, Lucca, 1971.