The Secrets of Italy

by Corrado Augias

  In one of his Promenades dans Rome Marie-Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal, includes a short note that gives a more detailed diagnosis, so to speak, in that it points to one possible cause of such inadequacy.11 He writes of meeting two young Roman couples, accompanied by their families, riding home aboard a cart from a day trip to Monte Testaccio. They were all singing and gesticulating, and both men and women seemed absolutely out of their minds. According to Stendhal this wasn’t because of any physical drunkenness, rather it was the result of some kind of “moral drunkenness.”

  It’s a harsh judgment, issued by a writer who, by the way, really loved Italy: He appreciated its inhabitants’ impassioned souls, and saw their behavior as the simple expression of a “romantic” vision—a vision he expanded upon to include the criminality and propensity for intrigue Italians seemed to embody. The scene of the two young couples in the throes of a disorderly joyousness causes him to make a pronouncement caustic as lye; his immediate reaction captures the most deplorable, primitive aspect of Italian character, a rather central cause of much of their misfortune. Stendhal calls it moral drunkenness, but in reality it could be an even more dangerous characteristic if you consider that, sooner or later, drunkenness passes; to the contrary, many observers of the same condition he denounced considered it a permanent condition. Many have dubbed it a “lightness of spirit,” an apparent fatuousness, a predilection for the smooth surface of things, for the pleasurable aspects of life around which everything—religion, social life, pastimes—revolves. It’s that talent for passing time (or of letting time pass, especially in politics) that Federico Fellini captured in his brilliant film La dolce vita, whose title is a nod to the sweet life Italians are so known for.

  Over the course of history it’s been these same characteristics that have often made Italians ferocious but not exactly courageous, ready more for a scuffle than for full-on war, adept at uprisings and turmoil but not real revolution, quick to take sudden and audacious action but unequipped with the stubborn tenacity that protracted conflict requires. To borrow Giacomo Leopardi’s words, it’s sheer “enjoyment, unaccompanied by any conscious effort.”

  In chapter 21 of his novel Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann, donning the guise of the learned narrator, plays the same chords, giving a clear-cut judgment of the differences between Italians and Germans. In H. T. Lowe-Porter’s translation it sounds like this: “With profound consternation we read of the landing of American and Canadian troops on the southeast coast of Sicily.…” The narrator goes on, confirming that he also learned “with a mixture of terror and envy” that the Italians, following a succession of defeats and losses, finally relieved themselves of their “great man,” and soon thereafter issued their unconditional surrender. He continues: “That is what the world demands of us too, but to consent to it our most desperate situation would still be much too holy and dear.” After this preamble he concludes his reasoning, explaining why he believes Italians managed to pull off what the Germans would’ve found impossible:

  Yes, we are an utterly different people; we deny and reject the foregone conclusion; we are a people of a mightily tragic soul, and our love belongs to fate—to any fate, if only it be one, even destruction kindling heaven with the crimson flames of the death of the gods!12

  This tragic aspect is exactly what’s missing from the Italians’ history—not because they haven’t suffered true, major tragedies (they’ve certainly had their fair share), but rather because they didn’t fully seize upon the spirit of such tragedies, or at least because their tragic circumstances never gave rise to any lasting memories.

  That’s not to say that the Germans’ tragic bent is invariably a positive quality, nor is it to say that the Italians’ knack for adapting to circumstances is only a defect, even if it means they’re then viewed as weak, sentimental, or, conversely, downright cynical. It depends on your chosen point of view, whether you’re given to an imperative sense of duty or to the sweetness of life.

  This attitude has always struck, and sometimes seduced, foreign observers—but the arena in which it grows dangerous is war. The reputation gained at the World War I Battle of Caporetto, which still comes up today in discussions of Italians’ comportment, wouldn’t have lasted so long were it not based on the widespread assumption of Italians’ cowardice.13 The debacle of Caporetto could be contrasted with the World War II Battle of El Alamein, where Italian soldiers fought in the sandy trenches of North Africa, with little logistical preparation and minimal weaponry, yet still acted heroically. But the power of commonplace convictions is that they’re both undemonstrable and insurmountable. German chancellor Helmut Schmidt once remarked that Italian tanks have four gears just like everyone else’s, but one moves forward while the other three go in reverse. Winston Churchill, commenting on Mussolini’s ill-fated Greco-Italian War, quipped that Europe’s worst army had beat its second-worst army. During the Falklands War, anyone who asked the commander of the English naval and air campaign for his prediction of how the battle with the Argentines would go was told that if they were of Spanish extraction they’d fight back, if they were of Italian descent they’d retreat. The Battle of El Alamein proved the opposite, but what does it matter? On January 23, 2012, Jan Fleischhauer, an online op-ed writer for the German weekly Der Spiegel, wrote about the cruise ship disaster on the Italian island of Giglio: “Is it any surprise that the captain of the Costa Concordia was an Italian?” He then moved on to his real objective, the Eurozone’s economic crisis: “The monetary crisis shows what can happen when, for political reasons, we choose to ignore differences in national populations’ psychological makeup.”

  Many years ago in Strasbourg I heard Wolfgang Schäuble, at the time a Christian Democratic minister in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s administration, say with deep conviction (to paraphrase from memory): we Germans need Europe, we must be part of a supranational structure capable of holding back the demon that grips our people from time to time.

  Italians have never portrayed themselves as a tragic people because they’re aware of the fact that they’re cast from a different mold. They don’t have much of a taste for tragedy, and it’s no accident that, aside from Vittorio Alfieri, known as the founder of Italian tragic drama, virtually no Italian authors have ever written tragedies.14 Paradoxically, as Praz observed, Shakespeare and his fellow Elizabethans drew upon reports of both contemporary and historical happenings in Italy when writing their tragedies, albeit rereading and evaluating such events through their own perspectives. As the painter Mario Cavaradossi cries in the opera Tosca, “L’ora è fuggita, io muoio disperato” (“The time has passed and now I die, despairing”). But his cry is still sung, and Puccini’s pathos-induced vibrato isn’t enough to give his desperation the depth of true tragedy.

  I would add—without any tinge of political acrimony, and solely in the interest of painting a complete picture, anthropologically speaking—that in no other nation worldwide has the head of government ever dared show his face in public with such heavy plastic surgery and makeup, further enhanced by hair replacements and almost high-heeled orthopedic shoes. I need hardly name names, and in any other country such a mask, most suitable for melodramatic theater or an opening-act comedian, would’ve won its wearer a ridiculous reputation; in Italy, it assured him a long-standing victory.

  The few short months of the Italian Social Republic, Fascism’s last gasp, also known as the Republic of Salò, were a concentrated dose of tragedy. Mussolini was reduced to the shadow of his former self, firmly in the hands of his Nazi puppet masters; his Black Brigades turned countless Italian villages into slaughterhouses, partisans were hanged by wire, apartments were transformed into torture chambers, and criminal gangs acted on their own authority, taking prisoners and raping and killing civilians without any fear of political or hierarchical oversight. An unspeakably dark atmosphere took over, and the vast number of prison-cell walls encrusted with dried blood was discovered only after Liberation. Seen in this framework, the Nazis
’ pressure on Mussolini to send his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, to the firing squads was the very essence of tragedy. His daughter Edda begged him to spare the father of his grandchildren, and pathetically threatened to release her husband’s diaries—as if those pages, which have since become rich material for historians, could’ve somehow changed the course of the carnage already well under way. This was a tragedy in the fullest sense of the word, a man torn between two choices, two laws: his love for his daughter versus his duty to the terrible regime that had allowed him to live just a bit longer. It was a prime example of what is widely known as the devil’s alternative, where there’s no good option—both are bad, no matter which you choose. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

  Such tragedy demanded an equally tragic finale, an act capable of bringing some closure to a period that had so deeply scarred the country, in both human and political terms—a period that had exposed how little Italians actually valued freedom. Such an act might have proven that behind all the resounding parades, tin armor, and cardboard daggers there was something real—that having believed, having died for that Italy, wasn’t just a proof of carelessness or stupidity.

  But there was no such act. Crouched down in the back of a German truck, wearing the coat of a foreign army, collar raised high to hide his terrified eyes, his large head covered by a crooked helmet—that’s how il Duce surrendered, confused and trembling. There was no “destruction kindling heaven with the crimson flames of … death.” Instead, there was just fear and blundering, and two machine-gun rounds ringing out in front of the pilaster of the villa where Mussolini had been taken along with his companion, Claretta Petacci—a heroic woman indeed. Il Duce could have offered some interpretation of his ultimate tragedy, after all the tragedies he himself had caused, but he didn’t have the heart; he was unforgivably absent, even for that missing final act.

  One of the characteristics that makes Italians so recognizable to foreigners is their religiosity. According to one vein of historical thought, when all is said and done, Italians and the Catholic religion have done mutual harm to one another. The question of whether religion encouraged the people’s collective bad behavior or vice versa—whether the Italian people had a negative influence on the religious spirit—is both controversial and probably unanswerable. During the years I lived abroad (in the United States and France) I had experiences that would make me inclined to go with the second hypothesis, but such opinions are, by definition, debatable.

  On the Boulevard des Invalides in Paris’s seventh arrondissement there’s a church dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier and run, as the name suggests, by the Jesuits. It isn’t a particularly beautiful building, and certainly can’t hold a candle to Rome’s more ostentatious Chiesa del Gesù or Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio. What’s striking about it is that all masses are held in an impeccable Latin.

  Even more striking is the fact that the assembled faithful are able to answer their celebrant with the same tone, also in Latin. It’s an unusual church with conservative leanings, which also explains its unusually high attendance rates, especially compared with so many other churches that remain half empty even at Sunday mass. The concentrated seriousness of its priests and congregants inspires respect even among non-Catholics. French friends of mine pointed out that in France, Catholicism, although it’s the country’s prevalent religion, has to compete with various Protestant denominations, whereas in Italy, and especially in Rome, there is no such competition. Indeed, Italian Catholics’ sense of religiosity often falls into indifference, becoming a bland association with the Church that often brings with it a deplorable degree of disinformation about the nature of faith and religious doctrine.

  Now let’s jump to New York. In a study titled The Madonna of 115th Street, Italian-American anthropologist Robert A. Orsi reports that, up until a few decades ago, during the liturgical feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (July 16) it was customary for a few women to be led up to the altar, licking the floor with their tongues as they approached. The practice was considered revolting, even among other Catholics.

  On 115th Street in Manhattan there was—and still is—a church dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. For many years its congregation followed the kind of primitive religious observances many Italian immigrants, especially from the South, brought with them. These immigrants were humble and often illiterate, and most had faced tiring, sometimes humiliating red tape as soon as they stepped off the boat at Ellis Island. Many had arrived with the naive conviction that the streets of New York were paved with gold. In reality the most thankless jobs awaited them: building streets, digging subway tunnels, collecting garbage, constructing skyscrapers. In 1939 Pietro Di Donato’s famous novel Christ in Concrete was released, the same year John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath came out. It was a time in which literature exposed the high price paid to build America.

  These extremely poor immigrants had also brought a primitive, superstitious, entirely exterior religiosity along with them to the United States. Today that Little Italy is no more. But for many decades it had remained a theater of noisy processions, complete with statues of the Madonna and various saints (for instance the Neapolitans’ San Gennaro, or Saint Januarius) carried atop community members’ shoulders and covered in dollar bills as the procession passed shouting spectators, accompanied by the deafening notes of amateur musicians, hearty applause, invocations, tears. As evening descended the parades metamorphosed into dances and endless banquets at tables set up in the middle of the street, just as they had been in the villages these people had left behind.

  This kind of religious observance greatly irritated other Catholics, not least the Irish and Polish, who shared the Italians’ same faith but interpreted it in a much more reserved manner. Differences in doctrine led to discord and offense, as the Italians’ entirely exterior approach to religious observance struck others as lacking in spiritual content, or too close to the kind of paganism that lived on in certain corners of southern Italy. Social differences were also a factor in such critiques, since the prevalently puritanical and antipapal culture of the United States viewed such effusive manifestations of religion as yet another example of Catholicism’s ridiculousness.

  We could look at a lot more examples, but they’d just be pointless repetitions. Let’s instead try the opposite, and have a close look at the case of Italian statesman Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour. Although almost everything about him is already known, his personality is still somewhat more eccentric than one would expect given the context. Giuseppe Garibaldi, for example, is the ideal hero of the people, the Italian par excellence: impetuous, honest, a good general, a political naïf. Cavour was the opposite, as unsuited for military life as he was brilliant in politics: he came from a rich family yet wisely made the most of his initial fortune, multiplying it many times over; he was born the subject of a tiny kingdom (Piedmont-Sardinia) but managed to broaden his own intellectual horizons to include all of Europe; he studied the consequences the nascent industrial revolution would have on society; and governed the complex movement toward Italian unification, leading it to the best possible conclusion. The eminent British statesman John Bright, a formidable orator and contemporary of Cavour, wrote of him in his diary: “He has the appearance of an intelligent English gentleman farmer, rather than of a fine and subtle Italian.”15

  Now that’s a curious compliment. Precisely because the Italian stereotype was so strong, all you needed to do to sing an Italian’s praises was say he didn’t seem Italian. Even the philosopher Henri Bergson was convinced Cavour was better than Bismarck—and he certainly was. Cavour was one of Europe’s most farsighted, forward-looking politicians. Unfortunately he served an enfeebled dynasty and a country whose history was far too complex to fit into one shared narrative.

  2.

  ITALIANS AS SEEN FROM THE INSIDE

  Unlike in the previous chapter, here I’m going to forgo choosing a single person, event, or place to start with. Instead, I’d like to tell you about a couple
of fairly special books, two novels that helped establish Italians’ self-image, providing what we might call a preview of one possible anthropological take on Italy’s people as a whole. Although they were written many years ago the descendants of their protagonists still show up in the news today, so it could be said that, literary criticisms aside, these novels introduced prototypical characters who made a deep mark on the nation. But that shouldn’t be so surprising—literature often has a way of collecting and condensing history into its stories. Italo Calvino once wrote that “a classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe.”1 In our case we’re not talking about an entire universe—rather more modestly, we’re dealing with the Italian peninsula and the various sorts of human beings who inhabit it. That’s why rereading certain pages is a lot like (and sometimes even better than) visiting a place or meeting a person.

  The 1880s were a significant decade: in 1881 Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree) was published, followed by Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra later that same year; 1883 saw the release of Le avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio) by Carlo Lorenzini, a.k.a. Carlo Collodi.2 Above all, two other titles rose to fame during that same period, and those are the ones we’ll look at most closely: Edmondo De Amicis’s Cuore (The Heart of a Boy) and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il piacere (The Child of Pleasure).3 They appeared just a few years apart, but in many respects came from different worlds: the former has a quintessentially Turinese tone, while the latter is intensely Roman in character. These two cities are separated not only by hundreds of miles, but also by deep differences in terms of customs and lifestyles.