The Secrets of Italy

by Corrado Augias

  In early June the provisional city government, which included three members of the Jewish community, stated that the gates of the ghetto were to be torn down. On July 9, “Year One of Italian Freedom,” the Jews were summoned to be told that, as the ghetto gates fell, so too would “every abhorred separation” be brought to an end. That marked recognition of their full citizenship, which had hitherto been very limited, when not outright denied. The National Guard was brought in to execute the order: “The Provisional Town Council … has decreed that the gates of the ghetto are to be razed, removing all separations between Venice’s Jewish and Gentile Citizens.” Pier Gian Maria de’ Ferrari, who commanded the Third Battalion, left this vivid description of the event:

  Inexpressible were the satisfaction and the happiness of all the attending Populace, who with happy cries of “Freedom” never tired of dragging those Keys [of the Ghetto gates] on the ground, blessing the hours and the moment of Regeneration. The echo of those bright “Viva”s was almost a single sound with the pulling down of the four gates, one by one, under the direction of Adjutant Goldoni who distinguished himself with the zeal of a patriot … As soon as the gates were brought to earth, People of both Sexes without distinction wove joyful democratic Dances in the midst of the Square that remained covered by the National Guard, and it is to be remarked that the Rabbis danced too, dressed in Mosaic garb.…7

  The “broken and shattered” gates were brought back to the main square of the Ghetto Nuovo, where they were burned amid jubilant cries of joy. In those hot July days, no one knew yet that the fate of the republic had already been cast, three months earlier, by the first agreement signed between France and Austria in Leoben. News that the era of discrimination had come to an end, and that a new life was about to begin, was all it took to unleash an irrepressible wave of joy.

  The jubilant inhabitants of the ghetto were right to embrace that hope, since that moment of freedom had yet to arrive elsewhere. One Venetian citizen known only by his last name, Massa, denounced the ongoing misery of Jewish communities outside Venice: “Massa, the president of the Patriotic Society, also spoke that day … The Jews have been banished from Naples … In Rome they are insulted and scorned with impunity … The Jews are marked in Rome like Beasts at the Market … Thanks then be given to the immortal Bonaparte who has broken the bonds of Italian servitude.”8 As he spoke with such enthusiasm, Massa was likely not yet aware that one of the first actions of the French occupants would be the imposition of a new tax totaling 870,000 ducats, a quarter of which was to be paid by the Jews.

  On October 17 the Treaty of Campo Formio came into effect and Austrian troops entered the city, replacing the French—no one knew whether to call this transition an occupation or a liberation. It did not take much for the tide to turn once again, and by January 1798 the Jews’ equality with all other citizens was again revoked. They were now subject to further limitations under Austrian rule, but the humiliation of being locked in from nightfall to daybreak was never reinstated.

  Venice’s former glory fell into decline, predictably, because of political shortsightedness and inadequate leadership. The Serenissima’s new rulers failed to see the changing times, nor did they understand the new social challenges they were faced with. Reduced to a tiny oligarchy, the government decided to close in on itself and defend the status quo. One of the major faults historians point to was the city’s refusal to work with the nobles on the mainland, creating alliances that could have brought a new energy and closer ties between Venice and its vast hinterland. Instead those ties atrophied, and eventually devolved into open hostilities. In addition, Doge Ludovico Manin turned out to be a poor leader. A contemporary chronicler described him in these terms: “He had thick eyebrows, pale brown eyes, a large aquiline nose, a protruding upper lip, and a weary gait, showing weak inclinations. His facial expressions betrayed his general dismay, which informed and governed every action he took.” This unflattering portrait accurately captured his nature, judging by his irresolute actions at a time when maximum energy was required of the city leadership.

  His last name, of course, calls to mind the much more honorable Daniele Manin, a patriot who brings the latter part of this story right back to the history of the ghetto. Daniele had Jewish ancestry. His grandfather, Samuele Medina, had converted to Christianity in 1759 along with his wife, Allegra Moravia, whereupon she took the surname of her baptismal godfather, Ludovico Manin. Daniele Manin had been imprisoned by the Austrians for his patriotic activities, and to the great joy of his fellow citizens was released (along with famed linguist Niccolò Tommaseo) during the uprisings of 1848.

  Ippolito Nievo sketches a scathing portrait of Ludovico Manin, Venice’s last doge, in his great novel Le confessioni di un italiano (see Preface, note 2). Nievo depicts his fearful character in this concise, tongue-in-cheek passage: “The Most Serene Doge Ludovico Manin, pacing up and down the room while nervously tugging on his britches, spoke these memorable words: ‘Tonight we shall not rest securely, not even in our own beds.’ ”

  A few pages later he provides this dramatic description of the last session of the Grand Council, in which Manin had launched into a furious invective:

  The Doge rose to his feet, pale and trembling, before the sovereign of the Great Council, for whom he was the representative, and to whom he dared propose an unprecedented act of cowardice … He stammered a few words about the need to accept those conditions, about how resistance was futile, even impossible, and about General Bonaparte’s magnanimity … [He] continued to dishonor himself, the Great Council, and the homeland with his stuttering, and not a single man present dared wrest from his shoulders the ducal cape, or smash his cowardly head on the floor, toward which the king’s ministers and pope’s delegates had all lowered their heads.

  Giulio Lorenzetti’s book Venice and Its Lagoon ends the chapter on the fall of the Serenissima with these inconsolable words: “So ended, without honour or a spark of heroism, between the shrinking cowardice of an enfeebled and corrupt aristocracy and the baseless illusions of a rash and fanatical democracy, the glorious Serenissima, ‘ornament of Italy and of the world,’ whose antique grandeur should have merited a less ignoble close.”9

  The history of Venice’s ghetto is not just about the Jews—rather, it has a lot to do with one of Italy’s truest, most dramatic “secrets.” Indeed, it might best be called an “enigma”—namely, the underlying reasons that explain why, throughout the peninsula’s entire history, not once has a proper treaty proclaimed and guaranteed the rights of individuals. Although such declarations are often laborious, drawn up step by step, and sometimes at the cost of much blood, it is curious that Italy has never really had one. In truth, there have been a few attempts, but they were sporadic, short-lived, and quickly stifled: remember Naples in 1799, and Rome in 1849.

  Think what you will of Napoleon, who displayed no shortage of deplorable aspects. Even the cold calculation by which he ceded Venice to Austria understandably raises disapproval. Yet it was Napoleon who brought freedom to the Jews of Venice, and it was thanks to him that the process of national unification was finally able to concretely get under way. The cannon shots that rang out in Marengo (near Alessandria, in Piedmont) in June 1800 sounded the alarm that woke Italy up after centuries of deep slumber.

  As a curious aside, we should also note that the Battle of Marengo took a contradictory turn. For a good part of the day it seemed that the Austrians had won; indeed, the feeling was so strong that the Austrian commander, General Michael von Melas, sent a dispatch to Vienna with the news of victory. Then, the unexpected rebound of the French, led by General Louis Desaix, brought in fresh troops that suddenly turned the tide of events, leading to an unexpected victory for Napoleon.

  Shifting our focus to the melodramatic world of lyric opera, which is always a good point of reference when speaking of Italian history, that battle also played a part in Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca. News of Napoleon’s supposed defeat at Marengo had even reached
Rome, where people immediately launched into a “Te Deum” to sing their thanks. But shortly afterward (the timing is, obviously, compressed for the theater) they learn that the tables have turned (“Melas è in fuga,” “Melas is on the run”) and Cavaradossi soars into his famous cry of victory: “Vittoria! Vittoria! L’alba vindice appar / che fa gli empi tremar! / Libertà sorge, crollan tirannidi!” (“Victory! Victory! / The avenging dawn now rises / to make the wicked tremble! / And liberty returns, / the scourge of tyrants!”).

  So far the plot contains large doses of realism, as the painter Cavaradossi and his friends are portrayed as a small group of isolated patriots stuck in a lazy and cowardly city. But if you dig back into the actual history, the truth is perhaps even worse: in order for Italy to topple its tyrants and give rise to freedom, foreign aid and intervention was often required. Italy has often trivialized liberty, its leaders have often arbitrarily used it and abused it; major civil liberties, the ones that guarantee individuals’ rights, have for long periods—our present day included—been neglected and even denied.

  I conclude this book fully aware of having skipped over many stories and places that are just as important as the ones I chose to include. The omission of Turin especially weighs on me, as it is one of the country’s most significant cities, for reasons both historical and otherwise. Italy simply has too many cities and people whose stories and histories are worth exploring, and they cannot all fit in one book.

  My choice to end with Venice was a conscious one, stemming from the deep melancholy that the sad end of the Serenissima has always inspired in me, ever since I was a schoolboy. How could this happen, I wondered back then. How could a well-managed, politically shrewd city-state that was so strong in commerce, trade, and military might have come to such a sudden end? And such a wretched one at that? I have boyhood memories of hiking in the mountains of Trentino, and from time to time I stumbled across the old boundary stones in the woods that bore the emblem of St. Mark’s lion. Venice stretched all the way up here, the adults explained, and these woods supplied the lumber for its arsenals and fleet of ships. Over time I became convinced that Venice’s end could be considered somehow destined, and that its disappearance could be read as a model for other events in Italy’s national history. I do not know if a historian would agree. Such conclusions are strictly personal and subjective, and therefore debatable.

  The Serenissima fell due to an unfortunate convergence of superior enemy forces, a weakened and divided ruling class, a government that was unable to rise to the occasion, and the lack of an informed citizenry. The very same factors were at work in the disastrous events that preceded the armistice of September 8, 1943. It is certainly no coincidence that, under a slightly different guise, we find the same factors at work in the way Italy’s political leaders have spent months and months dealing (or not dealing) with the terrible fiscal crisis that began in 2008, by turns calling it either insignificant or over and done with. Some have actually dared say the economy has recovered just marvelously.…

  This indecisiveness does not mean that Italians are incapable of stepping back to see the bigger picture and, at least for a little while, set aside their own self-interest for the sake of broader interests. It does, however, allow us to say that the number of people willing to aim higher is rarely enough to achieve politically useful results.

  But on a few rare occasions even a minority has been enough to change the course of history. After the infamous day I just mentioned—September 8, 1943—a minority of young people fought Nazism and Fascism, waging a brief civil war (1943–45), organizing the Resistance as best they could, and restoring the dignity Italy had lost when it allied itself with the criminal regime of the Third Reich. Sure, they were in the minority, but from both a political and moral standpoint that was all it took to redeem the country. It was one of the few positive moments in a century in which more negative moments prevailed.

  Even Voltaire, a great admirer of English culture and civilization, had read the history of that island as a struggle against the power of despots. In his Lettres philosophiques (Letters on the English, 1734), known also as his Letters Concerning the English Nation, he views the civil war as a war of the nation’s liberation from bondage. Voltaire had been seduced by the philosophy of John Locke, father of modern empiricism, and Isaac Newton’s later discoveries—which, although Voltaire could not have foreseen it, inspired the work of yet another genius in the following century, Charles Darwin. Voltaire came to view intellectual freedom as a necessary condition for significant theories and discoveries. The French historian Gustave Lanson’s book Voltaire (1906) called those letters “the first bomb hurled against the Ancien Régime.”

  In 1688 the English staged a revolution of their own, the so-called Glorious Revolution; in 1776 the Americans secured their independence; and in 1789 another revolution broke out, in Paris. Voltaire did not live to see it (he died in 1778), but he himself had helped pave the way for it.

  I list all of these dates because, while on both sides of the Atlantic the world kept moving faster and faster, in the Italian peninsula—from a sociopolitical standpoint, at least—virtually nothing was happening. It took the uprisings of 1848, the Articles of Association, the Five Days of Milan, and the short-lived attempt at a Roman Republic before the country’s slow awakening, begun (perhaps) with the cannon fire that had rung out in Marengo, began to take shape.

  Of all Italy’s secrets, this is the best-kept and most important one, the secret that encompasses almost all others: Why has the history of the peninsula had so little to do with the history of freedom? Many, myself included, have repeatedly asked this question. No one has the definitive answer, but of all the possible hypotheses the one that seems to me to have the most weight lies, once again, in the famous words with which Benedetto Croce responded when asked whence sprang the character of a people. The character of a people, he said, is its history, its entire history. If Croce is right, that is where we must search for the core of this secret—to learn to recognize it, and, who knows, maybe one day finally correct it. These words are nothing new; we have heard them several times before—once from the mouth of the great revolutionary and writer Ugo Foscolo. In a speech given at the University of Pavia on January 22, 1809, known by the title Dell’origine e dell’ufficio della letteratura (“On the Origin and Purpose of Literature”), he declared: “Oh Italians, I urge you to write your stories and histories, because no one more than you has experienced such pitiable calamities, so many mistakes to be avoided, nor has so many virtues worthy of respect.” We can only hope that, sooner or later, his exhortation is truly heard.

  NOTES

  A PREFACE, OF SORTS

  1. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. A. S. Kline, book VI, verses 851–53. [John Dryden’s 1697 rendering (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1909; also available at MIT’s Internet Classics Archive) is less literal and rather more poetic: “But, Rome, ’t is thine alone, with awful sway, / To rule mankind, and make the world obey, / Disposing peace and war by thy own majestic way; / To tame the proud, the fetter’d slave to free: / These are imperial arts, and worthy thee.”—Trans.]

  2. The 2003 fraud-related bankruptcy of Italian multinational food and beverage company Parmalat has been compared to the collapse of Enron.—Trans.

  3. Translated by Lovett F. Edwards and published as The Castle of Fratta (London: Folio Society, 1954).

  4. The term corda pazza comes from Luigi Pirandello’s play Il beretto a sonagli, translated by John and Marion Field and published as Cap and Bells (New York: Manyland Books, 1974); it also inspired the title of a major book about Sicilian culture, Leonardo Sciascia’s La corda pazza: scrittori e cose della sicilia (Milan: Adelphi, 1991). It’s a reference to Pirandello’s idea that every Sicilian has an internal mechanism with three cords (serious, civil, crazy) that can be wound up to produce various kinds of social interaction.—Trans.

  5. See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Pau
l Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).—Trans.

  6. See Pietro Zullino, Guida ai misteri e piaceri di Palermo (Milan: Sugar Editore, 1973), which also describes how in one respect Parma and Palermo are opposites. Eau de Parme or Acqua di Parma is a refined cologne described as “Lumineuse avec la fraîcheur de l’orange, de la bergamote, du romarin, et de la verveine.” Acqua di Palermo, on the other hand—also referred to as Acqua Tofana—is a poisonous mixture of arsenic and other chemicals, a colorless, tasteless, lethal liquid. Mozart once confided to his wife Constanze that he suspected he’d been slipped a dose of it. I’ll take advantage of this name- and geography-related tangle to mention a couple others of a more linguistic nature. Palermo in Arabic becomes Balarm, just as the general French term for a meat market, boucherie, in Palermitan dialect becomes Vuccirìa, the city’s main open-air market; to follow this even further, if you’ll allow, the town of Nablus in the West Bank and the city of Naples both got their names from the Greek Neapolis. That has little to do with all the rest, but it gives you an idea of how close the ties crisscrossing the Mediterranean really are.

  7. Attilio Brilli, In viaggio con Leopardi (Bologna: il Mulino, 2000).

  8. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone: A Selection, trans. Martha King and Daniela Bini (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), p. 189, July 23, 1827. [Note that the term zibaldone is the rough equivalent of “hodgepodge,” which captures a sense of the text’s varied topics.—Trans.]

  9. Ibid., p. 193, November 30, 1828.