The Secrets of Italy

by Corrado Augias

  13. Giosué Carducci, ed., Letture del Risorgimento italiano (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1895).

  14. Giustino Fortunato (1848–1932) was a prominent historian and politician; Nello Rosselli (1900–1937) was a leading Socialist and historian.—Trans.

  15. The author originally referred to “camorristi e briganti,” whereas I have opted to reference organized criminals in a more general way. It is worth noting that although the term mafia is often used in English in its more general connotation, in Italian it is actually the name for the crime syndicate unique to Sicily. Other regions have their own criminal organizations: the Camorra in Campania, the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria, and the Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia. The very fact that Italians draw distinctions between these factions is indicative of how widespread and varied the phenomenon is.—Trans.

  6. PARADISE AND ITS DEVILS

  1. Titus Livius, Livy’s History of Rome, book 25, chapter 13, trans. Rev. Canon Roberts (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1905). (Note that the term corn likely refers to grain-based provisions in general.—Trans.)

  2. Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, trans. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 63–65. It first appeared in Latin translation as the appendix to his Politica, published in Frankfurt in 1623. A note to the excerpt quoted here clarifies that “more recent and reliable estimates put the population of Naples close to two hundred thousand near the end of the sixteenth century.”

  3. D. A. F. marquis de Sade, Voyage d’Italie (Paris: Fayard, 1995).—Trans.

  4. This text has not yet been published in English, but its title literally translates as “The Sea Doesn’t Bathe Naples,” implying that it doesn’t touch the city (literally “get it wet”), nor does it wash away its accumulated grime.—Trans.

  5. Benedetto Croce, Un paradiso abitato da diavoli (Milan: Adelphi, 2006). First published in Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1927).

  6. Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah, trans. Virginia Jewiss (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). It is interesting to note that the Italian edition (Milan: Mondadori, 2006) was published and publicized as “a novel.” The book’s title is a dark play on words between the biblical city of sin and the reigning Neapolitan crime organization. A film version directed by Matteo Garrone was released in 2008. Saviano received death threats following publication of the book, so he was given a heavy security detail and went into hiding soon thereafter.—Trans.

  7. From an article in La Repubblica, August 1, 1991.

  8. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), p. 415.

  9. The partigiani badogliani were named after Pietro Badoglio, the general who was appointed prime minister of Italy after Mussolini’s removal from power in 1943. They were part of the Italian Resistance movement loyal to the so-called Regno del Sud (a term denoting southern Italy during the armistice between September 1943 and June 1944) and the Allies against the Nazi occupation.—Trans.

  10. Luigi Comencini riffs on this episode in the finale of his film Tutti a casa (Everybody Go Home, 1960). The famed comic actor Alberto Sordi plays the role of a junior NCO of the disbanded Royal Italian Army who takes command of a small group of insurgents.

  11. Curzio Malaparte, The Skin, trans. David Moore (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993). A reissue, with an introduction by Rachel Kushner, is forthcoming from New York Review Books.

  12. In keeping with other events discussed in this chapter, it is curious to note that both King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were put to death in Paris’s Place de la Révolution, later renamed Place de la Concorde—from revolutions to accords, world history wends a winding path.—Trans.

  13. Originally “ ‘al di qua’ e ‘al di là’ del Faro.”—Trans.

  14. The Italian state is subdivided into regions and provinces, the latter referred to with abbreviations (based on the name of the province’s capital city) much like the various states of the USA or the various counties of England.—Trans.

  15. Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958).

  16. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

  17. See Saviano’s Gomorrah and Garrone’s film adaptation, in which Toni Servillo plays Franco, a local crime boss who convinces ingenuous farming families to sign their land over to him, and then recruits illegal immigrants and even young children to bury vast quantities of toxic waste there.—Trans.

  18. Umberto Bossi is the former leader of the Lega Nord (“Northern League”), a separatist group that contests the validity of the unified Italian state and wants independence for northern Italy, specifically the area known as Padania (the Po River valley).

  19. Mario Pirani, “Due Italie in Europa: una in testa e l’altra in coda,” in La Repubblica, July 7, 2008.

  7. HE LINGERED A LITTLE, THEN LEFT THE WORLD

  1. Pope Gregory IX commissioned Brother Thomas of Celano to write La vita beati Francisci (The Life of Saint Francis) in preparation for Francis’s canonization in July 1228, just two years after his death. The text’s hagiographic intent is clear, not only in its emphasis on the saint’s qualities, but also in the weight it places on the undoubtedly exaggerated charges of guilt leveled against the town of Assisi, compared here to Babylon. The passages quoted herein are from Francis of Assisi—The Saint: Early Documents, trans. Regis J. Armstrong et al. (New York: New City Press, 1999), pp. 183–84.

  2. Ibid., p. 193.

  3. The first paragraph of The Testament of St. Francis reads: “The Lord granted me, Brother Francis, to begin to do penance in this way: While I was in sin, it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers. And the Lord Himself led me among them and I had mercy upon them. And when I left them that which seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of soul and body; and afterward I lingered a little and left the world.”—Trans.

  4. Ibid., pp. 201–2.

  5. Armstrong et al., Life, p. 69.

  6. Ibid., p. 218.

  7. The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi, trad. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908), pp. 23–24.

  8. Medieval historian Chiara Frugoni has written several books on Saint Francis of Assisi, including Storia di Chiara e Francesco (Turin: Einaudi, 2011), Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate (Turin: Einaudi, 2010), and Vita di un uomo: Francesco d’Assisi (Turin: Einaudi, 1995, reissued 2001).

  9. Giorgio Agamben, Altissima povertà. Regole monastiche e forma di vita (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2011).

  10. “Storia di fra Michele minorita.”—Trans.

  11. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1984), p. 239.

  12. Frugoni points out that Francis himself never mentioned these holy markings, which were actually found on the body of Elias of Cortona, his vicar. Apparently not even Pope Gregory IX believed in them, since his first papal bull marking the canonization of Francis made no mention of them, but he then changed his mind later on. It is a complex issue that seems unsolvable, as it can be interpreted in so many ways. It could be rationalized as a pia fraus (“pious fraud”) or a psychosomatic syndrome, but on the mystical level it makes Francis the first to have received such a bloody and high distinction.

  13. Alessandro Barbero, “L’invenzione di san Francesco,” in Atlante della letteratura italiana, volume 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 2010).

  14. Benito Mussolini, “Messaggio francescano,” in Arte-Luce-Parola, February 1926, no. 1, p. 5. Original: “La nave che porta in Oriente il banditore dell’immortale dottrina, accoglie sulla prora infallibile il destino della stirpe, che ritorna sulla strada dei padri. E i seguaci del santo che, dopo di lui, mossero verso Levante, furono insieme missionari di Cristo e missionari di italianità.” (I have rendered italianità as “Italian character”; the literal translation would be “Italian-ness,” read with a distinct tone of racial su
periority. The East referred to in the passage is Italian East Africa—present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, as well as parts of Somalia and Djibouti—in addition to Libya.—Trans.)

  15. Armstrong et al., Life, pp. 113–14. Original: “Laudato sie, mi’ Signore, cum tucte le tue creature, / spetialmente messor lo frate sole, / lo qual è iorno et allumini noi per lui. […] / Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sora luna e le stelle, / in celu l’ài formate clarite et pretiose et belle. / Laudato si’ mi’ Signore, per frate vento / et per aere et nubilo et sereno et onne tempo, […] / Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sor’ aqua, / la quale è multo utile et humile et pretiosa et casta. / Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per frate focu, / per lo quale ennallumini la nocte, […] / Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sora nostra matre terra, / la quale ne sustenta et governa, / et produce diversi fructi con coloriti flori et herba. / Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per quelli ke perdonano per lo tuo amore, / et sostengo infirmitate et tribulatione. […] / Laudato si’, mi’ Signore per sora nostra morte corporale, / da la quale nullu homo vivente pò skappare.”

  16. Massimo Cacciari, Doppio ritratto. San Francesco in Dante e Giotto (Milan: Adelphi, 2012).

  17. Original: “nacque al mondo un sole.”—Trans.

  8. THE GOOD DUCHESS

  1. Ferdinand Gregorovius, Wanderjahre in Italien (Munich: Beck, 1997). (Originally writen in 1856–57.—Trans.)

  2. Lorenzo Molossi, Vocabolario topografico dei Ducati di Parma, Piacenza e Guastalla (Parma: Tipografia Ducale, 1832–34), pp. 317–18.—Trans.

  3. Franz Herre, Marie Louise: Napoleon war ihr Schicksal (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1996).

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. François-René de Chateaubriand, The Memoirs of Chateaubriand, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 259.

  7. François-René de Chateaubriand, Chateaubriand’s Memoirs, trans. A. S. Kline (digital publication), book XX, chapter 13. (This passage, not included in Baldick’s version, is from the online source http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/Chateaubriand%27s_memoirs, consulted June 15, 2013.—Trans.)

  8. Chateaubriand, Memoirs, trans. Baldick, p. 260.

  9. Herre, Marie Louise.

  10. This is a reference to the aforementioned right-wing, nationalist Lega Nord and its desire to secede from the rest of Italy.—Trans.

  11. Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), “To the Reader.”

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid., chapter 18.

  14. Ibid., chapter 28.

  9. MILAN, BOTH GOOD AND BAD

  1. Magda Poli, Milano in Piccolo (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007).

  2. Ibid.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Galileo Galilei, “Recantation (June 22, 1633),” quoted in Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 312–13.

  5. On April 9, 1953, the body of twenty-one-year-old Wilma Montesi was discovered at Torvajanica, a beach not far from Rome. The cause of her death remains a mystery. The war had been over for eight years, and this scandal, known as the Montesi Affair, grew to involve top-level politicians. It is also noteworthy because it was the first time that one side of the case (the names are now of little relevance) used the police corps for political ends.

  6. Carlo Galli, I riluttanti. Le élites italiane di fronte alla responsabilità (Bari: Laterza, 2012).

  10. LAST JUDGMENTS

  1. Bible (King James Version), Revelation 8:7–9.

  2. Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, “Er giorno der Giudizzio” (“Judgment Day”), sonnet 276, November 25, 1831.

  3. “Good night” is used in the colloquial sense, meaning that will be the end.—Trans.

  4. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors & Architects, trans. Gaston Du C. de Vere, vol. 9 (London: Macmillan, 1915), p. 57.

  5. Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), first written in 1553.—Trans.

  6. Claudio Magris, “Dove batte il cuore dell’Iran,” in Corriere della Sera, September 5, 2004.

  11. THE INVENTION OF THE GHETTO

  1. The term Serenissima refers to the Most Serene Republic of Venice, as the city and its territories were officially known. To this day it is a common nickname for the city.—Trans.

  2. Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White (eds.), Venice, Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, trans. Linda L. Carroll (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 338.

  3. Riccardo Calimani, The Ghetto of Venice: A History, trans. Katherine Silberblatt Wolfthal (New York: M. Evans And Company, 1987), p. 1. (Compare this with the slightly different translation of the same document featured in Labalme and White’s book on p. 340: “[A]ll Jews who currently live in the various parishes of this city of ours … are obligated and must go immediately to live together in the group of houses that are in the Ghetto, near San Hieronimo, a very spacious locale for them to inhabit … two high walls are to be built to close off the other two sides that look onto the canals; all of the banks along which the houses run are also to be walled. Moreover, the guardians are to live in this place day and night alone, without family, in order to guard it well, and they will observe whatever other regulations are established by this Collegio. In addition, the Collegio will assign them two boats, with which they will patrol this place day and night and which will be paid for out of the money of the Jews.”—Trans.)

  4. The monti di pietà (literally, “mounts of piety”—collections of donated money) were pawnbrokers run by the Church. As charitable savings and loan institutions, they were developed to counter the spread of what was considered usurious moneylending.—Trans.

  5. Pope Paul IV, Cum nimis absurdum, quoted in Kenneth Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1977), pp. 294–95.—Trans.

  6. Calimani, Ghetto, p. 63.

  7. Ibid., p. 251.

  8. Ibid., p. 253–54.

  9. Giulio Lorenzetti, Venice and Its Lagoon: Historical-Artistic Guide, trans. John Guthrie (Trieste: Lint, 1975), p. 64.