by Tobias Jones
Then, the more I watched and understood TV, I realised that credibility in Italian is often based upon pomposity. Nowhere else are words so often spoken just for their idyllic sound, rather than their meaning. To be logorroico, incredibly wordy, is esteemed more than anything that’s actually being said. Invariably, the only way to get a conversational look-in is to interrupt. The only way to be taken seriously (especially as a journalist) is to hold forth with contorted clauses and forget any pretence of concision. There is one song that, for me, became Italy’s alternative anthem (partly because it’s so often aired, and also because it’s so appropriate): Mina’s Parole, Parole, Parole (‘words, words, words’). It’s beautifully sung with resignation at all the yakking, all the inconsequential talk.
The stereotype of German speakers in Britain, that they’re brutally to the point, is exactly what Italians think of English speakers, and especially journalists. ‘You can’t be so direct,’ said my ‘betrothed’, correcting my idiosyncratic style of writing Italian; ‘you need to dress it up a bit’. So each time I wrote a letter (usually a letter of complaint to Telecom Italia) I had to have my prose turned into an august essay as if written by a rather cocky, over-erudite schoolboy. Every letter is opened by the word egregio, which in English implies flagrant or foolish (‘egregious’), but in Italian is an honorific as in Egregio Signor Jones. And honorifics are the all-important sweeteners of the language – every graduate is called ‘doctor’, a simple football manager a ‘technical commissioner’, a weather forecaster has to be at least a Lieutenant-Colonel (duly decked out in medals for services to meteorology).
I used to read four or five newspapers a day to brush up on my slowly improving Italian. At the end of hours of diligent reading, with a door-stop dictionary at my elbow, I knew nothing more about current affairs than I had before breakfast. I had been informed about absolutely nothing. It wasn’t a case of incomprehension but of bewilderment. There were so many words, pages and pages of comment and opinion and surveys, which said absolutely nothing. Everything had to be qualified and contradicted. It was, I was told, a famous rhetorical device called anacoluto (‘anacoluthon’, inconsistency of grammar or argument). The classic advice to rookie journalists in England (that your piece will cut from the bottom up, so your first sentence has to contain the most important information, the second sentence the next important thing and so on) is entirely reversed in Italy. The last sentence, if you’re lucky, will tell you what the article you’ve waded through thinks it’s all about.
All of which does, strangely, have an important bearing on political discourse. That smoke screen of words means that no one can ever penetrate to the core of an issue, or ever understand fully what’s going on. More importantly, the country appears serenely alla mano, which is to say entirely unpretentious: probably noisy, vivacious, never pulling its linguistic punches. But when confronted by any incarnation of authority, that directness gave way to deference, chaos gave way to conformity. I had seen friends who were, in their homes, the epitome of the carefree; when they had to go to the post office, though, they would put aside a whole morning to practise the long, imploring speeches they would have to use.
Whilst I was trying to learn Italian, everybody else was desperate to speak English. It became very obvious that the chicest thing to do in Italian is to drop in English words – rather like showing savoir-faire in English. Almost all the advertising slogans, on TV or on billboards, are in English. Many DJs speak half in English, or have American interns who do various chat-shows. Sometimes the news on radio stations is read in both languages. Despite the fact that Italy’s fashion industry is superior to any other, if you walk down any street you will see dozens of Italians wearing clothes covered in English writing, often superimposed on a Union Jack or the Stars-and-Stripes. It’s called esterofilia, a liking for all things foreign.
Even football, which like food and classical music is one of the bastions of Italian pride, has been thoroughly anglicised, such as ‘Corner di Totti, Delvecchio sta dribblando, crossa, però Montella è offside’; a football manager is also Il Mister (pronounced to rhyme with ‘easter’). The importations are often hilariously inaccurate. The many billboards advertising sex-shops on the ring-roads around cities advertise what are called sexy shops. I’ve often tried – and always failed – to explain why it’s quite so funny: it would mean that the actual bricks and mortar of the shop are provocative, ‘you know, maybe in a G-string’. Victimisation in the workplace is called mobbing. A morning suit is called il tight. A tuxedo is lo smoking. Petting, it’s as well to know, doesn’t mean petting in the English sense, but a type of foreplay that is at the extremely advanced stages. Flirting means flirting. Slip means slip only in the Y-front sense, not as in ‘slip-up’. Politicians, too, are keen to show that they’re cosmopolitan and drop in all sorts of English words, even entitling their rallies Security Day, or their conferences I Care.
Sometimes the importation of English is nothing other than snobismo, a bit of easy showing-off when an Italian phrase could just as well have been used. Other times, though, there are fissures in the Italian, conceptual cracks where there is no alternative to an English notion. Soon after I arrived, I spent an enjoyable night sampling a friend’s grandmother’s home-made nocino – walnut liqueur. (Anything della nonna, of the granny, be it a restaurant dessert or a fiery liqueur, implies family and therefore bontà, goodness.) The following morning I discovered that hangover simply has no equivalent in Italian. (Drinking habits are infinitely more civilised than in Britain, and even when they’re not, it’s a transgression to which no one’s going to admit.) There’s no word to express condescending or patronising, which are I suppose the flip-sides of subservience. ‘Self-control’ is also absent in Italian, so the English is used.
The esterofilia, the liking for all things foreign, extends to names. Friends despair of my taste, but my favourite Italian actor is ‘Bud Spencer’, a bullish, former Olympic swimmer whose real name is Carlo Pedersoli. During the 1970s he went to America with ‘Terence Hill’ to make B-movies which pretended to be American, but which starred Italians mouthing English; the films were then dubbed into Italian for Italian audiences. Slapstick but touching, these films deliberately put a bit of hamburger beef into the spaghetti western, thus catering for the yearning for all things American. Christian names often follow the lead. I had found a job teaching at Parma University and in my classes, next to Maria Immacolata (Mary Immaculate) and Gian Battista (John the Baptist) there was a William, a Tommy and a Gladys. Other favourites are Jessica, JR (thanks to Dallas) or Deborah. Italy’s most famous televisual personalities are called ‘Gerry’ or ‘Mike’.
More surprising was that Russia has also been – especially for those from ‘red’ Parma or the Communist bastion of Reggio Emilia – the inspiration for non-Italian names. Amongst people my age (those born during the anni di piombo, the ‘years of lead’) Yuri is certainly more common than Tobia, and much less laughed at. (The first of many nicknames I was given was Zio Tobia, Uncle Tobias, which is the Italian for that famous farmer ‘Old MacDonald’.)
The difficulties of learning the language were compounded by the fact that Italian still hasn’t entirely percolated into Italy’s city states. Until the advent of radio and then TV, few people actually spoke correct Italian as their first language. Children of Italians who emigrated in the first half of the twentieth century often return to Italy thinking that they know Italian, only to discover that their parents only spoke and taught them their dialect. The results are still obvious today. When I asked students to translate an English word into Italian, I was normally offered a dozen alternatives, and long arguments ensued amongst the Sicilian, Venetian and Lombard students as to what was the proper Italian.
TV and radio are dominated by quiz shows that ask contestants what a fairly ordinary Italian word means; or else question them about some long-forgotten piece of grammar. I would occasionally ask a simple linguistic question at the dinner table (th
e ‘remote past’, say, of a particular verb) only to be offered three or four alternatives, before everyone started laughing and admitted they weren’t quite sure.
It was, I was informed, a problem of the piazza. Piazza, which I had always assumed meant simply ‘square’, had other connotations, as in ‘the team had better start playing better soon because Reggio has a piazza calda (‘a hot square’, which is to say volatile fans or a politically engaged population). The piazza is the ‘city’, its symbolic centre where people (for political or footballing reasons) ‘descend’ to celebrate or protest. The piazza is the soul of local pride, a concept that is close to campanilismo (the affection for one’s own bell-tower). It’s also, sometimes, the place of resistance to outside, even Italian national, influence. If Italians spend much time deriding Italy, doing the same to their (truly) beautiful home town is unthinkable. There’s a provincialism (in the proudest, least pejorative, sense) in Italy that is unthinkable elsewhere. The word for country – paese – even doubles as the word for town, suggesting that solidarity exists as much on a local as it does on a national level. City states are still city states, with their own cuisine, culture and dialect.
It became very obvious that ‘Italy’ and ‘Italian’ are notions that have been somewhat superimposed on city states, and which still haven’t been entirely accepted or absorbed. The country is really what Carlo Levi called ‘thousands of countries’, in which inhabitants enjoy the best of both worlds: the cosiness of provincialism mixed with urbane cosmopolitanism. The result is the most beautiful aspect of Italian life. People invariably live and work where they were born, rather than flocking to some far-off capital. Cousins and uncles and grandparents live in the same town, and very often under the same roof. (Although the following figures are from 1988–89, they have changed little in the last decade: 15.2% of married Italian children live either in the same house or the same palazzo as their mother. 50.3% live in the same comune. Only 13.2% live further than 50 kilometres from the maternal nest.)
A more serious drawback of the proud provincialism is that any notion of the ‘state’ is pejorative. The word stato, referring to the state at a national level, is almost always used as a criticism. The stato is the cause of all complaints and grudges. There is, as is well known, no patriotism in Italy. Nobody feels much affection for anything national (the only exception being the Azzurri, the national football team). The unification of Italy is so recent that many people still feel that the Italian flag is only an ‘heraldic symbol … crude and out-of-place – the red shameless and the green absurd.’2 Every Italian I met spoke about their country, at the national level, as exactly the opposite of what I had been told in Britain: instead of a land of pastoral bliss, Italians told me, with disparaging sneers, that their country was ‘a mess’, a ‘nightmare’, and most often ‘a brothel’. Italy, they said, was a ‘banana republic’, or, since the advent of Berlusconi, a ‘banana monarchy’. Everyone was very welcoming, but there was always, after a few hours, a warning. No one could understand why I had left Britain. A few told me to go back as soon as possible. They all, without exception, said Italy was bella, before explaining to me why it’s not at all what it seems.
There was an obvious, inexplicable inferiority complex about being Italian. The first time I went to browse through a bookshop, there were a host of indignant titles on display: Italy, The Country We Don’t Like, The Italian Disaster, The Abnormal Country. Watching TV, I realised that a large percentage of the Italian film industry seemed to rely on the ‘indignant’ genre. Endless films have honest men taking on the dark, unknown forces of Italy and meeting their inevitable, early death: An Everyday Hero, The Honest Man, A Good Man.
The discrepancy between my drooling friends in Britain and the dismay of locals was even more evident when reading Italian classics. There was one metaphor that was always used to describe Italy: ‘whore’, ‘harlot’, ‘brothel’. For Dante, Italy was an ‘inn of woe, slavish and base … a brothel’s space’. For Boccaccio it was the ‘woman of the world’, once regal but now fallen (fuggita è ogni virtù). Italy was, for Machiavelli, a woman disfigured and nude: ‘without head, without order, beaten, undressed, lacerated, coarse …’ So much for the sunny, celestial land I had, having read Shelley and Byron, been expecting: ‘a plane of light between two heavens of azure’, or a place ‘whose ever-golden fields’ were ‘ploughed by the sunbeams solely’.
I tried to find the origin of the use of ‘whore’ as a metaphor, and found that it was coined because of the perception that Italy had, as it were, been through so many hands. Bourbons, Hapsburgs, rival popes and other external dynasties had so regularly conquered and ‘possessed’ her that a weary, common expression became O Francia o Spagna, basta ch’ a magna – it didn’t matter who the political ‘pimp’ was, as long as there was food to eat. Since Italy wasn’t united until 1861, it remained for centuries a sort of bargaining chip in the balance of European power. Long before imperialism reached the East and West Indies, Italy was a colonised country, becoming rather like India would for the British: a ‘jewel’ in the imperial crown, esteemed for its age and cultural inheritance. There were, of course, indigenous dukedoms and independent republics on the peninsula, but they remained squeezed between strongholds of Hapsburgs and Bourbons in the ‘race for Italy’. (Even the mythological conception of Italy was thanks to outside influence: Saturn, ousted from Olympus by his son Jupiter, became the first of Latium’s many foreign rulers.) The result is that even now the metaphor of prostitution is endlessly invoked and reiterated. It’s become like Albion for the English: an intuitive image of what, for Italians, Italy has been (with the difference that it is invariably a negative image, and one which hints at the uncertainty about what ‘Italy’ really is, or who it belongs to).
Another reason the metaphor is used is the fact that the word for brothel (casino) also means ‘mess’ or ‘confusion’. The very modus operandi of Italy is confusion. That’s how Italy’s power and secrecy works. Any investigator simply gets tied up in knots with all the facts and words and documents; with the convictions and contradictions. The result is that their investigations invariably end up with such an unbelievable story that, even if it’s true, people are already bewildered beyond the point of no return. By far the most common expression heard to describe Italy is bel casino, which is rather like Laurel and Hardy’s ‘fine mess’. It means a ‘beautiful confusion’ or (originally) a ‘beautiful brothel’.
I quickly understood the reason for the Italians’ dismay about their state. Italy isn’t a religious country: it’s a clerical one. The usual fourth estate, the critical media, doesn’t exist, and has been replaced by another power, slower, more ponderous and invariably faceless: bureaucracy. Its clerics are the modern incarnations of priests. They are the people who classify and authorise, the people whose signature or stamp is vital to survival. Like priests, they’re the intermediaries who usher you along the yellow-brick road towards the blessed paradise of ‘legitimacy’.
Here post offices and banks are like large, emptied churches. They’re sacred, communal places with the same shafts of oblique sunlight falling from high windows. There’s a sense of people meekly approaching authority as they queue like communicants. Waiting, though, not to receive the eucharist, but to impart large portions of their earnings to one faceless monopoly or another. (One of the favourite events around mid-August is ‘liberation day’, the day of the calendar year in which you stop earning money that goes to the state, and start earning for yourself.) Hours pass and you get closer to the counter, closer to your brush with institutionalised usury. Then, because nothing – except driving – is done with anything resembling speed, and because the queueing system is unorthodox, you will find yourself further back than you were an hour ago. I used to get infuriated in such situations when I first arrived, but now I rather enjoy them. I’ve realised that, as the British go to the pub, so the Italians go to the post office. You meet and make friends, read a paper or just pa
ss the time.
Bureaucracy means ‘office power’ (bureau-kratos), and nowhere are offices as powerful as in Italy. One recent study suggested that two weeks of every working year are lost by Italians in queues and bureaucratic procedures.3 The calculation went that since Italians need, on average, 25 visits to various offices each year, the equivalent of almost 7,000 minutes each year are spent queuing. That would be a normal year; if you want to apply for a job, it’s best to put aside a week or ten days in order to gather the correct documents, pay for them to be stamped and so on. It’s like trying to catch confetti: having to race from one office to another, filling in forms and requests, trying to grasp pieces of paper which always just elude your grasp. As much as 2,000 billion lire is spent annually by Italians just to certify their status (car owner, divorced, resident at a particular address etc). It’s not just expensive: it’s exceptionally slow. It’s been nicknamed the lentocrazia, the ‘slowocracy’.
For many reasons the importance of Italy’s bureaucracy is in its politicisation. The civil service has often been so slow to implement laws and legislation that they are superseded before they’re in place. Funds offered by government often, in the past, never arrived, and so became residui passivi (funds beyond their application date) which were duly returned to the treasury. Time-wasting, the greatest skill of a politicised civil servant, became in the post-war period an art-form, whereby civil servants could delay reforms by their obstinate slowness. Endless left-wing historians have written of the clerical class as a shadow parliament: hostile to change, servile only to its insider clients. The bureaucracy is also acutely politicised by the fact that clerical jobs are so precious that thousands, millions, of Italians compete in competitions for a poltrona, an ‘armchair’. The jobs are particularly precious because they offer contracts for tempo indeterminato, for ‘time immemorial’. Thus politicians are lobbied by ambitious parents who long for their child to enjoy the comfortable, cosy world of a clerical job. It’s an example of another key-word of Italian politics: clientelismo, the culture of looking after your friends and family, and thereby keeping outsiders and unknowns out of the loop. I’m told the whole set-up is much more meritocratic than it was a few years ago, especially in the north, but it’s still unlikely that you’ll ever get a job without the contacts; you need to know the right local politician, or have the backing of – a phrase you frequently hear – a famiglia importante.
