The Dark Heart of Italy

by Tobias Jones

  A few months later: December 2000. With an election expected in spring, the political exchanges are getting worse. Two bombs, one allegedly Anarchist, quickly followed by the Fascist reply, have sent shivers down the spine of the body politic. ‘Something strange is happening,’ admits the Secretary of the Democrats of the Left: ‘terrorists are shooting again … there’s a return to a situation of tension …’ Everyone describes a sense of déjà-vu, a sense of disbelief that, years after the anni di piombo were thought to have petered out, these bombs are still being prepared and planted. It seems absurd and surreal. As one dismayed journalist writes:

  Here again are the ghosts which stink of dynamite … in most European countries governments of left and right alternate without any problems of public order or security. Not in Italy, where it seems [the bombs] will never finish. And the hands of the clock actually seem to have gone backwards …

  The first device was found on 18 December, placed a few metres away from Piazza Fontana, amongst the steeples of Milan’s gothic duomo. It was left in a black bag next to a public passageway, timed to go off at three a.m. The Anarchist trail is immediately under suspicion, particularly since the explosive used (called ‘Vulcan 03’ or ‘quarry dust’) was used in other, recent Anarchist bombs. The bomb is later claimed by a group called Solidarietà Internazionale. The response from the right is swift. On 22 December, a former ‘black’ terrorist decided to enter the offices of Manifesto, the ‘Communist daily’ as it calls itself, in Rome. On the fourth floor, shortly after midday, he asked for directions, explaining ‘I’ve got to deliver a package to Manifesto’. His bomb, however, exploded before he reached his target, lacerating his legs and giving him multiple fractures. Doors were blown off hinges, and one photograph the next day showed a poignant image: one sole, dusty shoe, that of Andrea Insabato, the bomber, upon a mound of glass, papers and masonry. By chance Insabato was the only one hurt, but – as Manifesto wrote the following day – ‘If the bomb hadn’t exploded before expected, it could have been a slaughter’.

  Piecing together Insabato’s curriculum vitae as a terrorist was fairly simple. He was an adherent of NAR, the far-right Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, and of Terza Posizione, in the 1970s. He was arrested in 1976 when, at the age of seventeen, he fired a pistol against one of the offices of the Communist party in Rome. More recently, in 1992, during a football match between Lazio and Torino, he ostentatiously burnt the Israeli flag, shouting ebrei ai forni, ‘Jews to the ovens’. Just days before the bomb against Manifesto he had attended, on the occasion of Jorg Haider’s invitation to the Vatican, a rally in favour of the Austrian politician, carrying a Palestinian flag.

  On its defiant front page (entitled Siamo Qui – ‘We’re Here’) the day after the attack, Manifesto blamed the attack on the ‘cultural humus which has allowed the neo-Fascists to be cleared through customs and which has offered them political legitimacy …’ Inside, the editorial continued the attack, suggesting that Insabato was the product of ‘the hypocritical right of Fini and Berlusconi which has never had the courage to deal with its bloody history, as has – with difficulty and pain – a part of the non-institutional left. This is the result. The sewer is still there, with its great unpunished and its little soldiers …’ That robust response from the target of the attack was to be expected, but most other political commentators follow the same line: Insabato, after all, graduated from the same crucible of neo-Fascism – the Movimento Sociale Italiano – as did many of the political leaders of Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance. Many have gone in different directions to Insabato, changing political livery and party names; but in the days and weeks after the bomb it emerged that there was barely a political party on the right which didn’t have some link to Insabato, or which hadn’t offered him a platform for his opinions. He emerged as an integralista cattolico, a member of the ‘Christian Militia’. He had frequently attended rallies of another party of the far-right, Forza Nuova. Most significantly he had, in January 1995 in Rome’s Hotel Ergife (where Pino Rauti was launching his new political party), taken the microphone and declared: ‘We need to remember that the real enemy is Zionism, that Jewish sect which tries with every means to dominate the world.’ Insabato, though, was swiftly branded a cane sciolto, an ‘unleashed dog’, by the far right.

  More subtly, many suggested that politicians were responsible for the ‘new terrorism’ not directly, but indirectly: with all the finger-pointing, the hysterical ‘Fascist!’ and ‘Communist!’ jeers of the pre-election fever, politicians had unwittingly given rogue terrorists a sense of purpose and a rhetoric they understood. Such was the analysis, albeit more muted, offered by the Procuratore della Repubblica in Milan shortly after the bomb there: ‘We had hoped,’ said Gerardo D’Ambrosio, ‘that the resort to bombs for political purposes was finished … unfortunately it’s not so … Every time the political exchanges get more bitter one can always expect that someone will try to exploit the situation …’ Italian terrorism, lamented the then Prime Minister, Giuliano Amato, is ‘a volcano which is never spent’. Another magistrate, investigating the new Red Brigades, called Italy’s terrorism: ‘an underground river … which suddenly re-emerges evermore violent.’ Terrorism in Italy, he said, is ‘almost physiological’.

  For decades bemused historians and sociologists have analysed Italy’s terrorist phenomenon. Many have echoed the line that ‘terrorism does not invent, but rediscovers, recycles and readapts that which is already in the womb of the nation,’4 suggesting that there’s something uniquely Italian about the country’s terrorism. Many of the early studies of the anni di piombo thus suggested that the country had a ‘psychosis of the bomb’. Ever since the Risorgimento, the argument went, the country had had a culture of violence that was ‘living and important’. According to that theory, the historical roots of the anni di piombo were clear: in 1894 the French President had been killed by Italian Anarchists, as were, later, the Spanish Prime Minister and the Empress of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1900 Umberto I was assassinated; in 1921, in a theatre in Milan, another bomb claimed the lives of more than twenty people. In 1928, eighteen were killed during an attempt to assassinate another Italian monarch. Violence, from the Risorgimento to the Resistenza, had been the catalyst for every important turning point in Italian history. ‘No other industrialised society,’ wrote one academic in the Rivista Storica Italiana in 1980, ‘has seen a terrorist phenomenon which, for duration … diffusion and rootedness can compare to that of Italy.’ ‘Violence has mesmerized us,’ wrote another academic; the anni di piombo were simply the latest example of Italy’s ‘aestheticisation of violence … rendered photogenic, if not exactly accepted, conferred with that fascination which is at the root of its hypnotic power …’5

  Others discerned what was called ‘Cattocomunismo’, the quasi-religious, millenarian zeal of the terrorists. These evangelicals, having lost their orthodox faith, were still attempting to ‘realise the other world in this world’, to pass ‘from an exigency of Christian totality to Marxist totality’. One left-wing guru had, for example, spoken of Communists as a race born of a ‘virgin mother’, and of his political group as a ‘combatant religious order’. ‘The need,’ wrote one journalist, ‘for total and definitive answers, the rejection of doubt, are at the same time Catholic and Communist.’

  The end of the Cold War, and the not-unrelated eclipse of the Christian Democratic party, have given studies a new dimension, contextualising the anni di piombo within an international framework. Against the backdrop of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Italy has been seen as a border territory, on a knife-edge between the two sides. The reasons for what has been called a ‘tragic frontier experience’ were both geographical (Italy being seen as literally on the front-line) and political (the country had the largest Communist party in the western world, winning 19% of the vote in 1946, and thereafter increasing its polling at every election until its peak in 1976 with 34.4%). The consequence was that Italy was
subject to a McCarthyism that made the original, American version appear very mild by comparison.

  Thus, historians have written of post-war Italy as being ‘on the nerve-front between the West and Communism, for the entire Cold War under constant observation, and its democracy ever under surveillance’. If the terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s was chilling, it was because that violence was a reflection of the Cold War, isolated examples of a greater global conflict. As such, the acts of terrorism were ‘signs of war, fragments of a planetary war fought underground which every now and again surfaced with its horror, its devastating potential … to destroy all that it touched: peace, the democratic confrontation, the truth … surfaced and moved on, leaving behind blood and darkness …’6

  In that respect, Italy has been compared to Germany, another country torn in two by the ‘spaccatura dell’Europa’, by the rift of an entire continent. The difference being that Italy witnessed ‘an invisible iron curtain, crossing populations, classes and consciences’ which ‘shattered’ the unity of the country into ‘two political, civil and moral realities … almost two countries’7. Whereas in Germany a wall had become a very literal, concrete example of a divided nation, in Italy the cleavage was ever more subtle and submerged. The clandestine nature of the armed struggle was, in fact, revealed to the Italian parliament in 1990, when Giulio Andreotti announced that ever since 1945 there had been a military presence on the peninsula called Gladio (the so-called ‘stay behind’ of Allied troops); subsequent investigations revealed that weaponry and personnel from much of the anni di piombo overlapped with that of Gladio.

  An equally serious problem was that Italy’s post-war foreign policy zigzagged unpredictably, swerving from philo-Arabic policies (Colonel Gaddafi had even become one of Fiat’s major shareholders) to support for Israel. The timing of Italian slaughters was often uncannily close to similar events on what the President of the Slaughter Commission called the chessboard of the Mediterranean, especially in the Middle East. Thus, according to some, Italy’s anni di piombo weren’t only a result of the Cold War, but also of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

  The role of parliament during the period was also decisive. Parliament was described as a ‘conventio ad excludendum’, an imperfect two-party system in which one party was permanently in power, and the other permanently excluded. Either that, or the opposition was fatally accommodated, becoming part of the ‘constitutional arch’, the political ‘marriage’ of opposing parties: there was the ‘opening to the left’ (involving Socialists) or the ‘historic compromise’ (involving the Communists). The Christian Democrats were thus described by Leonardo Sciascia as ‘invertebrate, available, conceding, and at the same time tenacious, patient, grasping; a type of octopus which knows how gently to embrace dissent to return it, minced, into consensus.’ Opposition was, effectively, impossible. Thus, some commentators on the armed struggle used the birth of British parliamentarianism as an example of what exactly was wrong with Italy: quoting Thomas Hobbes, writers such as Giorgio Galli saw the birth of the British parliament as a means to contain a civil war. Verbal exchanges and the alternation of parties replaced cruder confrontations as representative democracy became ‘the game which impeded a civil war’. That such exchanges were conspicuously absent in Italy meant that, in some sense, the latent civil war never found itself absorbed, reflected or pacified by parliament, and so raged on outside it.

  Whilst I was packing a bag to go back to Britain for Christmas a song came on the radio: it was the beautiful, lilting voice of Fabrizio De André, the country’s most famous and much-mourned singer–songwriter. The song, from 1973, is called Il Bombarolo – The Bomber – and is, like its subject-matter, an integral part of the nation’s fibre. ‘Intellectuals of today,’ go the lyrics, ‘idiots of tomorrow, give me back my brain, which I only need between my hands. Acrobatic prophets of the revolution, today I’ll do it by myself, without lessons … I’ve chosen another school. I’m a bomber …’

  And yet, whilst I was packing, the strange thing was that I didn’t really want to go home. I wanted to see friends and family, but it was somehow an incredible wrench to leave Italy, even only for a few days. I had become as campanilista (as attached to my local bell-tower) as everyone else. Even the thought of leaving Parma – nicknamed the isola felice, the ‘happy island’ of Italy – was worrying. I looked out of the window and saw it snowing, the large flakes jittering like molecules under a microscope. I could see the rooftop tiles turning from pink to white. On the street below, people were putting skis on their roof-racks. Then, just as I was about to leave for the airport, my next-door neighbour Lucia dropped by to give me a sackful of her hand-made cappelletti (the little pasta-wraps of Parmesan cheese which come served in a watery broth at Christmas) as if to remind me of all the good food I would be missing in northern Europe.

  There was another thing I would inevitably miss over Christmas. The sheer beauty of the country. The stunning style, the visual panache, the obsession with spettacolo. That, I knew as I sat on the plane, was what I would have to write about next: the Italian aesthetic. Because there was one enigma which I had been wondering about for months: how is it that the country which has produced the greatest art in the Western world, which produced some of the best films of the twentieth century, now has the worst, most abysmal television on the planet?

  References - 4 ‘The Sofri Case’

  1 Dario Fo, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, trans Ed Emery (London, 1992)

  2 Adriano Sofri, Memoria (Bari, 1990)

  3 Daniele Biacchessi, Il Caso Sofri (Rome, 1998)

  4 Giorgio Bocca in La Repubblica (21 July 1982)

  5 Franco Ferraroti, L’ipnosi della violenza (Milan, 1980)

  6 Maurizio Dianese and Gianfranco Bettin, La Strage (Milan, 1999)

  7 Giovanni Fasanella, Claudio Sestieri, Giovanni Pellegrino, Segreto di Stato (Turin, 2000)

  5

  The Means of Seduction

  It was television which practically ended the era of piety and began the era of hedonism …

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

  If I were a believer – not one of those who only goes to mass, but a believer who is perfectly convinced of his faith – I would say that Berlusconi is bad with a capital B … he has invested all that money in television in the worst way … he has lowered the cultural level of television and therefore of Italy … I blame him for that, because that cultural down-turn is the cause of so many things …

  Andrea Camilleri

  I don’t know whether it’s because of the Reformation, which was iconoclastic and ‘written’; or else because Britain has had, on the whole, the better writers and Italy much superior artists … but Italy is, unlike Britain, a visual, rather than a literary, country. Perhaps because there’s such a forest of legal and bureaucratic language, very few people read newspapers, even fewer buy or borrow books. Every year or so there are official figures about book-consumption from ISTAT, the national statistical research unit, and the results are always the same: a massive percentage of Italian adults don’t read one book a year. To survive, the edicole – the little pavilions on street corners which sell newspapers – have to double as fetish shops, selling gadgets and videos and soft-porn magazines alongside the newsprint. On public transport in Britain, half the passengers might be reading; in Italy, they will be eyeing each other, or else ‘reading’ the Settimana Enigmistica, a magazine of riddles and crosswords. There is, one quickly notices, no populist press, and there will be an Italian bestseller (Andrea Camilleri is the latest example) only once a decade.

  Reading, when it’s done at all, is done under duress. None of my students, I get the impression, has ever read a book for pleasure. The more time you spend in the universities, the more you realise that they are part of what the Italian media calls the ‘illiteracy problem’. A vast amount of teaching is done by dictation. When I ask students how they are taught in other classes, they describe professors who roll up and simply read their own books, chapter
by chapter, to their students. If someone interrupts the dictation with a question about what has been read, the affronted professor will pause, then go back and read the sentence again, without explanation. Revision involves buying and rereading the professor’s book, and learning it off by heart. Thus when those students then come to me for top-up lessons on language or literature, they have an acute fear of books and a sense of disorientation if asked to debate. They want to be told what to think, and they will then remember it and quote it back at you in exams.

  Visually, though, the country is more cultured than any other. Each church feels like a museum: go into the duomo in Parma and, with a 500 lire coin, you can light up the entire cupola and admire the angels and apostles who usher the Madonna into heaven. This Assumption of the Virgin is the work of the city’s most famous artist, Correggio (Antonio Allegri). Titian commented on the work: ‘Reverse the cupola and fill it with gold, and even that will not be its money’s worth’. (Although Dickens, visiting centuries later when the frescos were crumbling, was more scathing: ‘Such a labyrinth of arms and legs: such heaps of foreshortened limbs, entangled and involved and jumbled together. No operative surgeon, gone mad, could imagine in his wildest delirium …’) Every week, even in the smallest towns around Parma, a new art exhibition will open. A lot of my friends seem to be budding sculptors or photographers, or else are studying the popular degree course in Beni Culturali (the appreciation and restoration of ‘cultural goods’). Many happily talk to me for hours, without a trace of pretension, about why one architect or artist is worthy of note.