by Tobias Jones
Fascism, for Eco, was political nihilism: a desire for martyrdom, a servitude to death.
Related to that aestheticisation of death is the notion of a bella morte, of a ‘beautiful death’. It’s surely unique to Italy and certainly a strange adjective to use. We might say ‘peaceful’ or ‘painful’ death, but in Italy it would be ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’. If you’re arguing amongst southerners, one of the most brutal insults is to talk about their mortacci, their ‘ugly dead’.
It is only now that I realise that ‘beauty’ as it’s understood in Italy simply doesn’t exist in English. A bella morte is a moral as much as aesthetic judgement: it implies that someone died in an elegant, righteous way, probably neither in poverty nor in pain. It doesn’t, clearly, imply that the corpse was particularly attractive. Only now do I realise how wrong I have been. I used to think, when I first arrived here, that the Italian obsession with beauty was the negation of morality; that the beautification of everything and everyone was so obsessive that good and bad got left behind. Now, thinking about bella morte, I finally understand that the notion of beauty in Italy is a conflation of aesthetics and ethics. I finally understand that Burckhardt quotation, suggesting that Italians have ‘outgrown the limits of morality and religion’. The beauty syndrome isn’t the vanity and superficiality I thought it was; it’s a means, much more nuanced than the moralising of northern Europe, to identify who someone is.
To say someone is ugly isn’t only a physical judgement, it’s a moral one. Ugliness implies in Italian repulsion, which isn’t only an analysis of visual presentation. It’s an analysis also of someone’s worth, their ‘goodness’. A bell’uomo isn’t only a good-looker (literally a ‘beautiful man’), he’s also a ‘good man’, someone who is attractive as a person. Because the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are so rarely used, beauty is the litmus paper by which everyone is judged. It’s more sophisticated than morality because, in some strange way, it is more comprehensive. A description of beauty covers more ground than goodness, it includes more characteristics; not just righteousness, but civility, dignity, stature and so on. Bellissimo isn’t used just for appearances, but for il gesto, the ‘gesture’. Someone doesn’t do a ‘good’ deed, they do a ‘beautiful’ one. It’s like the old Greek idea of kaloskagathos: beauty and goodness are, rather than mutually excluding opposites, actually the same thing.
Talking about immorality is thus irrelevant in Italy, because it sounds preachy and prescriptive. Every time left-wing politicians, foreign journalists and the public in general accuse Berlusconi of immorality his popularity ratings with the other half of the country soar off the scale. He actually benefits from shrill attacks and immoderate language about immorality. The funny thing is, though, that no one has ever accused him of being a bell’uomo – despite the fact that, for his age, he is looking suspiciously good. That in itself gives the true measure of Italian beauty: it contains a moral message.
References - 10 I Morti
1 Corriere della Sera, (19 January 2002)
2 La Repubblica, (20 April 2002)
3 Giovanni Guareschi, The Little World of Don Camillo (New York, 1977)
4 Henry James, Italian Hours (London, 1995)
5 Umberto Eco, Sette anni di desiderio (Milan, 1983)
6 Ibid
Revised Postscript
Going back to read something you wrote in your late twenties isn’t always particularly enjoyable. You see all sorts of faults and, if the writing is personal, get a strange reminder of what you used to be like. I don’t know how obvious it is in the preceding chapters, but I remember what I was going through when writing this book. There was much wailing and gnashing of molars. Strangely it was a very calm period in my life but I was, at the same time, fuming disbelief and fury at what I thought was happening in a country I presumed to call my home. I was opinionated and impetuous. When I read that prose from four or five years ago I occasionally blush with embarrassment. But I know why I wrote in that slightly bilious vein. When asked to write a revised edition, I decided not to erase or soften my ‘juvenilia’ because what made me angry then still makes me growl deeply today. So all the chapters you’ve read up until now are untouched, the same – faults and all – as when they were first published.
This new postscript is an attempt to describe some of what has happened in the five years between the previous page and this one. Personally, my life changed rather dramatically. After publication I became rather notorious throughout Italy. I was in London on the first weekend after the English hardback was published when the phone went. It was Francesca who had been watching the Saturday night news in Italy with horror: ‘Emilio Fede ti sta sputtanando sul quattro’, she said: Berlusconi’s most faithful newsreader was doing a live piece to camera, unscripted, about how ungrateful and stupid I was because I didn’t understand that Italian television ‘is the finest in the world’. He was defending his profession against a slur which had come from the front page of the Financial Times’ Saturday supplement: to coincide with publication, the FT had asked me to describe Italian television and, in my unsubtle way, I said what I thought. ‘My Italian TV Hell’ was the tabloid-parodying headline the sub-editors had chosen. The trouble was that ‘hell’ has slightly stronger connotations in Italy and hell duly broke loose.
For the next week there was uproar. Maurizio Costanzo railed against me on his Sunday show. Gerry Scotti, host of another show on Berlusconi’s Mediaset, joined in too. Blob, the satirical programme on Rai 3, dedicated an entire episode to the furore called ‘Financial Blob’. For about a fortnight I was in the eye of a storm: Maurizio Gasparri, Communications Minister under Berlusconi’s government, said that he found the book ‘a mixture of Marxism and bigotry. Typical of a country where one branch of the parliament still wears wigs!’ Another politician from Berlusconi’s coalition muttered about making a formal diplomatic protest. I doubted that many people had actually read the book – it had only just been published in English – but it (and the FT article) were summarised by Italy’s TV elite as an all-out attack on two, closely related themes: Italian television and Silvio Berlusconi. Scandalised journalists from Berlusconi’s TV stations queued up to rubbish the ‘English Pinocchio’ who had lied about their beloved leader. The ferocity of the attacks was slightly spooky and had knock-on effects: the door-bell of our flat in Parma would ring late at night, weirdos would find my number and phone up to defend their national pride. With each passing week friends in different corners of Italy would warn me of another vituperative article which had appeared in one of the magazines from Berlusconi’s publishing stable. Apart from being mildly nervous about all the attention, I was gratified by the debate the book had provoked. Finally, TV shows were discussing the abysmal quality of Italian television and trying to work out who was responsible for the ‘cretinisation’.
I had written articles and essays on Italy for years and the only comeback I had ever had was the odd letter from a reader. Suddenly I was receiving about ten or fifteen letters each week, mostly from Italians or Anglo-Italians. By the time the book came out in Italian about six months later, I was receiving even more. I don’t relate this to imply that I had wowed readers and was endlessly receiving fan mail (not least because a couple of correspondents gave specific instructions as to where I could stick my fountain pen); but because that extended correspondence with fascinating people I never met deepened my understanding of Italy and showed me, often bluntly, what was good in the book and what was hasty or sloppy. A lot of the latter is now as obvious to me as it is to you: I do more sweeping than a full-time chimney cleaner; I often dust off 58 million Italians with a cute line. There are at least two factual errors and two dodgy translations. The chapter on Catholicism was written more to create an atmosphere of mystique, and introduce one particular scandal into the narrative, than it was to understand Italian Christianity. I didn’t see, or didn’t write about, those places where the mystique gains something more profound and more permanent.
&
nbsp; Despite those faults, the book was, amazingly, admired by many Italians. I was flattered that so many Italian readers weren’t offended by the book but enthusiastic about it. I think it expressed a love–hate relationship with the country with which most Italians could identify. Reviews in the sections of the Italian press not owned by Berlusconi were surprisingly generous. Umberto Eco described me as a ‘likeable eulogiser’. I began receiving endless invitations (all declined) to share platforms with left-wing politicians who wanted to enrol me in their campaign against the Prime Minister. I benefited from the fact that there is such a powerful esterofilia – liking of all things foreign – in Italy, and that readers were eager to hear a foreigner’s impressions of their country.
Funnily enough, the most common criticism put me in a no-win situation: British readers repeatedly said ‘but it can’t possibly be that complicated, you’re exaggerating’, whereas Italian readers would say slowly: ‘it’s fine as far as it goes, but actually it’s not quite as simple as all that’. Most Italians didn’t take issue with what I had written, but merely with what I hadn’t written: there were subtleties and nuances, they said, which I had overlooked and which would have made the book more even-handed. For example, to put all the blame for the politicisation of Italian television at the feet of Berlusconi was to overlook decades of political interference in Rai. Bruno Vespa, an indestructible host of a political show on Rai, ‘Porta a Porta’, once admitted during the Christian Democrat’s heyday that that political party was his ‘majority shareholder’. His role (appropriately for someone whose show’s theme music is taken from Gone with the Wind) was to be a sort of weather vane, simply twisting to show who had most power. Others suggested, I think quite rightly, that writing in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union I had underestimated the degree to which a rational anti-Communism had affected post-war politics. Italian Communism might appear intellectual and humane to a new arrival in Italy in the late 1990s, but it wasn’t, I was told, always so benign. To demonise the right without acknowledging a danger on the left made for a lop-sided analysis.
But the most common response to the book was epitomised by a friend. When I was writing the book I was sharing a flat – the one with the opera singer next door – with Carlo, a hard-living man in his 50s. He tended to be blunt and caustic in equal measure. Having flipped through the mint first edition one evening, he turned to me, pointing the tip of his cigarette in my direction, and said: ‘I’m going to stop reading it because I know it all’. His criticism wasn’t that the book was inaccurate; simply that, for those in the know, it didn’t say anything startlingly new. It was something that others repeated after publication: there was no discovery or scoop in the book. Its attraction merely lay in seeing how new eyes had discovered old problems. I realise now that I didn’t always see very clearly. I didn’t focus on the fact that the most enduring characteristic of Italy is contradiction. Normally, for almost everything you say the exact opposite is equally true. It often appears monocultural and uniconfessional, and yet it has more regional diversity (in terms of language, cuisine and music) than almost any other country. There are, for example, over 300 types of grape in Italy, compared to about 50 in France and only 7 in Australia. Italy has more surnames than any other country in the world: almost 350,000. If you watch television, the country really can seem dumbed down to the very lowest level and yet you regularly read newspapers which open with allusions to Plato or with quotations of Dante. It’s true that many Italians appear determined to rip off any passing tourist with catastrophic effects on the tourism industry. (Having made two TV series for Rai about the ‘Rich of Italy’ and the ‘Brains of Italy’, I wanted to do a third called ‘Con-Men of Italy’ – Imbroglioni d’Italia – but the head of the channel smiled as he explained why we couldn’t make the programme. He leant back in his chair and put his hands behind his head: ‘We don’t have the finances for the 50 episodes you would need!’) And yet, at the same time, there’s an innate generosity in Italy which is the complete contradiction of that rip-offery. It’s precisely those contradictions that make Italy such a difficult place to understand. The country takes everything to extremes and in this book I saw, or looked for, only one unfavourable extremity. Years later I feel slightly guilty about that concentration on the negative. This new postscript is an attempt both to offer an update on that ‘darkness’ but also, towards the end, to address that imbalance, to hint at other ‘hearts’ which are more sunny and more admirable than the one I originally made the subject of this book.
It had been a central tenet of the book that there exists an anthropological or sociological disposition to by-pass the law in Italy. The consequences are sometimes amusing, sometimes very serious. I would be genuinely delighted to be able to write that the intervening years have disproved the theory, but unfortunately events have, I believe, only confirmed it. Ironically, it was a scandal centring on Parma itself that became global news in late 2003. The Parmalat implosion was one of the largest corporate frauds in European history. Calisto Tanzi was a man you used to see occasionally around the city: he, too, was called il Cavaliere and was deferred to by an obsequious local press. He had built up his dairy company into the eighth-largest enterprise in Italy. It employed 35,000 people around the globe. The success was based upon brilliant business decisions. Tanzi had turned his product into a global brand first through technological innovation – supplying long-life milk in cardboard cartons – and then through high-visibility sponsorship in Formula One and football. Tanzi’s public image was that of a humble, devout philanthropist: he would go to church daily and donate huge sums to ecclesiastical restoration works. Like everything in Italy, on the surface it all looked glorious. The familiar seeds of financial fraud, however, were all there. Tanzi, like many Italian entrepreneurs, ran his company as if it were his own personal fiefdom. His relatives came before shareholders. One of the many dubious transactions which caused the collapse of the company involved siphoning off funds, almost $500 million, from Parmalat to his daughter’s travel company.
The crisis arose because – as with dozens of Italian companies in the past, including Berlusconi’s – Parmalat began to use hundreds of offshore subsidiaries from Lichtenstein to the Cayman Islands. So far investigators have unearthed 260 subsidiaries linked to the Parmalat mother company. It was, needless to say, a strange way to run a dairy concern. Tanzi and his accountants created faked invoices which in turn allowed him to inflate revenues and thereby gain access to huge loans. Much of the money raised was siphoned into offshore accounts. Acquisitions across the globe were deliberately overpriced so that more funds could be slipped from the company into mysterious accounts in the Caribbean. Those overpriced assets then appeared to justify the issuing of more bonds. Towards the end, company executives were so brazen that they faked an account with the Bank of America, in which they claimed to have deposited just under $5 billion. It was when the Bank, on 19 December 2003, denied any knowledge of the account that the entire Parmalat deceit unravelled. One worker has since committed suicide, thousands are facing unemployment and thousands more have seen their life savings disappear overnight. Billions of euros are still unaccounted for.
The Parmalat case confirmed what many people already suspected: that the Italian economy was facing a very serious crisis of credibility. Nowadays rarely a day goes by without some doom-mongering article in the press about the precarious state of the Italian economy. Many of the strengths of the country’s economy – textiles, footwear and furniture – are precisely those sectors most susceptible to cheap competition from Asia. Economic growth between 2001 and 2006 has been a slovenly 0.64%. The International Monetary Fund predicts a deficit of 4.3% of GDP in 2007, way above the 3% ceiling set by the European Union’s Stability and Growth Pact. The World Economic Forum’s 2005 annual league table (which ranks each country’s competitiveness) placed Italy a miserable 47th. Any statistic you find seems to warn of the fragile state of the country’s finances: only 57% of
the 15–64 age range are in employment, the smallest percentage in Western Europe.
Berlusconi had been portrayed by his supporters as the solution to Italy’s economic ills but his administration plunged Italy deeper into crisis. It’s true that he came to power just as the world economy was in difficulty; and it’s true that he passed tentative reforms like raising the incredibly youthful retirement age from 57 to 60… but otherwise his administration pandered to, rather than challenged, vested interests. Berlusconi had come to power parroting Reagan and Thatcher’s notion that big government was part of the problem, not the solution. But once in power it was anathema for him to reduce the size of the state and therefore the reach of his new-found patronage. His government blocked sensible financial deals which would have benefited his competitors (the sale of 49% of the Rai infrastructure to an American company, Crown Castle, was vetoed, leaving Berlusconi’s televisual competitor permanently hampered); at the same time his government offered a subsidy of almost a billion dollars from the cash-strapped state coffers to cover 75% of the cost of digital decoders, a market in which Mediaset was directly involved.
Any sensible on-looker might ask why there isn’t a third company to challenge this dangerous and imbalanced Rai-Mediaset duopoly in television. The story of how ‘La 7’ – the nascent seventh channel hoping to challenge the dominance of the other six channels divided between Rai and Mediaset – is salutary. Telecom Italia, that old enemy of mine, had bought an ailing TV station, Telemontecarlo, and was preparing an investment of some $300 million. TV stars had been signed to the project and advertisers flocked to be a part of the venture. Audiences for pilot programmes peaked, astonishingly, at 13%, way above the 2 or 3% audience share which Telemontecarlo had enjoyed in the old days. For the first time in decades it looked as if Mediaset might face real competition. There was every possibility that advertisers and audiences would move allegiance. What happened next was typical of government interference in the ‘open market’: there was a bid by the Pirelli tyre company to take over Telecom Italia. It was made clear to Pirelli that the bid would only be given government clearance if ‘La 7’ drastically reduced its ambitions. Telecom was susceptible to government pressure because, as a state monopoly, the government set the prices it could charge for line rental; the government appointees likewise regulated the prices of mobile phone calls, another large part of Telecom’s income. Effectively Berlusconi could determine, in one legislative act, the profit margins of the company which owned a dangerous competitor.
