domenica 5 settembre 2010

Unravelling the Confusion

One night in Italy as we sat down for dinner, we had a little bit of trouble remembering whose napkin was whose. At the inside dinner table, we all had a different colour of napkin rings, but the night before we had eaten outside using different napkins in different rings and had not necessarily all taken the same colour. As we tried to sort out the situation, my friend and hostess remarked, “Gli italiani amano fare confusione” (“Italians love to create confusion”). As anyone who has lived in Italy will testify, this is absolutely true. Confusion is an excuse for lots of talking and hand gestures, and Italians love those.

Around the same time, I discovered that the Italian word for “to develop”, sviluppare, also means "to untie" or "to extricate." In other words, the complete opposite of fare confusione!

Put these two facts together and you can see how progress in Italy rarely comes quickly. To compensate, however, there are at least plenty of opportunities for social interaction along the way!

The Dark Heart of Italy

For a long time, I’ve been meaning to write about a book that I read a while ago called The Dark Heart of Italy. The author, Tobias Jones, is a reporter who went to Italy hoping to investigate and explain the country’s politics and the various scandals that were going on at the time. However, he eventually realized that the truth in Italy is difficult to find, never mind unravel, and instead wrote a book explaining why everything in Italy is so difficult to explain. The book tackles corruption in various areas of Italian life, from football to the building industry, but for me the most interesting part was finding out more about how Italian politics came to be in the state that it is today, which in turn explains, at least to some extent, why Italians keep voting for Berlusconi in the face of total incomprehension from most of the rest of Western Europe.

I gave the book to an Italian friend who also wanted an explanation of Italian politics, so unfortunately I can’t check up on the details, but what I learned, in a very, very simplified way, was this:

After World War Two, politics in Italy was divided between Communists and Fascists, and well into the 1970s, these were very much two warring factions, split, of course, into many smaller parties. There were terrorist attacks, there were cover-ups, and somebody was even pushed from a window in an attempt to stop an investigation. In the face of all of this, Berlusconi seems like quite a reasonable man. He might spend much of his life getting parliament to pass laws that protect him for the rest of his life from being tried for doing pretty much anything, but at least he doesn’t blow people up or push them out of windows. As a politician, he may be corrupt but his politics do at least belong to today’s world and not to the warring ideologies of last century. He has convinced Italians that their country can be modern and successful and they (or many of them) like him for it.

The other reason, of course, as the book explains, is that in Italy you can sit in your Berlusconi built house reading Berlusconi magazines and watching Berlusconi TV and, in fact, pretty much live your entire life as a customer of the Berlusconi empire. That might be the other reason so many Italians end up being convinced that voting for Berlusconi is the right thing to do.

I mentioned a while ago that I have never wanted to mock or criticize Italy for the sake of it, but rather to understand where the country and its inhabitants are coming from. For anyone who wants to do the same, reading The Dark Heart of Italy is a great way to start.

sabato 4 settembre 2010

Back to the Veneto


After a week of total relaxation, I was ready for the next stage of my Italian adventure – teaching English at summer camp. This year, the children were not only delightful, adorable and totally charming in the way that Italian children do best, they were also (relatively) calm, attentive and motivated to learn. It was a wonderful two weeks. It's also amazing, when you get away from the lake and the magnet for cultured German tourists that is Verona, how quickly you feel that you are deep in the heart of the “real” Italy. You can cycle for hours along the country lanes between the fields of sunflowers and corn, watching the light change as the hot sun sets on the hazy horizon. You watch chickens hatching from their eggs. You can go for a drink at the bar and, even though you haven't been there for a year, they still remember you. You buy an ice-cream at the gelateria and the owner gives you a personal invitation to sit with the locals on the plastic chairs by the roadside while under a starry sky. And, if that all sounds a bit too idyllic, you can get eaten alive by the hungriest, greediest, most tenacious mosquitoes in Italy.

For better or for worse, the sense of community in these small villages and the speed at which news travels became very evident to us this year. One of my friends received a surprise visit from a friend of hers who didn't know where we were staying. He had found the not very regular bus using the internet but when he arrived, he didn't know where to go, so he told the bus driver he was looking for the house where the English teachers were staying. The driver didn't know, but he quickly got on the phone to all his friends and was able to point my friend's friend in the right direction. The signora across the road showed him the right house and he found us ... as did the many, many men of a certain age who stopped us in the street wherever we went after that to ask us if we were the English girls staying at a certain well-known B and B!