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.