Ladies Who Lunch a Milano

I left the lake on Wednesday morning and caught the train from Varenna back to Milan. When I lived in Milan, time spent outside of the city was golden, but having left, I was anxious for a dip back into my old life.

My first stop was the Mondadori bookshop on Piazza Duomo, where I picked up a couple of books by Niccolo' Amaniti and Lidia Ravera and mused at the fact that, although Mondadori is currently embroiled in a major corruption scandal and has just been ordered to pay a 560 million euro fine for its misdeeds, everything felt clean, normal and calm, almost to the point of being un-Italian. I left with my books in an eco-friendly paper bag with a message encouraging me to use energy-saving lightbulbs and save the planet.

After that I walked back across the piazza, giving bracelet-sellers and pooping pigeons alike my best Parisian glare, and met my friend, who took me to the Californian bakery on Via Larga for lunch. Lesson learned: if you would like to sit in a shaded outdoor garden eating a bagel topped with fresh, healthy ingredients, this is the place for you. If you would like to eat large quantities of delicious baked goods, rest assured, this place is genuinely American in its attitude to dessert. If you would prefer your delicious cake to be accompanied by equally delicious coffee, think again. While my friend may have been a little mean in her condemnation of our espressos as "sock juice", they were definitely more USA than Italian in style too and, in my book, this is not such a good thing.

My last hour in Milan was spent in a rapid raid of the three fabulous floors of my favourite Italian clothes shop, Nadine, whose flagship store is located at San Babila. While the quality is sometimes not quite high enough to justify the price, the clothes have a definite Italian style that is hard to find in France (There is colour! There are chic little details that you don't have to be a Parisian fashionista to notice!) and I picked up a sweet little bag, reduced from 45 euros to 20 to take home with me. Happiness is ...

Discovering Niccolo' Ammaniti

A while ago, when I was looking for Italian books to read and films to watch, a friend recommended Niccolo' Ammaniti's Ti prendo e ti porto via. The next time I was in Italy, I bought it, I read it and I loved it. When I finished it, desperate to experience again that feeling of reading such a great book that you can't wait for a boring train journey so that you can find out what happens next, I bought Io non ho paura.

I love reading in Italian. I would much rather read in Italian than French, even although in theory my French is far better than my Italian. However, because I learned Italian largely by speaking rather than studying literature, it's important to me to find books that are at the right level, and Ammaniti's definitely fit into that category.

At the same time, I remain an English literature graduate at heart and if the quality of the writing is too trashy, it bothers me, even if it is in a foreign language. Ammaniti does use language well (as far as I can tell) but really it's the characters and the plots that I appreciate in his stories. In Ti prendo e ti porto via, he describes personalities which are greatly flawed but, with the insights that he gives into human nature, manages to maintain the reader's sympathy for the characters.

Another thing I appreciated about the books was the insight into Italian culture that they gave to me. In the UK, we tend to associate poverty and its terrible consequences with living in the inner cities, but Ammaniti shows how the Italy that many people consider to be a rural idyll is home to great deprivation and all its associated problems.

For anyone who wants a thought provoking but manageable read in Italian, I would definitely recommend the two books , and, having finished the second one, I'm off to look for his other works on Amazon!

More Dark Heart of Italy

When I was in Italy last summer, I was inspired to write about so many things. In the space of two weeks, I was constantly struck by endless examples of what an Italian writer (I think it may have been Beppe Severgnini but I might be completely and embarrassingly wrong) called the difference between “your Italy and my Italia”. This is the difference between the Italy that tourists see (the magnificent scenery, the richness of the history, the art, the food, the fashion, the musicality of the language and the generousity and sociability of the people) and the complicated, illogical, confusing country of endless paradoxes that Italians actually live in. I felt guilty, enjoying the hospitality of my Italian friends and the locals in the village who shared so much with “le ragazze inglesi” and the desire to probe into the depths of the “confusione”, to criticise and to write.

In the end, only a couple of these posts got written, and less eloquently than I would have wanted them to be. Last night, however, a programme about Berlusconi’s Italy on Arte, the Franco-German TV channel, inspired me to say some more.

The programme began by describing the rise of Berlusconi and I recognised many of the events that I had already read about in Tobias Jones’ wonderful Dark Heart of Italy: how Berlusconi’s early political career began with the corruption scandal surrounding the Milano 2 residential complex that he built as a property developer and how he initially dodged legal procedings by exploiting the statute of limitations. The programme talked about how terrorism was exploited to create a fear of communism (“communism” and “fascism” are current political terms in Italy), making voters believe that the only “safe” government was one which subscribed to neither of these philosophies and instead promoted the development of the country and the gaining of wealth. It revealed how Berlusconi’s masonic connections enabled him to borrow enormous sums of money and build his media empire until it became a monopoly and how Mediaset then ignored rulings by the European Court in favour of a rival television channel.

All of this I knew already, and I would highly recommend Jones’ book if you would like to know more. The thought that the programme left me with however, was not outrage at the corruption itself but a sense of the terrible tragedy that all of this has been for Italy itself. Berlusconi came to power on a promise to promote prosperity for “the good people” instead of the political extremists, but it is clear even travelling around Italy today that there is an incredible rift between the wealthy and the ordinary people (never mind the poor). Public facilities such as swimming pools and libraries are rare in Italian cities. Much of the country’s beauty spots have been “privatised”, so that you have to pay to go to the beach and you can’t swim in the lake unless you own a villa on its shore. Italy’s cities, towns and villages traditionally belong to their peoples: socialising takes place during the passeggiata through the streets and sitting in the town square, but as someone who likes to wander around at liberty, I can testify to the general absence of public parks, spaces and places to go. While the rich have their fast cars, their yachts and their multiple holiday homes, there are places where graduates and professionals earn 500 euros a month and have to live with their parents even when they are in their late 30s. A young lawyer in Milan can earn as little as 1000 euros a month – when I lived there my rent alone, in a smallish flat on a dodgy street was 850 euros.

Many of these educated people know to protest but the combination of what was described as the “lobotomisation” of the Italian people through dumbed-down media, the labyrinthine nature of the country’s politics and a head-in-the-sand attitude to what is actually going on among many of the country’s ordinary citizens make it very difficult to bring about change. This indeed is the dark heart of Italy.

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.