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.

Draquila

I've just been to the cinema to see Draquila and, as with most things concerning Italy, the experience left me with an irrepressible urge to blog.

The film is a documentary which tells the story of Berlusconi's involvement in the aftermath of the earthquake in L'Aquila in April 2009. It's central claim is that, as well as using the tragedy as a useful way of distracting the public from the more dubious aspects of his personal and political life, Berlusconi also exploited the situation to further the construction industry interests of himself and his cronies. According to the film, instead of efforts being directed towards restoring the centre, letting people back into their homes and saving the numerous architectural and artistic treasures of the town, the earthquake was used as an excuse for massive building projects which included both hotels along the coast of Abruzzo which were used as temporary accommodation and hundreds and hundreds of new apartment blocks which will eventually have to be "given back" in the pristine state in which they were provided. The authorities did everything in their power to convince, cajole or force people to move into these apartments instead of back into their own homes.The documentary also shows how Berlusconi manipulates the public into believing that he is a hero and a miracle-worker who has nothing but their best interests at heart.

The L'Aquila earthquake happened when I was living in Italy and but, 19 months later and living in a foreign country, I find myself shocked by my lack of reaction to the disaster at the time. But at the time, I suppose what I saw was what the Berlusconi government wanted me to see - that something terrible had happened but that everything was being taken care of. Given that I used to avoid Berlusconi TV like the plague and take everything I read his newspapers with a pinch of salt large enough to give the entire population a heart attack, that's a scary thought.

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.

FAQ Italia

For a long time, I was fascinated by Italian bookshops. I used to go into them and wander around, dreaming of the time when my Italian would be good enough to read and fully understand the works that lined their shelves.

Many of the books I saw were translations. Italians, like most non-Anglophone Europeans, seem far happier to read foreign books than Brits are. (The same applies to music, films and pretty much everything else, but all of that is another rant for another day.) These were not the books, however, that I wanted to read.

The ones I wanted to read were written by Italians, in Italian, and they were all about Italy. Not tourism and travel books, but books about politics, books about the mafia and books about recent Italian history. The section of the shop devoted to these books always seemed to be disproportionately large. I wanted to understand Italy and I wanted to understand it from an Italian point of view, so eventually, with a long summer holiday and lots of travelling ahead of me, I bought one of these books.

I bought FAQ Italia, by Francesco Merlo. It comes from a series called “FAQ Books: domande che danno risposte” (questions which provide answers). Examples of the “questions” range from “Are we the land of the Mafia?” to “Are Italians mummy's boys?” These were questions to which I wanted not just any answer, but the Italian answer.

At first I quite enjoyed the book. Gradually, however, it wore me down. The “answers” to the questions were too short, too unbalanced and too irrelevant. After a while, I put FAQ Italia down and started on something else. I was staying with Italian friends at the time, and when I showed my friend the book and explained my disappointment, she sighed and said, “Yes, everything in Italy is polemical.”

For a long time I thought that the fact that Italian bookshops were so full of critical works on the country was to do with the fact that all the newspapers and television channels were under the control of Berlusconi and his ilk. Such writing was much less evident in the Mondadori bookshops, owned by the Berlusconi family, than in others. Books, I thought, were perhaps the last remaining outlet for free (or free-er) speech. There were certainly more politically oriented works in the Feltrinelli shop, which was my Mondadori's closest rival.

Recently, however, I discovered from Tobias' Jones' The Dark Heart of Italy (which is an incredibly gripping book in itself) that the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, owner of the aforementioned publishing house, was a communist and the founder of GAP, one of Italy's main terrorist organisations of the anni di piombo.

And so I learned that in Italy, not only does everyone in the media have an axe to grind, but they are heavy and destructive axes indeed.