The Dark Heart of Italy (12 page)

When Berlusconi burst into politics in the aftermath of Clean
Hands, voters thus had his record at Milan at the front of their
minds. There were, as usual, two sides to the coin: the epic success of
Berlusconi’s football presidency, countered by the strange financial
deals that he was accused of conducting in the dark. Berlusconi gambled
that because so many people would be dazzled by the success,
few would worry about the scandal and thus, not for the first time in
Italian history, he openly aspired to conflate politics and football: his
political party was baptised
Forza Italia –
a chant from the terraces,
as in ‘Go Italy!’ His parliamentarians were originally referred to as
his
‘azzurri’,
the generic term for players in the Italian national side.
When he announced the formation of his new political party, and
his own candidature for the post of Prime Minister, Berlusconi even
spoke of the move in overtly footballing tones: ‘descending onto the
pitch’.
Forza Italia’s
regional offices were often little more than the
former fan-clubs of the Milan football team which were dotted up
and down the peninsula. Berlusconi, it was clear, intended to run
the country as he ran his club (which could – depending on whether
good football is more important than correct accounting – cut both
ways).

The intimate link between football and politics is, with
Berlusconi, ubiquitous. When, in May 1994, his first government
faced a crucial no-confidence vote in parliament, his team AC Milan
were simultaneously competing for the Champions’ Cup with
Barcelona in Athens. That evening, once Berlusconi’s team were 2-
0
up (they would eventually win
4
-
0
), parliament voted in his favour.
Some people have followed the analogy between football and politics
even further. Romano Prodi (Berlusconi’s rival in the
1996
elections
and who won the contest) presented himself as a keen cyclist, an
image which, politically, recalled the old days of proportional representation:
a mass of competitors, the result announced after months
of competition and difficult calculation. Berlusconi’s footballing
mentality meant that he was ideal for the new, first-
past-
the-
post
system that was to revolutionise Italian politics. Italian politics
was suddenly more like football: a show-down between two sides;
abuse could be hurled at the opposing fans and their players, be
they sporting or political
.

Spring 2001. The crisis of Italian football was coming to a head. It centred, appropriately enough, on the reigning Italian champions, Lazio. Someone had allegedly forged a passport on behalf of Juan Sebastian Veron. Their coach, Sven-Goran Eriksson had been wooed away by the English FA. Their Portuguese defender had tested non-negative. Worse, though, for the image of Lazio and
Serie A, was the racism and violence, reflections of a more general, sociological malaise.

It started when Arsenal visited Lazio in the Champions’ League. As the Lazio fans, traditionally from the far-right, barracked Arsenal’s Patrick Viera with choruses of ‘boo-boo’, the Lazio defender Sinisa Mihajlovic repeatedly called him ‘nigger’. At the following match the Serb was forced to apologise and denounce his own racism over the stadium’s PA system. And yet the racist fans clearly enjoyed the collusion of the club and the
Carabinieri
lined up outside the stadia. Anyone who has ever been to a football stadium in Italy will know that it’s impossible to get into the place with a cigarette lighter, with coins and sometimes even keys. They will almost certainly be confiscated when you’re dusted down by the hoards of
Carabinieri
on the gates. And yet, despite such stringent checks, the following banners (both about fifty metres long) had both recently appeared in Lazio’s stadium: ‘Jews: Auschwitz is your town, the ovens your houses’ or, a tribute to Mihajlovic and his fellow Serbs, ‘Honour to the Arkan Tiger’. In another instance of incompetent policing, a motorbike was ridden up the spiral walk-way which takes fans to the upper tiers of the San Siro and thrown onto the opposing fans on the tier below. Quite how a motorbike was able to get there, when no one’s ever managed to take even a hip-flask into a stadium, baffled the embarrassed commentators.

Watching football matches became like watching newsreels of matches in Britain from the 1970s: fans goading the police or other fans into close-quarter fights, train stations vandalised, cars repeatedly set on fire. Every Sunday evening there seemed to be new pictures of looted shops seen through the haze of police tear gas. In one post-match incident, a player from Como, Massimo Ferrigno, punched his former team-mate Francesco Bertolotti into a coma which lasted over a week. A month later, a bomb was thrown into the home of the co-owner of Napoli, Corrado Ferlaino, because the club was performing badly. (The same reason was given for the calf’s head sent in the post to the President of Reggina.) Worse was the volley of smoke-flares which, at almost
every match, went to and fro between fans like a gently lobbed tennis ball. It looked quite picturesque unless you saw it up close: one policeman had to have a finger amputated. In an even more tragic incident, a fan was killed as a paper-bomb was thrown from opposing fans during a play-off in Sicily.

Towards the close of the 2000–2001 season, Parma were placed just behind the chasing pack for the title; with Inter Milan and AC Milan struggling, a Champions’ League place looked certain. ‘Huh,’ said Filippo, my taciturn and supremely cynical friend with whom I often watch the games from the
Curva
Nord
, ‘you just watch in the next few weeks. The teams from Milan will do anything they can to get into the Champions’ League …’

‘Such as?’

‘You just watch the penalties they’re awarded,’ he said, laughing bitterly.

Parma, though, was itself to become the centre of suspicion. When one of the Parma players scored a goal against Lecce, he looked embarrassed, as if he had messed up the script. There was no celebration, only a banging of his fists against the post. Then Parma were playing Verona. Suspicions were raised before the game by the fact that the Verona and Parma presidents are good friends and business partners. Giambattista Pastorello borrowed money from the Tanzi family – the Parma benefactors – to buy Verona, so the relationship is, to say the least, intimate. They often loan players one way or the other to help each other out. The teams even wear the same yellow-blue strip. During the penultimate game of the season, with Parma already guaranteed a Champions’ League place and Verona desperate to avoid the drop, Parma lost 2-1 at home. There was, of course, more conspiracy theorising for days on end.

It may be, of course, that Juventus and Italian football are actually clean and free of corruption. It may be that people from Parma are just bad losers. ‘But,’ as Filippo says, ‘I wouldn’t bet on it. I wouldn’t bet on anything here unless I knew the score. Literally.’

Most neutrals, for various reasons, wanted Roma to win the
title, mainly for the worthy reason that Roma had played the best football. Also, the Argentine Batistuta, having delighted Italian aesthetes for a decade without winning much, was reaching the twilight of his career, and most people wished him well. The other, well-publicised reason for neutrals supporting Roma was a promise made by an actress. Sabrina Ferilli is a
romanista
and the owner of Italy’s most famous pair of breasts – in various B-movies they’re shown off like
caciocavallo
, those huge tear-drops of smooth creamy cheese. She had promised to perform a striptease should Roma manage to win the title. In the run-up to the end of the championship, news programmes could talk about little else other than the prospect of ‘la Ferilli’ baring her bosom. It was, literally, ‘big news’. Roma did, of course, win the title, and ‘la Ferilli’ did her teasing striptease (down to a skin-coloured bikini).

The season, though, didn’t end there: as ever, there were legal cases that promised to drag on for years. The President of Napoli, a man whose face is like an over-inflated football, half of it covered by a hedge-like moustache, began legal action: he insisted that Parma and Verona must have come to an agreement, and that Napoli had been the victims, dropping down to Serie B. More seriously, and probably more based on fact, at the beginning of July it was announced that two of the leading lights of Juventus, the
amministratore
delegato
Antonio Giraudo and the doctor Riccardo Agricola, were to be tried for ‘sporting fraud’ for administering illegal pills and illicit syringes to Juventus players. The man who had conducted the investigations was even, the press noted gleefully, a Juventus supporter.

At the beginning of the following season, Edgar Davids’ ban from football was reduced. Nobody really noticed. In short paragraphs at the back of the sports pages, it was reported that the magistrature had decided to reduce the Juventus midfielder’s ban to just four months. Since a large part of the ban had been served during the summer months, he would be allowed to return to football almost immediately (17 September). All the other sentences were reduced or annulled, be they for forging passports, match-fixing or use of Nandrolone.

All of which made me think that the real problem wasn’t about penalties, about whether the referees lean slightly towards the Old Lady of Italian football or the Prime Minister’s team when they blow their whistles and point to the spot. The debate is really about another type of penalty, or the lack of it. It’s the fact that, as Italy’s moral minority always complains,
non paga
nessuno
, which basically means that no one in Italy is ever, ever punished for anything: ‘nobody pays’. Ever since I had arrived I had heard one half of the country, that law-abiding half, complain bitterly and incessantly about the
furbi
who appear to bend and break the law at will, without ever facing the consequences. In Italy there are no penalties other than on the football pitch. Crime is never followed by punishment because, at least for the powers-that-be, there’s guaranteed impunity. You can get away with anything. As long as you play the game, you’ll be played onside. Take Nandrolone, field illegal players, fiddle the accounts, put up Fascist banners:
non
paga
nessuno
.

Perhaps none of which really matters. Italian football remains the most stylish and cultured and clever incarnation of the sport. The
Azzurri
will always be the hot favourites to win any international tournament because, whatever goes on in the boardrooms, the actual foot-soldiers are still the best in the world. Also, I would rather play football in Italy – in the parks or on the beaches – than anywhere else. When you roll up with a friend, looking for a game, everyone will instinctively welcome you. Then, once they realise you’re English, they will pretend to be having second thoughts: ‘
Mamma mia
, not an English footballer!’ The seriousness with which they play, whispering advice to each other as they sprint across the sand, or signalling where you should put the ball just by moving their eyes, is incredible. They hardly ever foul; if, by accident they do, they will pick you up, bow and apologise. That’s the nobility of Italian football. Afterwards, once you’re in a bar with them all, it’s normally impossible – thanks to their hospitality and generosity – to buy even one drink.

And anyway, long before the end of that football season, the plight of one individual had become the complete negation of my
theory of Italian impunity. Almost as if to compensate for the absence of justice, one man had been sentenced to an exemplary prison term for a murder committed decades earlier, in 1972. Here, finally, was an example of that rare thing, a genuine Italian punishment (with the irony that it had been meted out to the one man millions of Italians were convinced was actually innocent). Adriano Sofri had become the country’s most famous ‘murderer’, and – since his case overlapped so intimately with that of Piazza Fontana – I travelled to Pisa prison to meet him.

Heading out of Parma to the south-west you quickly reach the Cisa pass which takes you over the Apennines towards the Ligurian and Tuscan coasts. It’s a spectacular road that lifts you above the fog of the plain: supported on concrete stilts it struts over valleys, and its long tunnels puncture the mountains. A few hundred metres below the asphalt, picturesque mountain villages huddle around their bell-towers, appearing from above like random piles of matchboxes. Now, in October, the mountain colours are crisp and autumnal: white wood-smoke gusting between dark green pines.

I’m driving towards Pisa prison. A few days before, the first penal section of the
Cassazione
court had, on 6 October 2000 in Rome, pronounced the final judgement on a murder committed almost thirty years before, in May 1972. It had taken eleven hours for the court to reach their decision, which was then curtly announced to the gathered journalists at ten p. m.: ‘this court rejects the appeal for a retrial …’

It was the definitive, closing chapter of a case that has obsessed the country, one which had, throughout the 1990s, become every bit as politicised and emblematic as the Dreyfus affair almost a century before. The appeal to the
Cassazione
was the last resort: a final opportunity to reopen the case. That opportunity denied, the conviction (announced six months previously) for the ‘Calabresi crime’ stands, and Adriano Sofri will remain in prison
until 2017, almost fifty years from the date of the crime.

‘The Sofri Case’ is, in many ways, the complementary inverse of the on-going Piazza Fontana trial: a tardy and dubious attempt to apportion blame (this time on the extra-parliamentary left) for one of the iconic moments from the
anni di piombo
; to indict not only an individual but also the wider movement of which he was representative. If evidence which is belated and confused in the Piazza Fontana trial has allowed the left to point an hysterical finger against various historical nemeses, the Sofri case has offered the same opportunity for the right. The Piazza Fontana crimes were the very reason for the Calabresi crime: Calabresi was the police commissioner in charge of interrogating Pino Pinelli, the Anarchist suspected of the bombing who subsequently fell to his death from a window of the police station. As with so much of the
anni di piombo
, Piazza Fontana appears the original sin from which all other crimes descend. ‘The
anni di piombo
started with Piazza Fontana,’ wrote Giorgio Galli in Genoa’s newspaper
Secolo
XIX
, ‘and until the truth about that beginning has been ascertained, that about Calabresi will remain partial.’

Responses to the Sofri case tend to be knee-jerk assertions of either his guilt or innocence, and all commentators inevitably become
colpevolisti
or
innocentisti
, part of the guilty or innocent camps. For the left, Sofri is a
cause
-
célèbre
without compare, the sacrificial lamb of the right bent on judicial revenge for left-wing terrorism in the 1970s. ‘They’ve buried him alive,’ say his friends on the evening of the latest decision. Some hint darkly that Sofri, as a man of granite integrity (and one who knows his own symbolic value), might now resort to suicide, but he denies it in a press conference from Pisa prison the following morning: ‘There are two things I’ll never do: ask for a pardon [which would imply guilt], or commit suicide’. His brother, an academic in Bologna, declares: ‘This is an ugly country; if I weren’t an old
signore
nearing the end of my days, I would go away …’ An editorial in
La
Repubblica
calls the decision ‘a monstrosity … the inhuman and uncivil vendetta of the State’. Sofri, runs the editorial, has to suffer the ‘infamy of being an assassin – still worse the sender of an
assassin … he will consider this a death sentence, and will testify until martyrdom his innocence.’ Within days, a campaign for granting Sofri a Presidential pardon is begun.

Those on the right, however, were gleeful. ‘Justice has been done,’ declared one member of the National Alliance; ‘let’s hope that the
Lotta Continua
lobby [the movement of which Sofri was the leader] now shuts up, and remembers their history as killers, as definitively sanctified today by the Italian judiciary’. Another National Alliance spokesman says he hopes for an end to ‘the obsessive, apologist song which has transformed Sofri into an icon which even he doesn’t seem to recognise’.

The road comes out at the
Golfo
dei Poeti
. I turn left, and stop in another small town, Bocca di Magra, and approach a man selling pancakes out of the back of a van. He’s got thick waves of greying hair. This is Leonardo Marino, the
pentito
whose confessions are responsible for the Sofri case. I explain that I’m a journalist, and ask him a couple of questions. He repeats the phrases I’ve read elsewhere: religious language about repenting, about the need, after all these years, to tell the truth. Marino, once in the rank-and-file of
Lotta Continua
in the 1970s, has become a figure of ridicule for the left. He is the
pentito
who has pointed a finger at Sofri, and his two ‘accomplices’. In 1988 he confessed first to his priest, then to the police, about his involvement in the murder of Luigi Calabresi. Almost every detail he recalled was wrong: the colour of the car, the place where the murder was planned, the weather conditions. There was little evidence, other than his, on which the accused could have been convicted. There was an eerie absence of the normally all-important
documenti
.

It’s strange, now, to see him: whilst Sofri is in prison, Marino is selling pancakes on the Ligurian coast as if nothing had happened. During Sofri’s first trial it was revealed that Marino had been in contact with the police long before his ‘official’ confession in the summer of 1988, leading many (not least Dario Fo in another invective comedy,
Marino
Libero
, Marino è
Innocente
) to suggest that the whole confession was simply a put-up job by police.

An hour later I arrive in Pisa. The city is dominated by scholars
and students and the atmosphere is very left-wing. Pisa’s ancient university (where Galileo Galilei once taught), and especially its
Scuola
Normale
(founded by Napoleon in imitation of Paris’s
Ecole
Normale
), have long been the educational cradles for future Presidents and Prime Ministers, for philosophers and scientists. During the 1930s, the city was a refuge of intellectual resistance to Mussolini: in 1937 Aldo Capitini published his
Elementi
di
un’esperienza
religiosa
, an impassioned plea for non-cooperation with the regime, and two years later one of his colleagues published
La
scuola
dell’uomo
, a sort of paean to liberty. Walking around the city, back and forth across the bridges which criss-cross the river Arno, the political affiliation of the city is obvious: sprayed on walls at regular intervals, with what I’m told is typically Tuscan humour, is one recurrent sentence:
Cacciamo
i Fascisti della
faccia
della terra … e non solo!
– ‘Let’s hunt fascists from the face of the earth … and not only from there!’ Another piece of urban graffiti is appended to the south wall of a church: an enormous mural, a collage of colourful, floating bodies, painted in Pisa by Keith Haring shortly before his death. Like Parma, everywhere there are monuments, memorials and plaques, always appearing more provocative than reconciliatory. In the heart of the city there is a small park with the sculpted bust of a young man, Franco Serantini. Below the inscription explains: ‘20-year-old Anarchist mortally wounded by police at an anti-Fascist rally’. On the wall of the building opposite the bust someone has (evidently recently) sprayed: ‘Franco, we will avenge you’.

The
Casa
Circondariale
di Don Bosco
, Pisa’s prison, is a squat building, almost unnoticed from the road but for the perspex watch-tower inhabited by a bored, uniformed guard. Immediately inside the prison there’s another plaque, this time commemorating the agents of custody killed in the line of duty: ‘Repose with Christian piety’ it says (dated 1977). The prison guards are good-humoured and disorganised, struggling to find the flurry of faxes and photocopied
documenti
that I have, for months, been sending to them and the ministry in Rome. Finally everything is miraculously in order, and I’m ushered across a courtyard and through a
series of slow, hydraulic doors. The interview room is cold. In the corner, plastic chairs are stacked to the damp, brown ceiling. I sit down on one of the chairs and wait for the arrival of Italy’s most notorious ‘murderer,’ Adriano Sofri.

Throughout the early
1970s
, the anarchist Pino Pinelli and the police
commissioner Luigi Calabresi became symbolic characters in Italy’s
unusual morality play, invariably hero and villain respectively.
Despite the fact that he had been unknown and anonymous during
his lifetime, in death Pinelli had become, like Che Guevara, the focal
point for left-wing malaise. He was invoked in slogans daubed on
walls across the country
: ‘Quando votate ricordatevi di Pino Pinelli’
(‘when you vote, remember Pino Pinelli’), and
Lotta Continua
issued a record of ‘The Ballad of Pinelli’. Calabresi, on the
other hand, became the scapegoat for all the alleged injustices of
Italian society, and of Piazza Fontana in particular
.

As the libel trial continued between Calabresi and
Lotta Continua,
however, the process of blurring fact and fiction was wel
l
underway. A series of films and plays began to add to the symbolic
accretions of the Pinelli–Calabresi case. In October 1970 Dario
Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist
opened, with its unsubtle indictment
of the police version of events:

In the same year, Elio
Petri’s film,
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
won an Oscar for best foreign film, portraying a policeman
who had murdered a suspect but was persuaded not to confess.
The parallels with the Calabresi case (even though the film had been
shot prior to December 1969) were obvious. As were those drawn a
year later with the release of
Sacco and Vanzetti,
a film version of
innocent (Italian) Anarchists put to death in America, in which
another Anarchist, Andrea
Salsado
, fell from the fourteenth floor of
a New York police station. The momentum of indignation was such
that, in June 1971, 800 intellectuals signed a motion in
L’Espresso
magazine describing the police as ‘torturers’.

That polarisation of politics was underlined on 16 April 1970, when
the television news was interrupted shortly after 8.30 p.m. in various
cities by the announcement of a new, revolutionary formation. As the
images of the day’s news rolled on, an inserted voice-over announced:

The wording reflected the character of the leader of the GAP movement,
Giangiacomo Feltrinelli: melodramatic, apocalyptic, above
all desperate to inherit the mantle of the partisan movement.
Feltrinelli is one of the many ‘fallen’ from the
anni di piombo
whose memory has been both lionised and ridiculed, his name
becoming a reflection of both the violence and the farce of those
years.
Feltrinelli’s
family was one of Italy’s richest, thanks to their
acres of forests in
Carinzia
, and his
grandfather’s
road-building
projects under Mussolini. Brought up ‘like a prince of the royal
blood in olden times,’ Feltrinelli escaped from his family home in
Turin during the civil war to fight with the partisans, later becoming
a member and generous benefactor of the Communist party.
Feltrinelli had, in 1950, founded a study centre and subsequently
opened a publishing house and a chain of bookshops across the
country. It was Feltrinelli who first published Giuseppe Tomasi di
Lampedusa’s
The Leopard
and Boris Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago
(a publication which soured his relationship with the Communist
party in Italy and Russia). Increasingly, he travelled to Cuba and
South America, duly publishing works on guerilla movements, on
Che Guevara, and – as a close friend of Castro – commissioning the
Cuban
leader’s
autobiography
.