The Dark Heart of Italy (20 page)

Seven-thirty the following day. The same crowd on the pavement, waiting for the office to open. We greeted each other like old friends. The man in the West Ham top was there. He shook my hand, delighted that the English were subjected to the same routine as Africans. After queuing for only 45 minutes, I proudly presented my application for sojourn in Italy. The application process, of course, would require months, but at least equipped with the carbon copy I could go to the
Anagrafe
– the provincial equivalent of Somerset House – to apply for residency. The
Anagrafe
is an infamous institution: any change of status – marriage, new house, identity card – has to be rubber stamped. Then to the tax office, to apply for VAT status: another morning gone. I was beginning to understand why people talk about doing an ‘operation’
in a bank, or an office: it really does require military precision to navigate your way through the documentation.

Worse was yet to come though. The university presented me three contracts for the three courses I was supposed to teach. Since they are formal pieces of paper, it’s not enough to sign them: they have to be
bollati
, given an official postage stamp sold at tobacconists. Then, I was told, I had to be insured in case of personal injury incurred whilst lecturing on English literature: another 300,000 lire. A few days before the beginning of the course, I went to the faculty library to see what books were available. The stern
signora
from the secretarial office ran up to me:
Ma che
fai?
‘What are you doing?’

‘Trying to find a few books for next week.’

‘These are for the exclusive use of permanent staff. You’re hired as a freelance and must buy your own.’ She produced the business card of a friend who could help me out.

‘But I’m allowed to use the blackboard, right?’

‘Haven’t you read your contract?’

I hadn’t of course. It slowly dawned on me, as months went by, that since I was working freelance at the university there was no date specified as to when payment arrived. Assuming things were done monthly, I had only looked excitedly at
quanto
– how much? – not at the much more important information:
quando
, when? Months went by: the deep blue sky of late summer gave way to the dense fog of autumn. The snow began to fall in December, and the local electricity monopoly, AMPS, wanted its heating bills paid promptly at the post office. Any tentative payment enquiry at the university accounts office was brushed off with brilliant ventriloquism: ‘It is foreseen that the pre-agreed payment as stipulated in the contracts for freelance teachers will be honoured before the end of the academic year.’ Months later, that line had turned into ‘before the beginning of the next academic year’.

I went back to see Filippo, who began laughing. ‘You’ve still got milk in your mouth! Of course she makes you get insurance and books from her friends. Of course she then pays you a year and a half later. What did you expect? You really are so naive.’ He began,
slowly, explaining the whole thing again. ‘Cash,’ he kept repeating. ‘Cash. Documents and contracts and banks will always rip you off. You must insist on cash. And never tip. Tipping is for stupid foreigners. Italians never tip. Why would we? Tipping is like paying tax … a voluntary contribution towards someone you don’t know and shouldn’t care about.’ The distrust was incredible. All the more so because ‘credit’ – that Italian invention – was originally based linguistically and financially upon belief, on trusting the other person.

I had even seen politicians urge tax evasion, though. Those in opposition would encourage viewers not to pay the TV licence because the RAI channels were in the hands of the ‘wrong’ party. Other political leaders regularly urge a
sciopero fiscale
, a tax strike in protest against unfair financial burdens from the government. The defence line for tax-evaders is always the same: either it’s justified because the government is corrupt, and therefore our tax-evading corruption is actually ‘fiscal resistance to corruption’. Or else it’s justified because of the extraordinary tax levy on Italians, the theory of the so-called
oneri impropri
(‘unfair burdens’). It’s a defence line which Silvio Berlusconi has repeatedly used to explain his financial manoeuvres: tax-payers, he has said, feel ‘morally at loggerheads with the state’, observing that the state’s laws go against ‘our natural sense of justice …’
2

Given that backdrop, in which everyone (from friends to parliamentarians) urges you to, sooner or later you will become ‘
furbo
’. However earnest the intentions, you’re almost forced to collude with ‘unofficial’ money, with the ‘black’ side of the economy, simply because it’s so widespread. To avoid doing so would be harder than avoiding the cracks between the cobbles. Renting property ‘in the black’ (with under-the-counter cash) is very common because it suits both sides: the landlord pays no tax, so the rent is lower. You’re welcome to do it legally and above board, but then you’ll end up in a bedsit somewhere under the ring-road. If you can compromise on your morals a bit, the opportunities are exponentially increased. If you want to buy a house, the scams are even more labyrinthine. Buying a property
involves so many middle-men (not only estate agents, but ‘notaries’, the richest of all Italian professional orders) that it’s not surprising that Italians are bemused with the ease and speed with which the British buy and sell houses. Here, the costs and complications are so high it’s clearly best to keep it a once in a lifetime experience. The only way to save yourself 30 or 40 million lire is to take a few short-cuts. Many suggested to me that if I were to pay them in ‘countables’ they would accept a 1.5% instead of the 3% cut. With the notaries you can even pretend that you’ve bought the house for half the price, thus halving his cut (although there you will be left with a property which is worth, on the vital, stamped paper, only half of what you actually paid). Alternatively, there’s something called a
scrittura privata
, a ‘private document’, a sort of ‘for our eyes only’ agreement. Thus you can buy a property for two different prices: the official one (cutting your costs, future taxes and so on) and the private one (which is the real price you agree to pay the seller). Not for the first time, it became difficult to distinguish quite what was going on. There seemed, at all levels, to be parallel paths – the official one written on paper, and the hidden one going on in verbal agreements between ‘gentlemen’.

The other problem was that frequently I was offered a flat that, given the official/reality divide, wasn’t actually in existence. The widespread practise of illegal building (
abusivismo
) means that you can find something that – given your modest budget – appears a bargain: a two bedroom attic flat on split levels in a part of the city that feels crumbling but lively. The estate agent notices your enthusiasm, and whispers in your ear about how negotiable they are when it comes to cash payments. The problem is that if the flat or a part of it, say the second level of the flat, is ‘abusive’, it simply doesn’t exist in the annals of bureaucracy. To save money, the notary has been bypassed and in buying the property, you make the gamble that the ‘unpardoned’ building doesn’t get discovered, because you would have inherited the abuse. You would, to officialise the abuse, have to pay for the pardon, or else keep it secret and risk the fine. It would be very unlikely that anyone would even discover your inherited abuse, but if you had
snapped up the bargain you would already be on that well-trodden road to collusion with illegality. Anyone who had a grudge against you could simply do the ultimate in betrayal: denounce you.

Stay in the country long enough and you simply have to become ‘cunning’ in order to survive. With a shrug of honest admission, everyone in Italy will admit to having broken the law at some point (it’s hard not to if being ‘an accessory to tax evasion’ involves leaving a shop without the till receipt). Catholics mention original sin and our fallen nature; politicians talk about being realistic rather than ideological about the law. Everyone has a bit of ‘black’ mixed in with the ‘red’ and ‘green’. It’s only a matter of degree.
Così fan tutti
: everyone’s guilty of something, so if you go looking for dirt, you’ll find it anywhere.

The whole debate about Clean Hands is about where to draw the dividing line (if it even exists) between what is ‘cunning’ and what is ‘corruption’. And even corruption is a redundant term because here the word has so many layers. It is only a loose, generic word (like
prosciutto
) that needs to be divided into dozens of different cuts, each of a different quality and cost.

The other side of the economy is the complete opposite of those small
enterprises: huge ‘para-statal’ companies employing hundreds of
thousands of people. As with the politics, in economics there was a
marked continuum between Mussolini’s regime and the First
Republic. The many acronyms from Fascism such as IRI, IMI and
AGIP
survived untouched. To those state enterprises, founded in
1933, 1931 and 1926 respectively, was added another in 1953, ENI.
Thus the public sector workforce remained much as it was under
Mussolini: IRI had in 1942 employed 210,000 people; by 1955 it was
still employing 187,000 people and would, seven years later, become
Europe’s biggest industrial group after Royal-Dutch Shell
.

The other catalyst for Italy’s post-war reconstruction was
Mediobanca, founded as an offshoot of the Banca
Commerciale
Italiana in 1946 and nestled just behind La Scala in Milan. It was,
until his death in 2000, for over fifty years the private domain of a
banker called Enrico
Cuccia
. Even there the continuities with the
Fascist period are marked:
Cuccia
had married the daughter of
Alberto
Beneduce
, the man who had, under Mussolini, been president
of both IMI and IRI. Mediobanca provided credit to the country’s
commercial ventures, receiving in exchange large shares itself or
else positions on the board. (It now has a market capitalisation of
almost £7 billion, and owns, amongst other assets,
Assicurazioni
Generali, Europe’s third-largest insurer.
Mediolanum
, a bank in
which Berlusconi has a 36% stake, is now part of the controlling
shareholder group of Mediobanca.)

For all the subsequent criticisms aimed at the Christian Democrats,
their rebuilding of the Italian economy was a brilliant piece of strategic
management. Mediobanca, with its secretive system of overlapping
interests, provided capital investment. Those semi-public corporations
(often blamed for the later distortions of the Italian economy) for
decades laid the foundations for Italy’s industrial revolution. Thanks
to their partnerships with private enterprises, those para-statal
acronyms offered Italy the best of both worlds: the guiding hand of the
public state combined with the acute, capitalist judgements of private
enterprise. The result was that the raw materials and the physical
infrastructure required for the country’s economic miracle were quickly
put in place. To give just one example, steel production, controlled
by IRI through the
Finsider
company, reached three million tons by
1955; the obvious beneficiary was Fiat, which in turn increased production
by some 400% during the 1950s
.

Thanks to the low value of the Lira, and the low labour costs of the
immediate post-war years, the ‘miracle’ was export-led. For much of
the post-war years, the percentage growth of exports – cars, chemicals,
clothes and so on – was in double-figures. The crisis only
arrived in the
1970s
. Since Italy was more dependent upon oil
than many of the other industrialised countries, it was particularly
susceptible to the hike in oil prices at the beginning of the
1970s
. The
end of the
Bretton
-Woods agreement on fixed exchange rates and the
devaluation of the dollar (in both 1971 and 1973) meant that
Italian exports (ever the success story of the economy) were hard hit.
Industrial unrest was also causing a wage spiral. The hourly rates of
workers between 1964 and 1968 increased by 22.8%; during the four
years after that period, they rose by over 95%. In fact, inflation was
perceived as a way out of the Italian crisis, not least because the continuing
fall in the value of the Lira meant that the engine of the
Italian economy – exports – could be kept competitive. (Meanwhile
imports, of course, and especially oil, became as a consequence evermore
expensive, which itself fuelled the inflationary spiral.) It was in
that period that the most surreal effect of Italy’s economy took place:
everyone became a millionaire, and calculators started to come
equipped with that unique button of three zeros in order to save time
when adding up
.

The more serious problem was that the economy was being subordinated
to the survival of various political parties. Since they
depended so heavily on patronage, on the ability to place their
supporters within the bureaucracy through ‘recommendations’, any
attempt to cut down on the mushrooming public sector workforce
would have been tantamount to political hari-kiri. Thus organisations
like the
‘Cassa per il Mezzogiorno’
(the ‘fund for the south’)
and the ‘Ministry of State Participation’ were just the most famous
examples of the bureaucracy providing jobs rather than services.
Despite its important role in post-war reconstruction, the huge
public sector had ‘become the centre of party power, paving the way
to the so-called spoils system
’.
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It served politicians to do exactly
what was worse for the Italian economy: exponentially expand the
size of the bureaucracy, thereby increasing the size of their grateful
clientele. By the beginning of the
1970s
, just over 30% of all salaries
and wages in the south of Italy were due to public administration
jobs. The circumstances were exaggerated in the south, but even
nationwide the percentage of employment in the public sector had
doubled from just 9% in 1951 to over 18% in 1990
.