The Dark Heart of Italy (32 page)

I looked at the sea and beyond, trying to catch sight of the north African coast. Sicily, I suppose, has always been held up as the epitome of what’s wrong with Italy. And yet, sitting there in the sunset, it also seemed exactly what’s right: despite poverty, the generosity is instinctive. Despite daily reports about murders and kidnappings, it also appears blissfully peaceful and serene. Things might be serious, but I had never heard so much laughter. In fact, behind the stereotypical lawlessness is hidden what many consider the real, earthy intellectual caste of Italy. Sicily has been the cradle of some of the country’s greatest writers: Giovanni Verga, Luigi Pirandello, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia. Reading them, you get an idea of the sheer aridity of the island. Always in the background there’s a sense of mortality amidst the dust. Grandiose concepts like dignity and honour still dominate the moral and immoral spectra. And because everything is a hall of mirrors, in which nothing is ever quite understood, words are always carefully chosen, no utterance is ever idle.

Sicilians are admired because, as Sciascia wrote, they ‘little love to speak’, their lives are ‘made up more of silences than words…’ A friend from Parma who now teaches at Palermo university talks admiringly of Sicilians’
flemma serafica
, their ‘seraphic phlegm’, which enables them to put up with poverty whilst watching the profiteers. Another friend from Parma, a middle-aged man whose son spent a long time on the island recovering from heroin addiction, says that Sicilians are the most noble and intellectual of all Italians. ‘They have,’ he says, ‘the perfect combination of hardness (
durezza
) and refinement (
raffinatezza
). You see it in all that studied politeness, the dutiful examination of their own behaviour…’

After a few idle days at Marsala, I went to Mozia, which is, along with Agrigento, one of the southern Mediterranean’s richest archaeological sites. It was here that an Englishman named Joseph Whitaker began painstakingly retrieving bits of boats and
weapons and burial sites from the shallow waters around his offshore island, San Pantaleo. In his villa you can still see marine charts, tracing the Carthaginian sailing routes between southern Sicily and Spain, north Africa, and Greece. Nearby improbable windmills sit in the shallows, sucking in the sea to produce hillsides of glistening salt.

When I got back to Palermo it was July 14, the day of
La
Santuzza
or Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of Palermo. The city centre is still largely as it was after the Allied bombing raids from the Second World War: some houses have no front walls, so you can peer in and see abandoned cookers and a tree sprouting in the kitchen. Lone walls rise up and lean randomly without any purpose. There are still piles of mortar and horizontal doric columns where the bombs fell over fifty years ago. Against that backdrop,
La Santuzza
appeared beautifully, elegiacally pagan. Loudspeakers were hung from street corners to relay the voice of a husky French actress which was alternated with the stern tones of the
Arcivescovo
of Palermo. ‘I am
Santuzza
,’ said the actress, ‘I am the city, I live between the mountains and the sea.’ Meanwhile beautiful, busty girls mounted on huge iron horses were wearing twelve-foot dresses and lighting extravagant fires. Fat, topless men were looking bored as they pushed the oars of the float, occasionally stopping for a cigarette when the man in a suit at the front received an order from his walkie-talkie. The air smelt of lighter fuel and incense. Behind me a Vespa screeched to a halt inches from my calves. The guy took off his helmet, excused himself, and made the sign of the cross.

Within weeks of returning to Parma there were more bombs, this time more professional and consequential. One blew apart Venice’s marketplace outside the city’s tribunal the day before Berlusconi was due to arrive. Another, a few days later, at Vigonza (again in the Veneto) targeted the headquarters of the Northern League. After the bombing, the outside wall of the headquarters looked like a spider’s web – the masonry and plaster cracked into interconnecting lines. The response was, again, paranoia that the
country was slipping back towards the irrational reprisals of the
anni di piombo
. Berlusconi responded by trying to knit together another ‘historic compromise’, drafting the left wing onto his side to denounce and isolate the ‘terrorism’. No one really bought it though. Everyone realised that Italy was nowhere near the violence and terrorism of the 1970s. It was much shallower, more superficial, and no one really thought, however tragic his death at the hands of the forces of order, that Carlo Giuliani was going to become a new Pino Pinelli, the Anarchist who suffered the ‘accidental death’ back in 1969. There was, certainly, a strange nostalgia for the
anni di piombo
amongst a tiny minority, in the same way that in the 1970s there was a yearning to recreate the Resistance. But all the vital ingredients that made the 1970s so bloody were entirely lacking. The government, however, appeared to enjoy the
anni di piombo
comparison more than anyone else. Given the twin threats of Communism and terrorism, the Christian Democrats were for decades electorally invincible. Berlusconi was trying the same tactic, talking up both threats in the hope that his politics and his past could be ignored. From July onwards, any opposition to Berlusconi would be labelled ‘terrorism’, and protesters were likely to feel the full force of the forces of order.

Francesco Cossiga, a former President of the Republic, was once described as playing ‘a Pirandellian game of double truth and double lie… [he was] even fantastic in his wish for rationality filtered through ambiguity’. That ambiguous reputation arose because of the suspicion that he knew more about the country’s terrorism than he let on. (There was, in the early 1980s, an attempt to indict Cossiga when he was Prime Minister because he lied about tipping off terrorists about imminent arrests. The indictment failed.) Now, though, Cossiga is nicknamed ‘pick-axe’ because of his violent, provocative outbursts. Having witnessed the terrorism first-hand in the 1970s, he has frequently urged peace negotiations between Italy’s warring sides. In the aftermath of the G8 and the bombings of August 2001, however, he changed his attitude. As the country was worrying about the next international conference
(due in Rome in November) Cossiga outlined his advice to Berlusconi:

As a synthesis of strategic, Christian Democratic advice to the government it was breathtaking: let a few hooligans riot, and then truncheon them into submission (or worse). The very politician who had tried to bring the two halves of the country together was now advocating the settling of some old scores with the left. Given Italy’s history it wasn’t surprising that many Italians, going into another ‘hot autumn’, were mildly paranoid.

Such was the atmosphere in Italy immediately prior to the terrorist attacks on America. The Allied response to 11 September was a mixed blessing for Berlusconi. They allowed him to play the patriotic card and, according to his supporters, to add to his stature in the international arena. For one half of the country, Italy could finally be proud once more. After years of feeble government, they said, the country at last had a leader who could strut the international stage. There was a tangible upsurge in patriotism. The national anthem, the words of which are notoriously unknown by most Italians, was even played before a local derby in Verona. Tricolour flags were hung out over balconies and little lapel-badges of the red, green and white were dusted off by television presenters and politicians. Italian troops were offered to the Americans and were, to the delight and surprise of the patriots, actually accepted.

For the other half of the country, though, what was happening was worrying. Television, as usual, was the first to register the sub
tle changes. Dancing troupes began wearing military outfits: khaki bikinis or mini-skirts made up of stars-and-stripes. In another toe-curling show, a group of girls danced dolefully in burqas before the band struck up Yankee Doodle and they stripped off to the all-Italian sequin underwear. Films about the Crusades were shown repeatedly throughout September, and government ministers began going on air to denounce Islam and any other religion not subject to the Vatican (one of the Catholic leaders likened Bin Laden to Luther). Berlusconi, at the end of September, told journalists in Berlin about ‘the superiority of our civilisation’ over Islam. It was, he said ‘1,400 years behind’. It was the first signal that his presence on the world stage was to be an awkward, blundering one. What appeared swashbuckling bravado in Italy looked like ignorance abroad. Every Western government distanced itself from his comments: ‘It’s clear that Berlusconi’s remarks were offensive and offence has been taken,’ David Blunkett observed the next day. Realising that he had made a mistake, Berlusconi then denied ever having made the comments. The unfortunate phrases were, said Berlusconi, the malicious inventions of Italian Communists.

When the war on terrorism found a ‘financial front’, his position became evermore unfathomable. As the international community began taking an ever-tougher line on the movements of unsourced money, Berlusconi’s domestic legislation was going in exactly the opposite direction. With the eclipse of the Italian currency, the Lira, just around the corner, his government passed legislation which was little more than a licence to launder money. In return for a fine of 2.5% of the sum involved, illegally exported (or earned) capital would be allowed to return to Italy. It was called, simply,
rientro
dei capitali
, and was introduced as a sly amendment to a vote on the introduction of the Euro. Apart from the international derision that the legislation incurred, the government won on both counts: financially the Treasury would benefit from the fines and the influx of funds, and politically
Il
Presidente
seemed to have honoured his side of the dark bargain struck before the election. Stashes of illegally exported cash could
now, for a small fee, be put through the governmental washing machine. Such was the unease at the legislation that, only months after coming to power, the government was forced to make the ‘reentry of capital’ legislation a vote of confidence in the government.

Meanwhile, a parallel piece of legislation seemed, in the face of international efforts, even more perverse. The government had added two amendments to a treaty agreed between Switzerland and Italy in 1998, and which was only now being ratified in parliament. Those amendments were effectively bureaucratic spanners in the wheels of international investigations into financial fraud. They rendered useless any documents used in on-going trials for banking irregularities unless they met rigid and improbable conditions (adherence, for example, to a raft of laws from February 1961, which ratified the Convention of Strasbourg). It seemed apparent that certain trials would have to be postponed, or begun again from scratch. By that time, the Statute of Limitations would take effect, and further prosecution would be impossible. The Director of Public Prosecutions in Geneva, Bernard Bertossa, spoke of his ‘impression that this disgraceful law has a clear objective: to do away with certain evidence to neutralise certain judicial processes in Italy.’

Even on the government benches there was outrage at the legislation. For the first time, 27
franchi
tiratori
(‘snipers’ from Berlusconi’s own Pole of Liberties coalition) took advantage of the secret ballot to vote against the government. As the legislation was passed, there were physical fights on the floor of the parliament. It was described as a rissa: not exactly a punch-up, but a lot of pushing and shoving between opposing politicians. Indeed, as the amendments were being passed, opposition parliamentarians held up posters with the name of Cesare Previti (Berlusconi’s lawyer currently on trial in Milan) and the number of his Swiss bank account.

It became very obvious that the backlog of court cases against Silvio Berlusconi and his allies was the main reason for the autumn’s rushed legislation. He intended, it seemed, not to defend himself
in
the various trials, but to defend himself
from
them. Even
the Northern League, which at the beginning of the 1990s had appeared a minor party intent on rooting out the corruption of Rome, had become entirely co-opted to the cover-up. The Justice Minister, the
Leghista
Roberto Castelli, repeatedly inveighed against the ‘dirty togas’; Carlo Taormina, the Sicilian lawyer, went further, saying that any magistrates who continued to prosecute Berlusconi should themselves be prosecuted. Each time he went abroad Silvio Berlusconi desperately tried to explain himself to his allies: Italy had ‘Jacobin judges’ he said in Spain. ‘For the last ten years,’ he said in an interview with one of his own magazines, ‘there has been a civil war in Italy.’ In a move which seemed intimidating, and whose full significance would only be understood months later, protective escorts for magistrates were drastically cut back. By the beginning of December, after weeks of relentless attacks, the entire committee of the ‘National Association of Magistrates’ resigned en masse, the first time it had done so since 1924.

Days later, the partners of the European Union met to discuss plans for a European arrest warrant for 32 of the most serious crimes: terrorism, arms-trafficking, paedophilia and so on. It was expected to be a straight-forward meeting, but Italy unexpectedly, and for the first time in her post-war history, had suddenly cooled on the idea of the European Community. The Italian delegation refused to sign the agreement. The motives for Italy’s reluctance to introduce a European arrest warrant were baffling. Others, though, suggested it was only natural: at a time when the Italian government was intending to stitch-up its domestic judiciary, it wouldn’t then go and create an international noose for the presidential neck. Roberto Castelli, the Justice Minister, returned from Brussels wearing his green, Northern League neck-tie, and duly announced to a rally in Milan that a European arrest warrant was a sure way to guarantee Communist justice; nobody, said Umberto Bossi – the Minister for Reforms and leader of the League – would have been safe from the left-wing ‘executioners’ had the legislation been signed. An agreement was eventually reached, but only once many of the crimes under discussion had become subject to ‘dual incrimination’: the arrest warrant would
only be valid if the crime was legally a crime in both the country requesting extradition and the extraditing country. As Graham Watson, the Chairman of the European Parliament’s Justice and Home Affairs Committee, later told me: ‘The whole episode raised further questions in Brussels about the cleanliness of Berlusconi’s government. That a Prime Minster should go so far to guarantee what is effectively a veto against the arrest of criminals is very worrying. I should say that I don’t think he was trying to save his own skin, but that of his friends and allies.’