The Italians (10 page)

His
Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore
(
Six Characters in Search of an Author
) is probably Pirandello’s best-known work. But another of his plays is even more relevant in this context:
Così è (se vi pare),
variously translated into English as
Right You Are (If You Think So)
and
It IS So (If You Think So)
. It is a flat-out assault on the notion of objective truth. The play centers on the attempts, by a group of middle-class men and women in a provincial town, to find out about the newly arrived Ponza family, and particularly the elusive Signora Ponza.

They are presented with two accounts: Signor Ponza’s mother-in-law, Signora Frola, claims Signora Ponza is her daughter and that the possessive Signor Ponza is cruelly keeping her shut up at home. Signor Ponza, on the other hand, says his mother-in-law is mad. He says her daughter was his first wife, who died, and that Signora Frola continues to delude herself into thinking that she is the mother of his current, second wife. Signora Frola insists that, on the contrary, it is her son-in-law who is crazy. He then appears to confirm that view, but afterward explains that he did so in order not to interfere with her fantasies. Finally, Signora Ponza is brought into the proceedings and declares that she is both Signora Frola’s daughter
and
Signor Ponza’s second wife.

But, she says: “I am she who you believe me to be.”

CHAPTER 5

Fantasia

Michele Misseri
^*
: It was me. It was me. I killed Sarah with these hands. I ask God: Why didn’t he have me struck by lightning at that moment? Why did he let me kill that child?

Interviewer:
Mr. Misseri, how can you be believed?

Michele Misseri:
I have always told the truth. Right from the start, when they questioned me, I said it was me.

Interviewer:
You have given seven versions in eight months.

From a report in
La Repubblica,
June 1, 2011

I
t must have been such a powerful image: Italy’s man of destiny, Benito Mussolini, riding at the head of a column of three hundred thousand armed Fascists, marching on Rome to enforce an ultimatum to the king. After he came to power, schoolchildren were taught that three thousand “Fascist martyrs” had died in the insurrection and that, on their way to the capital, Mussolini and his Blackshirts crossed the river Rubicon, just like Julius Caesar when he too marched on Rome to seize power in 49 BC.

But it was all nonsense. Only about thirty thousand men were involved. Many were unarmed. And the overwhelming majority arrived in Rome by train after their leader had been appointed prime minister within the terms of the constitution.

Mussolini was nothing if not an audacious illusionist. When Hitler visited him in 1938, he decided the Rome the Führer saw on his way in from the airport should be at least as impressive as the Berlin he himself had seen the year before. So houses along the route were spruced up and, in some cases, pulled down. That of itself was not particularly exceptional perhaps. But Mussolini went further—much further. He ordered artificial trees to be planted along the route and cardboard facades depicting lavish villas to be erected at intervals. The barrels of some of the artillery that Hitler was shown—at a suitable distance—were made of wood.

It is scarcely unusual for totalitarian regimes to deploy myth and falsehood. More surprising is the use in Italy of similar techniques by the democratic regime that followed the downfall of Mussolini’s dictatorship. The official version, which held sway until the 1990s, was that the republic was born of the resistance to German occupation and the Nazis’ Fascist Italian allies. Every year on Liberation Day, April 25, and on every other convenient occasion, in fact, the Christian Democrats and their allies, who soon came to monopolize power in postwar Italy, paid homage to the resistance and the heroic exploits of the partisans.

“Heroic” is by no means too lavish an adjective in this context. Historians reckon that, of the hundred thousand Italians who joined the resistance, thirty-five thousand lost their lives—a shockingly high casualty rate, proportionally well in excess of that in most of the Allied units that took part in the Italian campaign. The death rate among the partisans is a useful corrective to the view that Italians were reluctant to die for their country in the Second World War.

But the fact is that most of the partisans—about 70 percent—were Communists. And the central aim of the Christian Democrats and the four parties with which they allied in various combinations for more than forty years was to ensure that the Communists never got into government. Some of the partisans, it is true, had been Christian Democrats, but most of them joined the resistance only after Mussolini’s fall from power.

The Cold War that followed the Second World War supplied plenty of opportunities for the exercise of what in Italian is called
fantasia
—a word whose meaning lies somewhere on the permeable frontier between “imagination” and “creativity.” Perhaps the most remarkable example was the Terzo Corpo Designato d’Armata. This was an army unit, three hundred thousand strong, deployed in the 1950s on the flat Venetian hinterland as a bulwark against invasion by the Soviet Union and its allies. Except it never existed.

It was a giant bluff thought up by the Italian army as a substitute for having to recruit, train and arm hundreds of thousands of actual soldiers. A real lieutenant general was appointed to command it. He had genuine headquarters in Padua and a tiny staff whose job was to generate mountains of paperwork that, when leaked to the appropriate intelligence services, sent a message to the Soviet Bloc countries that if they tried to fight their way into Western Europe through northeastern Italy, they would face stiff resistance. Troops—most of them imaginary—were recruited, promoted and eventually discharged from the Terzo Corpo Designato d’Armata. Fuel was stored and ammunition distributed. But mostly on paper.

The existence—or rather nonexistence—of the Terzo Corpo Designato d’Armata came to light only after the end of the Cold War, in 2009, when a newspaper reported on the problems it was still creating for the army. It had been disbanded in 1972, but the tons of paper it had generated could not be destroyed. In Italy, officially secret documents can be pulped only once they have been declassified—and they can only be declassified by the department or unit that created them. In this case, the unit no longer existed. And, indeed, never had.

Historically,
fantasia
has been the Italians’ most valuable resource. It enabled them to outwit foreign occupiers, invaders and other meddlers. It helped them create their unrivaled cultural heritage, and that in turn sometimes made the soldiers who used Italy as a battleground more reluctant than they might otherwise have been to shell and bomb Italian cities.
^*
Fantasia
has been a source of creativity from engineering to fashion. And it can be glimpsed in other, more trivial aspects of Italian life. Elsewhere, for example, politicians give their parties descriptive but dull titles like the New Right or Socialist Workers’ Party. But in Italy
fantasia
has been brought to bear. Berlusconi began the trend by using a football chant,
“Forza Italia!,”
as the name of the movement with which he launched himself into parliament in 1994. Then his rival Romano Prodi hit back by founding an alliance he dubbed L’Ulivo (“The Olive Tree”), one of the components of which was the Margherita (“Daisy”) Party. Since then, we have seen the emergence of the “Five-Star Movement.” In much the same way, crass non-Italians give current affairs shows on television names like
Focus
or
Panorama
or
The World Today
. On Italian channels we have
Porta a porta
(“Door to Door”),
Ballarò,
which is the name of a Palermo street market, and
Le invasioni barbariche
(“The Barbarian Invasions”).

But
fantasia
is a two-edged sword. It can be used positively or negatively. And it is also at the root of a lot of the deception that bedevils Italian life. It is no coincidence that this should be the central theme of the best-loved book in the Italian language.
Pinocchio
was written in 1883 as a tale for children, warning of the perils of lying. The puppet whose nose grew whenever he told a fib was swiftly recognized as a character of universal significance. And nowhere does he resonate more than in his native Italy. Just as Don Quixote, whose preposterous idealism and touchy pride immediately struck a chord with the Spanish, so Pinocchio speaks to Italians in a very special way as a caricature of many of their national virtues and vices. He is bright (he learns to walk almost instantly), easily distracted and fundamentally kindhearted. But he also combines—to an exaggerated extent—the characteristics of both the
furbo
and the
fesso.
He is simultaneously mendacious and gullible. Whenever he is in a fix, he resorts to a convenient lie. But he is not quite as clever as he thinks. And his eagerness to believe that he can become rich without effort makes him easy prey for the Fox and the Cat, genuine professionals in the business of deception.

Carlo Collodi,
^*
the author of
Pinocchio,
would no doubt be delighted to know how popular his character remains well over a century after he first appeared in print. But he might be dismayed to learn that the spirit of the tale is still very much alive in his native Italy. Cheating on school and university exams, for example, does not attract anything like the same degree of condemnation that it does in most other societies. It is euphemistically described as
copiare,
which also means “to copy.” To cheat in other contexts is
barare, truffare
or
imbrogliare.

Luca Cordero di Montezemolo is a respected industrialist. He has been chairman of Fiat and Ferrari. For a time he was the president of the employers’ federation, Confindustria. Yet he proudly revealed during an encounter with students at the business-oriented Luiss University that “at school, I was the world champion at
copiatura
.”
¹
Silvio Berlusconi made his earliest profits by writing essays for other students to hand in.

You do not need to look far in the Italian press to find articles excusing—or even praising—cheating in exams. This, for example, from a columnist in
Il Giornale:
“Trying to cheat means trying to deceive, and it is obvious that it is reproachable. But frankly I do not see in it the malicious intent to perpetrate a serious deception. It has always been done. It is done. It will continue to be done. It is a sign of very human weakness: you are insecure; you happen to be unprepared; a little bit of help, and perhaps the difficulties can be resolved and the test passed.”

The devices used by Italian school and university students to give themselves what is, when all is said and done, an unfair advantage constitute a testament to their ingenuity, for which you cannot help but have a sneaking admiration. In lots of countries, you could find an equivalent of the
bigliettini,
tiny crib sheets that are hidden somewhere on the examinee’s person. But in Italy there is an item of clothing specially made for carrying them. It is called a
cartucciera:
a cotton garment resembling a cartridge belt (after which it is named), worn around the waist under normal clothing. Crib sheets on every subject likely to arise in the exam can be put in its pockets and discreetly extracted according to need.

With the arrival of the Internet, things have become even more sophisticated. Web sites have been set up offering pens, watches and even sweatshirts with hidden compartments for
bigliettini
. Electronic gadgets have also opened up new possibilities for the inventive and unscrupulous, especially smartphones. The educational authorities swiftly banned them, but the prohibition can be circumvented: the trick is to arrive with two and hand in one.