The Italians (12 page)

Part of the fascination exerted by Italy’s
mafiosi
is the way that they too communicate by means of signs. Less than a year after Bossi’s melodramatic descent of the Po, I was at the other end of Italy, in Catania, at the foot of Mount Etna, being driven through crime-infested backstreets in a police car code-named “The Shark.” At the time, Catania was Italy’s most violent city—a battleground on which Cosa Nostra was fighting for territorial ascendancy with a variety of more or less organized criminal gangs. The underworld murder rate—in a city the size of Cincinnati or Hull—was running at two a week.

On the night I arrived, the latest victim was found. He had been shot in the face and throat. Either before or after, his skull had been battered in with a rock. The way he met his death was violent, but no more so than if he had been killed by rival hoodlums in Moscow or Macao. What made it stand out was that the circumstances of his death had apparently been arranged in such a way as to send a message. An Uzi submachine pistol of the sort favored by Cosa Nostra had been laid across the corpse at a point just above the knees.

The police officers with whom I spent the morning were certain this would have a precise significance—that it would be immediately comprehensible to at least one other mobster, and that if they could only decode the message, it would help advance the investigation into the gang war raging in their city. For much of the patrol they debated why the gun had been put at that specific point on the body, whether it really belonged to a member of Cosa Nostra, whether any significance could be attached to the position of the safety catch and whether there was a meaning to be read into the way the victim’s limbs were arranged.

The officers were behaving in a way Italians do instinctively when faced with something new or dramatic or out of the ordinary. Nothing—but nothing—is ascribed to chance. This is maybe the single biggest difference between the worldviews of Northern Europeans on the one hand and Southern Europeans, and especially Italians, on the other. The former tend to view the latter, condescendingly, as besotted with conspiracy theories. But the fact is that Southern Europeans, and particularly Italians,
are
conspiratorial. What is more, they often talk in metaphors and communicate with symbols. And since so much is therefore deceptive or illusory, given a choice between a simple explanation and a tortuous one, you are just as likely to be right if you plump for the second.

This is also the rationale behind what is known as
dietrologia
(literally, “behind-ism”)—the peculiarly Italian art of divining the true motive for, or cause of, an event. If a minister successfully campaigns for, say, greater resources for the physically handicapped, the
dietrologo
will not believe for one second that it is because he had their best interests at heart. He will note that the minister’s brother-in-law’s wife is on the board of a company that makes, among other things, prosthetics. And if a newspaper mounts a campaign against, say, a firm for secretly selling eavesdropping equipment to an unsavory foreign dictatorship, the
dietrologo
will note that the paper’s shareholders include a company that operates in the same sector as the one whose wrongdoing has been uncovered. The essence of
dietrologia
is that it dismisses the notion that anyone could act purely for reasons of moral conviction.

But then in Italy what you get is seldom what you see—or hear. Long after I returned, I was having coffee with a fellow journalist and the conversation turned to an incident that had made news that week. It was election time, and Silvio Berlusconi was bringing his campaign to an end in Rome. The pollsters all agreed that the capital was critical to the outcome of the vote, but Rome had never been particularly easy terrain for Berlusconi, who comes from Milan. So it was not difficult to understand how his campaign aides had reacted when the AS Roma captain, Francesco Totti, said he would be voting against Berlusconi’s candidate in the mayoral election that was being held at the same time. The engaging Totti had the status of a demigod among AS Roma fans and in a city where, for many, soccer is more of a cult than a sport, his remark could have swung the vote. The night before at his closing rally Berlusconi had made things worse for himself by saying Totti was “out of his mind.”

But that morning, he had abruptly changed his tune. In a radio interview, he had praised the Roma captain as “a great lad and great footballer.” He went on: “I’ve always been fond of him. And anyway his wife works for a TV channel in my group.”

Returning from the bar, I must have said something like, “So, Berlusconi has buried the hatchet,” because my Italian colleague stopped dead in the street and looked at me with utter astonishment.

“You really haven’t understood, have you?” she asked.

“What?”

“That wasn’t a burying of the hatchet. For me, that was a
warning.
He was saying: ‘Watch it, Totti. Remember that your wife works for my company. One more remark like that before election day and she could be looking for work elsewhere.’ That’s the way any Italian would have understood it.”

The use of symbols and metaphors, the endless interplay between illusion and reality, the difficulty of getting at a commonly accepted truth: these are all things that make Italy both frustrating and endlessly intriguing—not least because they raise the tantalizing question of why a people who spend so much of their time peering behind masks and facades should nevertheless be so concerned with appearances, with what they see on the surface.

CHAPTER 6

Face Values

L’unico metodo infallibile per conoscere il prossimo è giudicarlo dalle apparenze.

The only infallible way to know another person is to judge him by his appearance.

Antonio Amurri

T
he hero of Sandro Veronesi’s novel
La forza del passato
never got along with his father.
¹
For one thing, his late father was—or at least seemed to be—a die-hard right-winger. At one point, Veronesi’s hero-narrator remembers an evening in the 1970s when they were watching a press conference given by Giorgio Almirante, the then leader of the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). His mother was in the kitchen, baking a cake.

“He and I were alone, without mediators, an ideal situation for degeneration. Almirante was speaking, and I kept quiet in order to let my father make the first move, the better to decide on which attack to unleash; but strangely, rather than his usual opening provocation (something like ‘He’s certainly not wrong there’), this time he kept quiet too. By then Almirante had gotten to the fourth answer and neither of us had yet said a word, when, finally, my father spoke. ‘Never trust men who wear short-sleeved shirts under a jacket,’ he said.”

Astonished, the narrator looks more closely at Almirante. The suntanned MSI leader seems perfectly dressed, “but his naked arms peeped out from beneath the sleeves of his impeccable blue jacket, and once you noticed it, that detail made him look vaguely obscene.”

A lot of people—Americans in particular—like their politicians to look good. But Italians not only want their politicians to dress immaculately; they and their media are endlessly scrutinizing what they call—using the English word—their
look,
the way in which they dress, in a search for clues to their true personalities. I remember a comparison that covered an entire page of one of the national dailies between
il look
favored by
Silvio Berlusconi and that projected by his then rival for the prime ministership, Romano Prodi. It began with their ties (Berlusconi stuck rigidly to a white bird’s-eye pattern on dark blue, while Prodi favored regimental-style diagonal stripes in various colors), and progressed by stages to their choice of underpants. Prodi apparently wore roomy boxer shorts, while Berlusconi favored clingy briefs. The source of this information about their underwear was not disclosed.

Whenever a new president is elected, he too will be given the head-to-toe treatment. Giorgio Napolitano, Italy’s first ex-Communist head of state, presented quite a problem, because his fashion sense was, well, rather what you would expect of a man who was then in his early eighties. But that did not stop the style analysts from dissecting his “southern-cultured middle class”
look,
starting with his Borsalino and ending at his lace-up shoes. Readers were solemnly informed that the incoming president “favors those in black or brown, and always made of leather.”

This same narrowed sartorial gaze is trained on foreign politicians too. When the Italian American Nancy Pelosi was chosen as Speaker of the House of Representatives, newspapers back in her “old country” inevitably reported the event with pride. But the focus was not perhaps what she might have expected. “Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi, age 66,” ran a caption beneath a large photograph of the lady who had just become the highest-ranking woman politician in U.S. history. “Born in Baltimore. Moved to California. Likes to dress in Armani.”

Some years later, when the British went to the polls, I was sitting at my desk in
Corriere della Sera
’s Rome office when the telephone rang. At the other end of the line was a colleague on the political staff of the
Guardian
.

“John, I’ve just had the most
extraordinary
call from someone who claimed to be working for
Corriere,
” she began.

“No, she’s entirely genuine,” I said. “I gave her your number.”

“Oh, well, that’s a relief,” said my colleague. “You see, all she wanted to know about the candidates was how their wives were dressing. It was
quite
bizarre.”

I have the resulting article on the desk in front of me as I type. “Styles Compared” is the headline. In a graphic spanning the width of a page, each of the main party leaders is shown next to his wife. There is a general description of their tastes in fashion. But in addition there are little inset circles with magnified photographs of the telling details: Sarah Brown, the wife of the Labour leader, “red wedges with opaque blue tights (€63)”; Miriam González Durántez, the Spanish spouse of Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat contender, “bag made by hand in Brazil from the ring-pulls of 1,000 tin cans (€52)”; Samantha Cameron, wife of the Conservative candidate, “Jigsaw belt (€33).”

The paper’s readers were told that Cameron chose inexpensive accessories “to seem chic, but not privileged,” and that although Brown had been criticized for her ill-matching clothes, “some people think she does it on purpose as a contrast to the too-perfect Samantha.”

It is inconceivable that any British paper would analyze in such intricate detail the dress sense of the contenders in an Italian election, let alone that of their wives. But then, in Italy, what can be seen on the surface is constantly being scrutinized for clues as to what might lie below. It goes some way toward explaining the paradox mentioned at the end of the last chapter: one reason Italians place such emphasis on what is visible is because they assume it is a representation of something that is not. And that is only to be expected in a society where so much is communicated by means of symbols and gestures.

No people on earth express themselves as visually as the Italians. Hand gestures—it is true—exist in every part of the world and some are international: we all know what someone means if he rubs together his thumb and index finger. But only the Italians can draw on such a vast range of hand signs, each linked to a precise meaning. Sometimes, if you cannot hear a conversation, you can get the overall gist just by watching.

There are gestures for hunger, agreement, dissent, wedlock,
furbizia,
insistence, negation, voluptuousness and complicity. There are different movements for communicating the drinking of water and the drinking of wine. Hand signs can be used in place of entire sentences like “See you later” or “Get to the point.” I once did an inventory of gestures and had no difficulty reaching a count of ninety-seven.