The Italians (19 page)

Recent years have also seen the Italians shoot into the ranks of the world’s most enthusiastic gamblers—a clear sign of increased readiness to assume risk. By 2010, according to figures compiled by Global Betting and Gaming Consultants (GBGC), Italy’s gross gambling yield (the amount staked less the amount paid out in winnings) was almost $21 billion. That represented annual losses of $345 for each man, woman and child in the country. Excluding the mostly small countries that are specific gambling destinations—places like Macao and the Netherlands’ Antilles—Italians’ per capita spending was the fifth highest in the world, behind that of the Australians, Canadians, Japanese and Finns. Their average losses were significantly more than those of the Spanish, who have traditionally been Southern Europe’s most ardent gamblers. Spokespeople for the Italian gambling business claimed it had become Italy’s third-biggest industry.

The origins of this abrupt transformation go back to the mid-1990s. Until then, Italians had a narrow choice. They could have a flutter on the lottery, bet on the outcome of football matches and horse races or—if they could get to them—try their luck on the green baize tables of Italy’s handful of casinos. The oldest—it claims indeed to be the oldest in the world—is the Casinò di Venezia, which was founded in 1638 and moved to its current premises in Ca’ Vendramin Calergi after the Second World War. The branch of the
casinò
^*
on the Lido came into existence in 1938. Other casinos were—and are—to be found at Sanremo on the Riviera, Saint-Vincent in the Valle d’Aosta and at Campione d’Italia, a tiny “exclave” of Italian territory within the Swiss canton of Ticino.

In addition, there was an illegal gambling sector that included neighborhood raffles and other, less innocent outlets for the wagering instinct. Spanish governments had long realized that the easiest way to get their citizens to pay their taxes was by encouraging them to gamble and taking a share of the profits. Italian politicians were slow to draw this lesson—or, perhaps because of the strong religious influence in politics until the early 1990s, they were reluctant to do so. The explosive growth of gambling since the Christian Democrats’ grip on the nation eased suggests that the illegal segment of the market was bigger than anyone imagined. To some extent, then, Italy’s gambling boom has been a matter of the regulated segment of the market growing at the expense of the unregulated one.

The first step in this direction came with the legalization of scratch card lotteries in 1994. Three years later, Sisal, a private company with a gambling concession from the state, introduced what was to become a hugely popular lottery, the SuperEnalotto. Its chief attraction is that every so often it showers a vast jackpot on the player who succeeds in picking the six winning numbers. As the weeks pass without a winning combination, the jackpot grows, tempting more and more people to try their luck. Such is the appeal of SuperEnalotto that it draws coachloads of punters from neighboring France and Switzerland. In 2009, an unidentified ticket holder in Tuscany won €140 million after eighty-six draws that had failed to produce a winner.

By then, gambling fever had really taken hold in Italy. Over the previous five years, the industry’s turnover had soared by 73 percent. In the same period, the world gambling market expanded by only about 10 percent. What made this increase all the more remarkable was that more and more Italian euros were disappearing into slot machines (the single biggest gambling medium) and being staked in other ways at a time when the economy was pretty much at a standstill. This raises the intriguing question of whether Italians’ newfound enthusiasm for gambling really does reflect an increased appetite for risk. There are some indications that this is the case. Many Italians, and particularly younger ones, have become fascinated by the game of poker. Its popularity was given a huge boost by the legalization of online games of skill in 2008 and, subsequently, by the launch of a satellite channel devoted entirely to poker. But it can also be argued that the gambling boom is a perverse outcome of the extraordinarily long standstill in the Italian economy, which began at the beginning of the decade and was still eroding Italians’ living standards long after the end. For people unable to find the cash to pay their bills or meet their regular mortgage payments, lotteries in particular hold out a hope, however faint, that all of their problems could be solved by a huge win.

One thing is clear, though. The rapid growth in the social acceptance and official encouragement of gambling are symptomatic of an erosion of the power, though still considerable, of an institution that, down the troubled centuries, has been for Italians perhaps the greatest of all refuges and consolations: the Roman Catholic Church.

CHAPTER 9

Holy Orders

Molti italiani, pur modestamente credenti, ritengono il cattolicesimo un patrimonio nazionale irrinunciabile: La Chiesa, da parte sua, ha assorbito virtù e vizi degli italiani, in un condizionamento reciproco che ha fatto della religione una caratteristica subculturale, più che un’adesione di fede.

Many Italians, even those who are not particularly religious, regard Catholicism as an indispensable national asset. The Church, for its part, has absorbed the virtues and vices of the Italians in a process of reciprocal conditioning that has made religion a subcultural characteristic rather than a bond of faith.

Giordano Bruno Guerri

F
rom the moment white smoke gushes from the chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel to the proclamation of a new pope from the balcony of Saint Peter’s, something like an hour elapses—an awkward pause during which the crowd in the great square in front of the basilica is in a state of keen expectation. When Pope Francis was elected in 2013, it was raining. So those waiting to hear who would be the new spiritual leader of the world’s 1.2 billion baptized Catholics were even more in need of distraction. What better, then, than some music?

After a few minutes the Vatican’s band—still known as the “Band of the Pontifical State”—duly marched onto the square, its musicians resplendent in gray-blue capes with yellow linings. A detachment of Swiss Guards followed, bearing pikes.

So far, so unexceptional.

But then a new band came strutting through the columns that encircle the square: that of Italy’s semi-militarized Carabinieri police force. Hard on its heels, five honor guards drawn from the Italian army, navy, air force, Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza. By the time they had all lined up opposite the Swiss Guards on the broad concourse in front of Saint Peter’s, almost two hundred Italian soldiers and gendarmes—more than half of them armed—were standing to attention in a foreign state. The Vatican band played the Italian national anthem. The Carabinieri played the pontifical anthem. The commanders from each side saluted one another. And then the senior Italian officer swapped places with the commander of the Swiss Guards. Both officers raised their swords and cried,
“Viva il Papa!,”
drawing the same cry from the troops ranged in front of them.

Italian TV commentators explained to viewers that the Italian armed forces were paying homage to the new pope in his role as head of state, as stipulated by the Lateran Pacts, the agreements that finally reconciled the Roman Catholic Church to a unified Italy in 1929. But if the aim of the ceremony had been to leave the onlookers in the square baffled as to where the dividing line ran between the Vatican and the Italian state, it could not have been better staged.

Foreigners from more secular nations were similarly perplexed by the reaction to a case taken to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg by one Soile Lautsi, an atheist and an Italian of Finnish origin. She argued that the display of crucifixes in school classrooms violated her right to give her children an education free of religious influence. Laws, which like the Lateran Pacts date from the Fascist era, specify that every classroom in Italy must have a crucifix hanging on the wall. Ms. Lautsi’s suit was contested by the Italian government, whose representatives argued that the crucifixes were symbols of
national
identity
.
The education minister at the time, Mariastella Gelmini, summed up the government’s case when she said that the symbols “do not mean adherence to Catholicism.” When the court sided with Ms. Lautsi, there was outrage. A poll conducted at the time suggested 84 percent of Italians were in favor of the crucifixes, which are also widely displayed in law courts, police stations and other public buildings. Two years later, the court’s decision was overturned on appeal. More than a dozen countries, including Poland and several Orthodox states, had by that time joined Italy in contesting it. The appeal court, known as the Grand Chamber, found no evidence that the display of the symbol on classroom walls “might have an influence on pupils.”

The frequently blurred distinction between Italy on the one hand and the Vatican and the Church on the other reflects a historical fact: that, until very recently, not only was Christianity Italy’s only religion, but Catholicism was for all intents and purposes the only way of practicing it. The assumptions that fact fostered persist in the most unlikely quarters. When, shortly after standing down as Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair converted to Catholicism, the center-left newspaper
La Repubblica
greeted the news on its Web site with a story under the headline “Blair Becomes a Christian.”

The Islamic community in southern Italy was virtually obliterated at the start of the fourteenth century. Emperor Frederick II
^*
had deported most of his Muslim subjects to the Italian mainland. Their biggest settlement was at Lucera in modern-day Puglia. In 1300, the French ruler of the Kingdom of Naples, Charles II, attacked the town. Some fled to Albania. But most of the Muslim inhabitants of Lucera were either slaughtered or sold into slavery.

That left only the Jews as representatives of another faith. Sizable numbers had lived in pre-Christian Rome, having arrived as traders or slaves. The Jews of the peninsula fared relatively well in the early Middle Ages, those on Sicily outstandingly well under the Normans. But at the end of the twelfth century Pope Innocent III ushered in a period of intermittent oppression that reached a peak of intensity during the Counter-Reformation.

As late as the end of the fifteenth century, the Borgia pope Alexander VI, who has gone down in history as one of the most infamous of pontiffs, welcomed to Rome thousands of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal. But just a few years later, the authorities in Venice confined the Jews of their city to a single area and gave the world a pretty word for an ugly reality:
ghetto.
^*
In 1555, Pope Paul IV created another ghetto in Rome, ordered the city’s Jews to wear distinctive badges and forced them to work as unpaid laborers on the fortifications. A successor, Pius V, decreed that the Jews should be banished from the Papal States (though in fact they were never removed from Rome itself). Elsewhere on the Italian peninsula, their fortunes were uneven. The Spanish expelled them from the south and, later, from the Duchy of Milan. But other states, notably the Duchies of Ferrara and Mantua, gave them refuge. It was not until the nineteenth century that the situation of Italian Jewry improved more generally, and only after unification that they were fully emancipated.

Jews played an important role in the Risorgimento, and were to continue to do so in the politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two of Italy’s early prime ministers were Jews (though one, the secular Alessandro Fortis, was said to have undergone a deathbed conversion to Christianity). It is grimly ironic that Jewish intellectuals were also instrumental in the rise of Fascism. Margherita Sarfatti, one of Mussolini’s many lovers and later his biographer, made an important contribution to the development of Fascist thinking about the arts.