The Italians (2 page)

I first lived and worked in Italy, briefly, at the age of eighteen and might never have returned except for the odd holiday had it not been for Paul Webster, who in 1994, while foreign editor of the
Guardian,
suggested that I rejoin the staff of the paper as its Southern Europe correspondent based in Rome. When I left Italy again, five years later, I had no plans to go back and probably would not have embarked on the writing of this book had Xan Smiley, the then Europe editor of the
Economist,
and Bill Emmott, its then editor, not arranged for me to become their correspondent in Italy. Warm thanks also to Alan Rusbridger, then as now the editor of the
Guardian,
who proposed that I be shared between the two publications and later agreed to my taking a period of unpaid leave to begin the writing of this book. John Micklethwait, the current editor of the
Economist,
also agreed to that, and later generously offered me a spell of paid leave so I could finish what I had started. John Peet, who has been the Europe editor of the
Economist
for most of the time I have worked for the magazine in Italy, has been unstintingly tolerant of my periodic retreats into book writing.

In each of my spells as a correspondent in Italy, I have benefited from the hospitality of national newspapers: first
La Stampa,
and more recently
Corriere della Sera
. It has given me access to a wealth of information about Italy and the Italians. I am very grateful to those who edited these two papers during the periods in which I worked on their premises, Ezio Mauro, Carlo Rossella, Stefano Folli, Paolo Mieli and Ferruccio de Bortoli, as well as to the Rome bureau chiefs and Rome supplement editors who were my immediate hosts: Marcello Sorgi, Ugo Magri, Antonio Macaluso, Marco Cianca, Andrea Garibaldi and Goffredo Buccini.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the reporters, specialist writers and regional correspondents of both papers. Italian journalists are unsparing in the help and advice they offer to their foreign colleagues and over the years I have acquired a huge debt of gratitude to those of
La Stampa
and
Corriere della Sera
for their insights and their readiness to share their knowledge with an outsider. Those who made direct contributions to the contents of this book include Massimo Franco, Lorenzo Fuccaro, Daria Gorodisky, Stefano Lepri, Dino Martirano and Ilaria Sacchettoni.

Thanks also to Eliza Apperly, Elizabeth Bailey, Lara Bryan, Simon Chambers, Bianca Cuomo, Giulia Di Michele, Bea Downing, Katharine Forster, Will Harman, Sophie Inge, Yerrie Kim of EF Education First, Tom Kington, Flavia Manini, Maria Luisa Manini, Hannah Murphy, Laura Nasso, Marie Obileye, Lorien Pilling of GBGC, Hannah Sims, Helen Tatlow, Katherine Travers, Ed Vulliamy, Tom Wachtel and Sean Wyer.

Paddy Agnew, Antonio Manca Graziadei and Isabella Clough Marinaro generously agreed to bring their specialist knowledge to bear on Chapters 14, 18 and 19, respectively. Francesca Andrews and Maria Bencivenni read through large sections of the book. Their observations and suggestions, which could have come only from a rich experience of the cultures and societies of both Italy and Britain, were invaluable. It goes without saying that the errors that remain are mine alone.

I could not have wanted a more involved, enthusiastic or charmingly persistent agent than Lucy Luck. And I have had the immense good fortune to have as my editor Simon Winder, who is not only a successful writer himself, but the author of books in a similar vein to my own. This one is all the better for his perceptive comments. Melanie Tortoroli at Penguin Group (USA) has been every bit as supportive (and patient).

This edition of the book also owes much to Christian Jungeblodt, an outstanding photographer and a good friend whose memorable glimpses of Italy and the Italians enhance the pages that follow. Many of the photographs are due to be published in a book,
Bella Italia Project,
supported by VG Bildkunst.

My wife, Lucinda Evans, read the entire manuscript with the keen eye of a former national newspaper subeditor. It has benefited greatly from her good judgment and feeling for words. But her main contribution has been a subtler one: she has been with me throughout my Italian adventure, and the insights and reflections she has shared with me along the way can be found in almost every chapter of this book.

CHAPTER 1

The Beautiful Country

Il bel paese ch’Appennin parte, e ’il mar circonda e l’Alpe.

The beautiful country that the Apennines divide, and Alps and sea surround.

Petrarch

N
o one would choose to start a book at Porta Pia.

It is in one of the least attractive corners of central Rome, a place where architectural styles from different periods sit uncomfortably together like mutually suspicious in-laws. The biggest building in the vicinity is the British embassy, which dates from the 1970s. Its architect, Sir Basil Spence, was at great pains to ensure it blended in with its surroundings. Not everyone is convinced he succeeded. The embassy looks rather like a colossal concrete semiconductor, torn from the motherboard of a gargantuan computer.

The gate—the
porta
itself—takes its name from Pius IV, Michelangelo’s last patron and the pope who brought the Council of Trent to a successful conclusion, thereby launching the Counter-Reformation. Michelangelo’s friend and biographer, Giorgio Vasari, wrote that the artist offered Pius three designs, and that the pope chose the least expensive.
^*
Nowadays, the gate he built forms one side of a bigger structure—the side that faces toward the center of Rome. How much of Michelangelo’s design has survived is open to question. A coin minted in 1561, when work began on the gate, and an engraving made three years after its completion depict two substantially different structures.

In the nineteenth century, another Pius—Pope Pius IX—had a courtyard put behind Michelangelo’s gate (if it was any longer Michelangelo’s gate) and added a new facade in the neoclassical style that looks away from the center of the city. Around the courtyard between the two facades, Pius IX erected some buildings for use as customs offices. Rome was still then the capital of the Papal States, a sizable territory that had been governed by the popes since the eighth century and whose latest ruler had indignantly refused to let it be incorporated into the new state of Italy.

On either side of Porta Pia stretch the Aurelian Walls. These were begun in the third century AD for the protection of ancient Rome. Lofty and sturdy, they continued to defend the city, with greater or lesser success, for the next fifteen centuries, and it was only by blasting a hole through them at a point about fifty meters west of Porta Pia that Italian troops were able to force their way into Rome, complete the unification of the peninsula and put an end to the temporal power of the popes. Many of the soldiers who poured through the breach on that September morning in 1870 belonged to an elite corps of Italy’s new army known as the Bersaglieri (“Marksmen”). The customs offices inside Porta Pia were later turned into a museum for the Bersaglieri.

The area around the gate, then, is an eclectic muddle. But it brings together within a few hundred square meters tangible allusions to the bits of their history of which Italians are proudest: the Roman Empire, the Renaissance and the Risorgimento.
^*
Some, though not all, would add to that list the papacy and the Counter-Reformation, which brought with it the splendors of Rome’s Baroque churches.

What other people of comparable numbers can lay claim to such an extraordinary catalog of achievements? One nation—even if it did not consider itself a nation until quite recently—produced the only empire to have united Europe and the greatest cultural transformation in the history of the West, one that shaped our entire modern view of life. Along the way, the Italian peninsula emerged as the preeminent seat of Christendom.

No other nation can boast such a catalog of great painters and sculptors: Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, of course. But also Donatello and Bernini, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Titian and Caravaggio. And there are others, like Mantegna, who are nowhere close to the top of the list but who would be hailed as national cultural icons in most other European countries. Then there are the architects—Brunelleschi, Bramante, Palladio—and the writers—Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. And the composers—Italy has given the world Vivaldi, the Scarlattis, Verdi and Puccini.

Saint Benedict, Saint Francis and Saint Catherine of Siena were all Italians. So too were Galileo, Christopher Columbus and Maria Montessori. Among other things, we owe their country the Gregorian calendar, the language of music, time zones and double-entry bookkeeping. Italians invented the telegraph, the seismograph and the electric battery.

They gave us opera and Venice, the basilicas of Saint Peter’s and Saint Mark’s, the Duomos of Milan and Florence, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Trevi Fountain. Even if they have not actually visited them, most people know the names of historic cities like Bologna, Perugia and Naples. But there are others scattered across Italy that few foreigners have heard of—places like Trani and Macerata, Vercelli and Cosenza—that house more cultural treasures than are to be found in entire U.S. states.

It is a mind-spinning legacy, and one that understandably mesmerizes anyone who goes to Italy. But the picture that visitors take away in their mind’s eye when they catch the flight home is, if not misleading, then certainly unrepresentative of Italy’s postclassical history—unrepresentative of the lives of most of the people who have lived in what is now Italy since the fall of the Roman Empire. More illustrative of their experience is the heavily fortified medieval tower that stands just a few hundred yards west of Porta Pia. It was put there in the ninth century and reconstructed between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries. It is one of many such towers that were built into the Aurelian Walls and that punctuate them at intervals as the walls stretch into the distance on either side of Porta Pia.

For nearly a millennium and a half, the majority of the people we now call Italians lived in territories that were either ruled by foreigners or so tiny or so weak that they were perpetually at risk of being overrun by outsiders. Why? For Luigi Barzini, the author of perhaps the best-known portrait of his people,
¹
this was “the crux of the Italian problem, of
all
Italian problems”: “Why did Italy, a land notoriously teeming with vigorous, wide-awake and intelligent people, always behave so feebly? Why was she invaded, ravaged, sacked, humiliated in every century, and yet failed to do the simple things necessary to defend herself?”

Part of the answer is to be found in Italy’s divisive geography. For a start, almost one in every ten Italians lives on an island, physically detached from the rest of the nation. Sicily, the biggest island in the Mediterranean and with a population the size of Norway’s, is quite big enough to be a state by itself. The landscape of the island is as varied as that of many larger territories. Sandy beaches and rocky shorelines, precipitous citrus groves and undulating wheat fields are all in their different ways typically Sicilian. There is an extensive plain outside Catania in the east, as well as several mountain ranges, one of which has a peak rising to almost two thousand meters. Even that, though, is dwarfed by Mount Etna, Europe’s biggest active volcano, which is more than half as high again. Plans to link Sicily to the rest of Italy by means of a bridge or tunnel go back to classical times. But even though the island is only three kilometers from the mainland at the closest point, none of the plans has ever been realized—not least, in recent years, because of a fear that such a massive construction project could hand a bonanza to Sicily’s Cosa Nostra and the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria, the region on the other side of the Strait of Messina.