The Italians (29 page)

Nor in the Mezzogiorno was the story always one of unremitting mistrust. From time to time, sections of the peasantry formed common cause to challenge the enclosures by landowners of what had once been common land. In the late 1940s, tens of thousands of people banded together in Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata and Abruzzo to occupy estates in support of land reform.

Since then, countervailing forces have been at work. On the one hand, it can be argued that the scramble for a better, richer life triggered by Italy’s “economic miracle” promoted a renewed, more family-centered approach. On the other hand, industrialization and urbanization thrust Italians into trade unions and vastly broader networks of relationships than they had known in the villages or towns from which they had migrated. People whose only previous attachment had been to their immediate family joined sporting clubs, leisure groups and sometimes charitable associations. At the same time, the Catholic Church shifted the emphasis of its teaching further from an almost exclusive stress on the value of the family to encompass a recognition of the importance of society as a whole.

These forces remained finely balanced until the early 1990s and the arrival of Silvio Berlusconi. In a very real sense, he has been the paladin of a new brand of amoral familism. From the outset, his speeches—rich in allusions to the family—carried an implicit message: that his listeners had a right to advance their family’s interests while paying only limited heed to the needs of society.

As the Italian family declines, there is a risk that amoral familism will dissolve into simple egocentricity, broadening and strengthening what Italians call
menefreghismo
(from
me ne frego,
or “I don’t give a damn”).
Menefreghismo
is the bartender who pushes your coffee across to you as he looks the other way, the cashier who stares through you as she takes your money. It is also the driver who bears down on you as you step onto a pedestrian crossing at such a speed he would run you over if you did not pull back in time. By itself,
menefreghismo
is usually little more than irritating. But, mixed in with
furbizia,
it forms a distinctly toxic blend that helps explain a phenomenon that influences much else in Italian life: a high level of mistrust.

CHAPTER 13

People Who Don’t Dance

Fidarsi è bene, non fidarsi è meglio.

To trust is good; not to trust is better.

Italian proverb

W
alk down any street in Italy, and what is it that makes the scene different? Obviously, there will be shop fronts and signposts that are specific to Italy. But another difference—even from what you see in other countries fringing the Mediterranean—will, in all probability, be the number of people wearing sunglasses. It is the middle of winter, but you can be sure that some of those walking down the street, peering into shop windows or sitting outside a bar will be wearing them.

Why?

For much of the year—it is true—the light in Italy is bright. And doctors will tell you that wearing dark glasses is advisable to protect against ultraviolet radiation. But the light in our hypothetical street is perfectly bearable. Some of those you can see—or, in truth, only half see—may be wearing sunglasses for cosmetic reasons: to hide the bags under their eyes caused by too late a night or perhaps too early a morning. In other cases, the dark glasses are simply a fashion accessory. But none of this fully explains why you tend to see so many more people shielding their eyes in Italy than in, for example, Spain, where the light is, if anything, even more dazzling in winter because of the higher altitude in much of the country. Could it be that some Italians like sunglasses for the same reason that poker players do? Could it be that they have more reason to want to see while remaining only half seen?

“Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi,”
said Cicero: “The face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter.” And certainly anyone who can hide the expression in his or her eyes is giving him- or herself an advantage in the delicate interactions that are the stuff of life in Italy.

Unsurprisingly, the world’s biggest manufacturer of dark glasses is Italian. Nothing, you might imagine, is more American than a pair of Ray-Bans. But, in fact, the brand is owned by a company started in 1961 in Agordo, a little town in the shadow of the Dolomites. Its founder, Leonardo Del Vecchio, spent much of his childhood in an orphanage. His company, Luxottica, which now has its headquarters in Milan, also owns Oakley and makes the sunglasses that bear the names of many of the world’s most celebrated fashion houses: Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel, Prada, Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan.

The image of themselves that Italians are happiest to foster is that of a warm-blooded, warmhearted, smiling, laughing people, whistling their way through life in an attitude of carefree bonhomie. This is the Italy of the joking waiter who flirts outrageously with the women diners. It is the Italy often projected by Roberto Benigni, the quick-fire Tuscan comic whose movie about the Holocaust,
La vita è bella,
won him the 1999 Oscar for best actor. And it is real. One of the Italians’ most engaging characteristics is their optimism, backed by a determination to put their best foot forward in even the most daunting circumstances. It is an important, and delightful, part of what Italy is about.

But before deciding that that is what Italy is
all
about, foreigners would do well to learn about two almost untranslatable Italian words. One is
garbo,
which dictionaries translate as meaning either “grace” or “courtesy.” But that only hints at its connotations. Certainly, a man or woman with
garbo
is one who behaves elegantly. But it is also a quality essential to any kind of decision maker in Italy: it is the one needed to keep your options open without appearing to be indecisive, the quality required to impart unwelcome news in a way that is not too hurtful, but also the one needed to keep face as you imperceptibly shift your position.

The other quintessentially Italian noun is
sprezzatura,
which was coined by Baldassare Castiglione in
Il cortegiano,
a manual for early sixteenth-century courtiers. His book makes clear that life at court was no soft option. Renaissance courtiers were expected to speak eloquently, think clearly and have not just extensive learning but also the accomplishments of a warrior and athlete.
Sprezzatura
was the key to how all this should be presented to the world: with a studied insouciance, as if it had all come naturally, even if it was the result of long nights spent reading by candlelight and exhausting days spent practicing swordsmanship.

If we go back now to our hypothetical street and look around carefully, we can see the spiritual descendent of Castiglione’s courtiers, of those unnervingly composed young men you see whispering conspiratorially in one another’s ears in the corners of Renaissance masterpieces. He is there, sitting in that convertible outside the bar, staring at a hostile world through those ubiquitous shades. His hair seems to be tousled. But, in fact, it has been carefully teased that way: it is as much a product of artifice as his perfectly toning shoes and belt. Our modern-day courtier is probably waiting for a beautiful young woman who is as elegant as he. But it is more than possible that he is there for an appointment with someone who can fix an
appalto
—a contract—or perhaps tell him whom he needs to make a good impression on if he is to get onto the slate of candidates for the upcoming local election. His is a world of elegance and machination, but beyond his family and perhaps a handful of friends from school or university, it is probably one of isolation. It is the isolation that was so vividly brought to life by Marcello Mastroianni in the knowing, lonely characters who wander through some of the films of Federico Fellini. But it can also be seen in, for example, the cool gaze and absurdly precocious lounging pose of little Giovanni de’ Medici
^*
as he stands at his mother’s side in a celebrated portrait by Agnolo Bronzino. It sends a message: even toddlers, if they come from de’ Medici stock, are possessed of daunting emotional self-control.

Perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of the Italians, and the one that most deceives others, is their apparent impulsiveness. Their animated facial expressions, their energetic hand movements and their seemingly emotional outbursts coexist with a deep, underlying caution and discretion. Their troubled history and guileful compatriots have taught Italians to be intensely wary.

One of the first things to strike any foreign correspondent arriving in Italy is the reluctance of ordinary people to supply their names, let alone other details like their profession, age or hometown. They may talk loudly into their mobile telephones about the most intimate details of their private life—their problems with their brother-in-law, even their medical examinations—but if you go up to them and ask them how they are going to vote, for example, they will often decline. Or they will tell you, but refuse to give you any details of their identity. I have found the same is true when Italians are asked to comment on an almost infinite range of issues, from what they had witnessed at the scene of an accident to who they thought might win Saturday’s match. Even when assured their remarks would not be published in Italy, they will often turn away with a wag of their upheld index finger, usually muttering a word imported from English:
“Privacy.”

Perhaps the most remarkable example of caginess occurred one evening after I had been rung by a colleague in London. The paper was putting together a table showing the prices of similar items in various European capitals. One of them was a McDonald’s Big Mac. I asked my assistant to call the nearest branch in Rome.

“Who wants to know?” came the reply.

My assistant said it was for a British newspaper.

“In that case, I can say nothing.”

My assistant said she did not need a comment, let alone a name. And she pointed out that, if she were to walk down the street and go into McDonald’s, she would be able to see the price of a Big Mac on display above the counter. All she wanted was for the person at the other end of the phone to repeat the figure that was presumably emblazoned on an illuminated sign just above her head. No dice. In the end, my assistant had to leave the office and walk a quarter of a mile through Rome to find out something that could not have been more fully in the public domain.

But then reticence about providing information can even extend to the media, whose entire reason for existence—you might think—is to provide information. The news you get on television may be biased, but, like the news on the radio, it is normally communicated in a clear and comprehensible manner. Italian magazines and to an even greater extent Italian newspapers often need to be decoded rather than read. This is particularly true of political reporting. All too frequently the impression you are left with in these cases is that the reporter has been indiscreet enough to lift a corner of the veil covering the story so that you have been let in on some, but certainly not all, of the secrets to which only he or she is privy.

To be fair to my Italian fellow journalists, much of this is done to protect sources. In other instances circumlocution is employed—usually on orders from above—as a way of not upsetting the politicians concerned. It hardly needs to be said that the politician with the most intimidating media power has long been Silvio Berlusconi. While he was in power the Italian media often got around the problem by reprinting criticism that had appeared in foreign publications and that they were loath to air in quite such bald terms.

“For centuries, we used to call in foreign armies to fight our battles for us,” one of Berlusconi’s ministers remarked to me at a dinner. “Now we invoke foreign correspondents instead.”