The Italians (31 page)

I have only once seen a genuinely drunken Italian. And only once have I been with an Italian who drank rather more than was good for him at dinner. In both cases, it was in the northeast of the country, and that is where the statistics indicate that alcohol consumption is highest. It is also where penetrating winds blow up the Adriatic, through the lanes of Venice and across the dank, flat expanses of Veneto. Beyond Venice and Veneto lie the Alps, where a shot of grappa never goes amiss in winter.

Elsewhere, the emphasis, especially at parties, is less on the drink than the food, which is invariably delicious. One of the first Italians I met after arriving in Rome had been brought up in Britain. When she left school, her parents decided that she should get back in touch with her roots by going to university in Italy. It was not long before she was invited to a student party where she realized to her dismay that the only drinks on offer were nonalcoholic ones. Her experience dates back several years. Since then, young Italians have become more relaxed about alcohol. But drunkenness is still rare.

Drugs are quite another matter. Surprisingly little is said or written about it in the media, but the consumption of narcotics in Italy is high. Two recent surveys indicated that the percentage of adults who had used cannabis in some form in the previous twelve months was the highest or second highest in the EU (and significantly higher than in Spain, which has a long history of cannabis use because of its proximity to Morocco). The consumption of synthetic narcotics was less widespread. But acknowledged cocaine use in Italy was well above the European average (though not as widespread as in Spain).

In 2005, however, doubts were raised about official and other estimates of cocaine consumption when a research institute took a different approach to the issue. Instead of getting pollsters to question people, the institute took samples from the river Po. What its researchers were looking for was a substance known as benzoylecgonine, the main urinary by-product of cocaine. The amounts detected suggested that consumption in the north of Italy was almost three times the officially estimated national average.

The following year a satirical-cum-investigative TV show tried out a quite different methodology. Reporters from
Le Iene
(“The Hyenas”) tricked fifty politicians into taking drug tests. Four were found to have used cocaine in the previous day and a half. But they were never identified, and the report was never shown. The reason?
Privacy
.

CHAPTER 14

Taking Sides

Quella del calcio è l’unica forma di amore eterno che esiste al mondo. Chi è tifoso di una squadra lo resterà per tutta la vita. Potrà cambiare moglie, amante e partito politico, ma mai la squadra del cuore.

Football love is the only sort of love on this earth that is eternal. The fan of a team will remain one for the whole of his life. He may change his wife, his lover or his political party. But he will never change his favorite team.
^*

Luciano De Crescenzo

W
hen my wife and I moved back to Italy, we lived for a while in a flat in EUR, the adjunct to Rome that Mussolini began in the 1930s. It was intended for the 1942 World’s Fair (hence the initials, which stand for Esposizione Universale di Roma). In the event, the Duce and his ally Hitler were busy with other things when 1942 came around. Today, there are government offices in EUR as well as headquarters of some of Italy’s biggest banks and corporations. The problem is that when the office workers all go home, the place becomes a morgue. Apart from a concert venue, just about the only evidence of life is offered by the numerous prostitutes—many of them transvestites—who hang around on street corners near the parks. But EUR has its attractions. It is within easy reach of the coast. It is home to one of the finest twentieth-century buildings in Europe, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, better known as the Square Colosseum. And EUR also has a splendid man-made lake surrounded by acres of lawns and hedges.

For most of the year, this pleasant spot is the preserve of joggers, local dog walkers and office workers taking a stroll during their lunch hour. But there comes a moment in the spring when one weekend the park around the lake, which is known as the
laghetto,
fills to bursting. It remains that way for two or, at most, three weekends. Then, at a certain point in late July, the droves of people from elsewhere in Rome disappear as abruptly and conclusively as the swifts.

There is a logic to this. The weather is not yet hot enough to encourage a visit to the beaches at Ostia. But it is sufficiently warm to make a walk by the lake a pleasant experience. Even so, the unanimity with which thousands of Romans reach the decision to go to EUR for a walk and an ice cream is astonishing. It is as if an order had gone out: “This is the weekend that we
all
go to EUR.” And it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that something a bit like that has indeed happened.

Extensive consultations will have taken place in hundreds of circles of friends and acquaintances all over Rome. And the “wisdom of crowds” principle means that each of those circles is likely to reach a similar, if not identical, conclusion. So at a certain point in the spring, the consensus will be “Let’s all go to EUR.”

The crowds you see as a result are the tangible evidence of
il piacere di stare insieme,
which can be translated as “the joy of being together”
^*
: a love of communal social action that points up one of the many paradoxes that characterize life in Italy. Ask any group of Italians for their outstanding national character trait and it is highly likely that at least one, if not most, will tell you it is
individualismo
. This does not mean individualism in the sense that Britons or Americans mean it.
Individualismo
combines “independence of action” with “self-interest.” Yet the vast majority of Italians are instinctively—almost compulsively—gregarious. So they may all prefer to go their own way. But they often end up in the same place.

When foreigners look around for a country with which to compare Italy, they usually light on Spain, or maybe France or Portugal, where the cultures are actually very different. No one ever mentions Japan. Yet it has often struck me that
il piacere di stare insieme
is one of several things that link the Italians to the Japanese. Both put a high value on the appearance of things. The Japanese, like the Italians, have a recent history of wielding an economic power that far exceeded their influence on the world stage. Both have traditionally had a high level of savings. Both have a tendency to form anticompetitive, cartel-like structures and partly for that reason have engendered seemingly indestructible organized-crime syndicates.
^*
Japan, like Italy, is highly seismic. And both are long, narrow countries where the vast majority of the population is crammed into river valleys and narrow strips of land along the coast. You have only to look at the hinterland of Naples or the near endless conurbation that follows the Po to the sea to realize how accustomed Italians are to living cheek by jowl.

Italians are great joiners. The reason, as mentioned in the previous chapter, that there are so many
presidenti
is that there are so many clubs, associations and federations—noticeably more than in Spain. Even youthful rebels join
centri sociali,
which are more like communes, even though that idea went out of fashion in the rest of the West sometime between the 1970s and 1980s.

I have never quite fathomed whether this powerful associative tendency among Italians exists because they are trying instinctively to replicate a family structure, or inversely because they are attempting subconsciously to pull themselves free of the family’s tentacles. Perhaps there is an element of both. At all events—and this is where we get to a paradox within the paradox—it coexists with a formidable tradition of querulousness.

The political conditions in central and northern Italy throughout the Middle Ages gave full rein to a combination of mutual collaboration and antagonism. The papal government of most of the center of the country, though sporadically cruel, was rarely strong. Farther north, there was no administration—or rather, there were many administrations. First came the self-governing communes. Later they were replaced by a patchwork quilt of principalities, duchies and counties. For a period of centuries, Rome and the cities to the north of it were racked by vicious fighting between factions based on loyalty to a noble family, a clan or a neighborhood. This is the world of Romeo and Juliet, of the Montagues and Capulets. In Siena these bitter rivalries can be seen today, channeled more or less harmlessly into the twice yearly Palio horse race.

The factions, with their stores of weapons and fortified towers, lent themselves naturally to being subsumed into a broader conflict between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. In the twelfth century, this crystallized around the rivalry between two German noble houses, each aspiring to the emperorship: on the one side the Welfs, and on the other the Hohenstaufens, with their battle cry of “Waiblingen,” the name of a prized family castle. Since it was the Hohenstaufen candidate who got the job, the opponents of the empire and supporters of the papacy (who were not always the same) later adopted the Italianized name of
guelfi,
while their adversaries came to be known, from the war cry of the Hohenstaufens, as
ghibellini.
Entire cities were one or the other: Orvieto was Guelph, whereas Todi, just a few miles away, was Ghibelline; Cremona was Guelph, but Pavia, upstream on the river Po, was Ghibelline. Other cities, like Parma, on the other bank of the Po, went back and forth between the two sides. Over the years, clashes in and between cities belonging to different factions left thousands dead. In 1313, fighting between the two parties in Orvieto went on for four days. Florence, a Guelph city, and Ghibelline Siena were intermittently at war for decades.

The tendency for entire societies to split into two camps along a fault line is scarcely confined to Italy. But few divisions have lasted as long as that between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Several Italian writers have seen in their bloody rivalry a legacy that can still be discerned today. According to one theory, it was reenacted throughout the Cold War in the standoff between the Christian Democrats and the Communists: the former, allies of the papacy, had the same essential characteristic as the Guelphs; the latter, like the Ghibellines, aligned themselves with a foreign power (just as the Ghibellines had taken the side of the empire, so the Communists looked for support to the Soviet Union).

But that interpretation has to be squared with another two-sided conflict that was suppressed at the end of the Second World War and never quite went away: between the supporters and opponents of Fascism. It is argued, mostly by right-wing intellectuals, that the Second World War in Italy did not end cleanly in a popular rebellion against the Nazi occupiers (which was the version of events that underpinned the postwar years). Instead, the Allied invasion put a stop to a messy civil war between Mussolini’s die-hard supporters on the one hand and a predominantly Communist partisan force on the other. Seen from this standpoint, the conflict resurfaced in the murderous street fighting that erupted between young neo-Fascists and left-wing revolutionaries in the 1970s. And it was resolved only after the Christian Democrats and the Communists were swept aside by history in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Silvio Berlusconi brought the far right into alliance and from there into government. In doing so, it might be argued, he also put an end to the age-old enmity between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines: his success in the 2000s eventually forced most of his adversaries, including both former Communists and ex–Christian Democrats, into a single center-left movement, the Partito Democratico (PD).