The Italians (42 page)

But that was then. And this is now. It seems to me that many Italians, and many of those who write about their country, fail to make a crucial distinction: between diversity and disunity. The two concepts are related, but different. The United States, for instance, is a country of immense diversity. But it is scarcely disunited. In the same way, Italy is hugely diverse—geographically, linguistically, ethnically and culturally. But that does not necessarily mean it is disunited.

Italians, who as a nation tend to be quite self-absorbed
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and not particularly interested in what happens outside their frontiers, seem largely unaware of the considerable diversity—and disunity—to be found in other European countries. Unlike France and Spain, for example, Italy does not have a sizable minority like the Basques, whose language is not even Indo-European. Italians certainly have a tradition of parochialism. Many have a fervent attachment to their town or city, and there is even a special word in Italian to describe it:
campanilismo,
which derives from
campanile,
or “bell tower,” the bell tower of the church being historically the focal point of Italian communities. But the effect of
campanilismo
is to detract from the loyalty that might otherwise be felt toward a bigger territorial unit, such as a region, which in turn could form the basis for a movement in support of autonomy, or even independence. Since 1970, Italy has had a fair degree of regional self-government. Yet so far none of its regional administrations has served as a springboard for the promotion of a separatist movement, as has happened in Scotland and Catalonia.

In the 1940s, a Sicilian independence movement took shape that had links to the Mafia. But it fizzled out after the Second World War. And while there has long been widespread support for an independent Sardinia, the island’s separatist movements remain hopelessly divided. The most important regional grouping in recent years has been the Northern League. But though from time to time its leaders play at being separatists, their real concern is with what they and their supporters perceive as the squandering of northern taxes in southern and central Italy. After the League was ravaged by the financial scandal that engulfed its founder, Umberto Bossi, and his family in 2012, there were signs of an emerging nationalism in Veneto that aimed not to invent Bossi’s ahistorical Padania, but to restore the old Venetian Republic, the Serenissima. It remains to be seen whether it will gain traction.

In several ways, the Italy viewed from outside by foreigners is a more homogenous country than the one seen from inside by its inhabitants. However different Italians may be in other respects, perhaps the greatest similarity—the attitude they most often share—is a reliance on the family. It is probably most intense in Sicily and least so in the far north. But the difference is one of degree. The point was highlighted in a made-for-TV movie based on the life of Felice Maniero,
¹
the boss of the Mala del Brenta, an organized-crime syndicate active in Veneto in the 1980s and 1990s. There is a scene in which Maniero arrives to buy a consignment of drugs from the local representative of Cosa Nostra. He introduces the man with him as his cousin. The Sicilian observes wryly that, when it comes to money, even northerners like Maniero will trust only the members of their family. “You’re not really so different from us, are you?” he says.

Because they take it for granted, Italians seldom notice that they are all—or almost all—brought up within a Catholic culture. That does not mean they all go on to become observant Catholics. But even the atheists among them absorb a wide range of common attitudes and assumptions. Compare that with, for example, the deep historic rifts between Catholics and Protestants in Germany and the Low Countries.

Nor do Italians remark on the fact that the vast majority of children in their country have the same education. More than 80 percent attend state schools. Of the remainder, all but a handful go to schools run by the Catholic Church. And since, on average, the educational standards of the public sector are higher than those in the private sector, Italy does not have to contend with the sort of insidious social division that exists in Britain between the mass of the population and a privately schooled elite.

Language remains divisive, to be sure. But not to anything like the same extent as was once the case. It is likely that, at the time of unification, less than one Italian in ten could speak the literary tongue based on the dialect of Tuscany that was adopted as the country’s official language. Even the new state’s first monarch, Vittorio Emanuele, had difficulty speaking it fluently. Over the years that followed, compulsory military service did much to spread a working knowledge of standard Italian, as did the movement of millions of Italians who left their homes in the south to travel to the north during the years of the “economic miracle” and thereafter, when internal migration resumed in the late 1960s; it has been calculated that by 1972 more than nine million people had moved from one region to another. One of the consequences was marriages between men and women from different parts of the country, and in a family in which, say, the wife was from Puglia and the husband from Piedmont, the common language was highly likely to be Italian.

Even so, by the early 1980s less than 30 percent of the population spoke only, or predominantly, the national language. Since then the figure has risen steadily, largely because of television. A study published by Istat in 2007 found that it had reached 46 percent. And there were striking differences according to age that suggested that the proportion of habitual Italian speakers was almost certain to continue rising; among people under the age of twenty-four, it was almost 60 percent.

Every so often, there is a reminder of how many Italians still converse in dialect. Not long ago, the judges chose a Miss Italia who came from a rural area of Calabria. In her first encounter with the media after her victory, she demonstrated all too clearly that her Italian left much to be desired. But the amused and slightly disparaging way in which her mistakes were reported made an important point: that the use of dialect is regarded in most parts of Italy today as a sign of lack of education, something to be slightly embarrassed about. So far at least, there is no sign that any of the dialects or languages of Italy (with the possible exceptions of Sardu and Venetian) could form the basis for an effective independence movement.

Another variation on the “no such thing as Italy” argument has it that, despite internal migration, Italy continues to suffer from a vast disparity in wealth between north and south—and, what is more, one that is widening. History has indeed divided the Mezzogiorno from the rest of the country politically and socially. Historians are still wrangling over whether the south has always—or at least since Roman times—been poorer than the north. But what is certain is that Sicily, Amalfi, Salerno and Naples all enjoyed moments of splendor in the Middle Ages. The world’s first medical school was established in Salerno, perhaps as early as the ninth century.
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The world’s oldest public university is in Naples; it was founded in 1224 by Frederick II and still bears his name today. In later centuries Naples had periods of great affluence and influence, particularly in the setting of Europe-wide trends in fashion and cuisine. For a time, it was the continent’s second-largest city after Paris. The first railway line to be built in Italy, in the early nineteenth century, did not run along the Po Valley but through the Mezzogiorno. By the time of unification, Naples was the most industrialized city in Italy. Most of the evidence nevertheless suggests that the south was still poorer than the rest of the country (though not much poorer than the Papal States, or indeed Tuscany).

What is clear is that unification did anything but help. The early, Piedmontese-led governments imposed higher taxes and seized Church lands, sparking an insurgency that the authorities dismissed as brigandage. By the mid-1860s, there were a hundred thousand Italian troops struggling to keep the peace in the Mezzogiorno. Palermo was bombarded into submission by the navy. In the decade that followed unification, almost ten thousand people were sentenced to death in the south. The northerners not only imposed their laws but wrecked the emerging industries of the Mezzogiorno by lifting the protectionist measures that had shielded them from competition under the Bourbons.
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It is quite possible that if the south had remained independent, it would be richer today than it is.

Whether there would have been less inequality among southerners is another matter. Though the prosperity of the Mezzogiorno as a whole may at times have rivaled that of the north, there seems always to have been evidence of immense disparities in wealth as far back as Roman times, when the southern countryside was a patchwork of latifundia, vast landed estates worked by slaves. Poverty deepened in the rural Mezzogiorno in the eighteenth century when landowners, in a movement that had parallels elsewhere in Europe, grabbed much of the common land. The peasantry never forgot or forgave the expropriations, and the recovery of what they believed was theirs was a constant theme in the rural uprisings that erupted at intervals in the centuries that followed.

The poverty of the rural south was the driving force behind the emigration from the mainland Mezzogiorno and Sicily that began in the 1880s. In the years that followed, millions of southerners flooded across the Atlantic to begin new lives in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere. Strict immigration laws in the United States and depressed economic conditions in much of Latin America contrived to keep Italians at home during the Fascist era. But in the postwar period more than a million departed. This was when many Calabrians in particular emigrated to Australia and Canada.

By then, however, the Italian authorities were making genuine efforts to tackle the “Mezzogiorno question.” There were some clumsy and only partially successful attempts at land reform in the late 1940s. But a fund for public investment in the south, the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, was founded in 1950, and as the economy recovered from the devastation of war, private investors became increasingly keen to sink money into an area that offered lower wage costs than the north. That, however, was an indication of the continuing deprivation in the Mezzogiorno. As late as 1973, Naples was hit by an outbreak of cholera, a disease caused by poor sanitation and associated with what in those days was called the third world. When Italy equipped itself with a comprehensive welfare system, many of the benefits flowed to the south and pensions, notably for disabilities, were often given—or fraudulently obtained—as a way of saving the beneficiaries from destitution rather than in response to genuine disability or other qualifying circumstances.

The imbalance between south and north is clearly apparent even today. But geographical disparities are not unique to Italy and—contrary to what many Italians believe—the gap has narrowed since reaching its widest point in the 1950s. Per capita income in Piedmont, Italy’s wealthiest region, was 74 percent above the national average in 1954. In the poorest region, Calabria, it was 48 percent below it.
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By 2010, the most prosperous region was the Valle d’Aosta, where average income was 36 percent above the national mean. The least well-off was Campania, where it was 36 percent beneath it. In other words, a gap of 122 percentage points had shrunk in the intervening fifty-six years to one of 72 points.

Nor was the gap any longer exceptional in the context of Italy’s European neighbors. In France and Spain too, the richest regions were about twice as rich as the poorest. In Britain, the disparity was even greater than in Italy. Measuring inequality takes economists onto notoriously slippery terrain, because a lot depends on the size of the territory used for comparison: a relatively high regional average income can hide the fact that there are pockets of extreme poverty, while a quite low one can mask the existence of great wealth in specific areas. To address this problem, the OECD computes a composite index of geographical inequality using what is known as the Gini coefficient. Italy’s score is better than the average of the organization’s member states. It emerges as more economically homogenous than Britain, the United States, Canada or even Austria.

Statistics, of course, are one thing, and sentiments another. If people feel themselves to be different from others, that is more important than any number of averages and coefficients. So how Italian do Italians feel?

In my experience, those least attached to the concept of Italy are to be found at either end of the socioeconomic scale. The aristocracy pretty much everywhere but in Piedmont lost out as a result of unification: from being big fish in small ponds, they suddenly became rather small fish in a much larger pond. The least educated and most disadvantaged Italians, on the other hand, are the least likely to have traveled outside their region and the most likely to speak their dialect at home and with their friends. But among the millions of Italians who make up their country’s sizable and growing middle class, there is plenty of evidence of a strong sense of identification with Italy.

Nationality, in fact, is stressed far more often in public than in other countries. It is not at all uncommon to find yourself reading an article about how
“noi italiani”
(“we Italians”) ought, say, to give more to the developing world, and then hear the weather forecaster on television describe how high winds are about to blow through
“il nostro paese”
(“our country”). During the commercial break that follows, you are quite likely to be assured that this or that range of sofas, brand of crockery or even van rental firm is the one
“più amato dagli italiani”
(“most beloved of the Italians”).

It all betokens a strong sense of ethnicity that is evident in other areas. No one thinks it is strange, for example, that an Argentinian footballer of Italian origin like Mauro Camoranesi should have lined up as a member of the Italian national side that won the 2006 World Cup. But then Camoranesi was no less than the thirty-fifth foreign national of Italian descent to have played for Italy.