The Italians (7 page)

It would be unfair, though, to run away with the idea that
furbizia
is a national characteristic. As the journalist and wit Giuseppe Prezzolini first remarked back in the 1920s, the
furbo
coexists with—and preys on—another kind of Italian, one he dubbed the
fesso.
That is by no means a compliment either. It means “idiot.” Prezzolini explained that you are a
fesso
“if you pay the full-price rail ticket, don’t get into the theater free, don’t have an uncle who is a
commendatore
or a friend of the wife who is influential in the judiciary or education; if you are neither a Freemason nor a Jesuit; tell the taxman your real income [or] keep your word even at the cost of losing thereby.”

The distinction between the two tribes had little to do with intelligence, Prezzolini argued. It was just that the “
fessi
have principles,” whereas the “
furbi
only have aims.” The division he captured has held good to this day. Indeed, an entire history of modern Italy might be written in terms of the never-ending struggle between its
fessi
and
furbi
. As you might expect, the
furbi
usually come out on top, except for brief periods, such as the one that lasted from the end of 2011 to the beginning of 2013, when Mario Monti, an arch-
fesso
(though no fool), governed the country with a cabinet largely of
fessi
.

That does not mean the
furbi
are necessarily more numerous. In fact, the only systematic attempt to gauge their numbers (as far as I am aware) reached the opposite conclusion. For a book on queuing,
⁴
a journalist interviewed a hundred of his fellow Italians. One of the questions was whether they’d ever tried to
fare il furbo
in order to get ahead in queues. Fifty-four said “never.” Thirty-five answered “sometimes.” And eleven said they “always” tried to jump the queue.

If
furbizia
has deep roots in Italy’s postclassical history, then so does a complex of entwined assumptions and attitudes for which, so far as I am aware, there is no particular word. Long experience of power changing hands in ways they were unable to influence has made Italians intensely wary of nailing their colors to any one mast. Historically, principles, ideals and commitment have proved dangerous. Those who survived were those who took care not to show their hand, who adroitly shifted position in time to be on the right side when the outcome of the latest power struggle became clear.

Some years ago, I was invited to dinner by an Italian nobleman after attending a commemorative event to do with the Second World War. As the evening progressed, I asked the count what memories, if any, he had of the conflict. His role turned out to have been a dramatic one. As a boy, he had been sent by his father to intercept the advancing Allied troops and warn them that they were heading into a trap—an ambush laid by the Germans in a narrow pass.

“You see, my father was the commander of the local
partigiani,
” he said. The
partigiani,
or partisans, were Italy’s resistance fighters during the conflict.

Now, this was pretty unusual. Titled landowners did not normally take leading roles in the resistance, which was dominated by Communists. And I said as much.

“Yes, well, my father had quite a lot of ground to make up in 1944, you see,” he replied. “He had been part of Mussolini’s innermost circle.”

The nobleman’s father was by no means the only one to hedge his bets. Many of Italy’s leading northern industrialists played a deft hand, appearing to collaborate with the Germans who occupied northern Italy after the fall of Mussolini while at the same time secretly providing information to the Allies and even, in some cases, cash to the partisans.

By overthrowing Mussolini and withdrawing from the Axis, the Italians emerged from the war purged of Fascism and on the side of the Allies. As a result, Italy benefited from postwar U.S. aid—unlike Spain and Portugal, which continued to be governed by their respective Fascist dictators. The sense of betrayal felt by the Germans when the Italians changed sides in 1943 was compounded by the memory of their having also switched allegiances in the First World War. Though Italy had formed part of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, its government held back when war broke out in 1914. This was by no means unwarranted: Austria-Hungary was the first to violate the ground rules of the Triple Alliance by failing to consult Italy before it declared war on Serbia and pitched the world into its first global conflict. The Italian government felt, understandably enough, that it was no longer under an obligation to the other members of the alliance. It joined the conflict the following year on the other side after Britain and France secretly promised the Rome government additional territory in the event of victory.

Alliances among the various states that now compose Italy were often subject to abrupt revision, and yet the history of the peninsula has been noticeably short on decisive turning points. There have been very few revolutions or coups—and virtually no successful ones.
^*
The Risorgimento and the installation of Mussolini’s dictatorship stand out as exceptions—moments when Italians were pushed into a radical break with the past, in part at least by the force of idealism.

The much longer periods of democracy before and after the Fascist era were more characteristic of the rest of Italy’s history, even if the men who featured prominently in them are less well remembered than Garibaldi or Mussolini. Who outside Italy, for example, has ever heard of Agostino Depretis? Or inside, for that matter? You will search the country in vain for a monument to Depretis or a piazza named in his honor. Outside his native province of Pavia, there are only a handful of streets dedicated to his memory, including one, for some reason, in the southern town of Andria.

Yet Depretis was one of the few politicians who could be said to have dominated the Italy of his day. He was prime minister nine times, more than any other politician since unification. Some of his cabinets were, admittedly, pretty short-lived. One lasted eighty-eight days (a reminder that endless changes of government have always been characteristic of Italian democracy and were not, as is often claimed, a product of the abnormal conditions of the Cold War).
^*
Nevertheless, Depretis stamped his personality on the period from 1876 until his death in 1887 as emphatically as Silvio Berlusconi did on the first decade of this century.
^*

So why has Depretis been wiped so comprehensively from the folk memory of the country he governed? Perhaps because he is associated with two things Italians would rather forget. It was while he was prime minister that Italy made its debut as a colonial power by occupying the Red Sea port of Massawa, and today not even the right seeks to glorify Italy’s ill-starred imperial adventures. But—to the extent that people today even know of his existence—Depretis is also linked to the emergence, just a few years after unification, of a phenomenon known as
trasformismo
. This is a word that has been taken from biology into the rich vocabulary of Italian politics. It means the building of parliamentary majorities by means of encouraging defection: lawmakers are persuaded to leave the party for which they were elected by offers of preferment (or something more tangible), or just by a fear of being caught on the losing side. Depretis’s cynical promotion of
trasformismo
shocked those of his contemporaries who had hoped a united and independent Italy would live up to the highest ideals of the Risorgimento
.
The journalist Ferdinando Petruccelli della Gattina described him as being “born a political malefactor in the way others are born poets or thieves.”
⁵
But it can be argued that even today Italian politics owes as much to the spirit of Depretis as it does to that of Garibaldi.

Most democratic constitutions offer scope for lawmakers to switch their allegiances once they are elected. But few, if any, developed countries see quite as many politicians do so as in Italy. In the whole of the British parliament that lasted from 2005 to 2010, for example, only one MP “crossed the floor of the House” in the sense of leaving one party to join another. Ten more “resigned the whip” to become independents, mostly to preempt expulsion from their party after becoming involved in some kind of scandal. But by the end of Italy’s 2008–2012 legislature, well over 100 of the 630 deputies were in a parliamentary group different from the one to which they had belonged at the outset. About half were independents. The rest had joined other parties.

Ideological ambiguity has been a hallmark of Italian politics since the foundation of the republic in 1946. The Vatican-backed party Democrazia Cristiana (DC), which dominated politics for much of the Cold War period, was almost impossible to categorize as right- or left-wing. It is often described as having straddled the center, but even that is not really correct. In line with Catholic doctrine, it was socially extremely conservative—as reactionary, in many respects, as Spain’s Francoists or the followers of Salazar in Portugal. Yet there was a Christian Democrat trade union federation, and in the early days of the DC some members of the party, men like Giuseppe Dossetti, were genuine radicals.

If the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian Democrats was their ideological ambivalence, then that of Italy’s Communists was their moderation. Their greatest theoretician, Antonio Gramsci, argued as early as the 1930s for a protracted “war of position,” a painstaking erosion of the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie, which may have been conceived as a prelude to revolution, but which gradually turned into a substitute for it. After the Second World War, Gramsci’s successor Palmiro Togliatti backed a policy of cooperating with the Christian Democrats and trying to recruit a broad range of people from all levels of society, particularly small-business people. After Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, Togliatti was the first of the Western Communist leaders to distance himself from Moscow, introducing the concept of “polycentrism,” according to which Communism had many points of reference and not just the Kremlin.

By 1969, the PCI was openly at loggerheads with the Soviet Union. Four years later, its new secretary, a Sardinian aristocrat, Enrico Berlinguer, proposed a three-way alliance, or “historic compromise,” between the Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats as a bulwark against the kind of far-right backlash that had just toppled Salvador Allende in Chile. Berlinguer was also a leading proponent of democratic and implicitly nonrevolutionary “Eurocommunism,” which drew on Gramsci’s writings for much of its theoretical framework.

Ambiguity and moderation may be of the essence in Italian politics, but the opposite usually seems to be true. Party leaders and government ministers hurl abuse at one another, deliver ultimatums and issue threats, so that for much of the time the country appears to be on the verge of crisis, if not collapse. But beneath the turbulent surface, there is usually space for an accommodation to be reached and good sense to prevail. Issues remain arguable, and thus negotiable. The same is true of Italian life in general. Imprecision is, on the whole, highly prized. Definition and categorization are, by contrast, suspect. For things to remain flexible, they need to be complicated or vague, and preferably both. Which is why the need was felt for one of the strangest job titles ever conferred on a politician.

CHAPTER 4

A Hall of Mirrors

Little girl on beach:
What’s the time?

Man in deck chair:
Who knows? The true truth will never be known.

Francesco Altan cartoon published in
L’Espresso,
July 15, 2004

R
oberto Calderoli is one of the more outrageous figures to have strutted across the Italian political stage in recent decades. He once said that he had kept a tiger in his house but had to get rid of it after it ate a dog. A senior member of the Northern League, he is noted, among other things, for having walked a pig across land designated for the construction of a mosque and for having described the losing French team in the 2006 soccer World Cup final as made up of “Negroes,
^*
Muslims and Communists.” Earlier that same year, Calderoli had lost his job as a minister in Silvio Berlusconi’s government. It was at a time of violent protests in the Muslim world over the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. During a television interview, Calderoli unbuttoned his shirt to show that he had one of the caricatures printed on his undershirt. Three days later, and with great reluctance, Calderoli resigned from the cabinet.