The Italians (8 page)

He was back as a member of Berlusconi’s next government, occupying a post that, as far as I am aware, has never existed in any other administration anywhere else in the world. Calderoli was made “Minister for Simplification.” The cabinet post he occupied disappeared in the next cabinet, led by Mario Monti, but the simplification portfolio remained and was entrusted to a junior minister. It should be made clear that the simplification in question was legislative in the case of Calderoli and bureaucratic in the case of his successor. But their appointments underlined an important point about Italy, which is that all sorts of things are immensely complicated.

“The Italian legislative corpus,” remarked the authors of a recent study,
¹
“has long represented a labyrinth even for the shrewdest legal practitioner because of its complexity and its sheer volume.” No one knows for certain how many laws there are. In a typical act of showmanship, Calderoli arranged in 2010 for a bonfire on which he claimed to burn 375,000 laws and other regulations that had been nullified by his department. The oldest was from 1864. Estimates of the number of statute laws in force at the time of Calderoli’s appointment varied widely, from around 13,000 up to 160,000, excluding those passed by regional and provincial legislatures. The government declared that, as a result of his ministry’s work, the tally had been reduced to around 10,000. But that was still almost twice as high as in Germany and three times as high as in Britain.

If the law in Italy is complex, then the way in which it is enforced and implemented is, if anything, even more so. For a start, there are five national police forces. Apart from the Polizia di Stato, there are the semi-militarized Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza (a revenue guard charged with curbing tax evasion, detecting money laundering and patrolling Italy’s territorial waters). Then there are the Polizia Penitenziaria, whose officers guard the prisons and transport prisoners, and finally the Corpo Forestale dello Stato, responsible for patrolling Italy’s forest and national parks. In addition, there are myriad provincial and municipal police forces. Altogether, Italy has more law enforcement officers than any other country in the European Union.
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The scope for overlap, rivalry and confusion is considerable.

The same is true, and to a far greater extent, of the bureaucracy. According to a study done by the farmers’ union, the Confederazione Italiana Agricoltori, paperwork and time-consuming formalities rob the average Italian of about twenty days a year. It used to be the case, for example, that Italians had to renew their passports annually. Even now, they have to buy a stamp once a year to ensure the document remains valid.

Excessive bureaucracy is often a response to corruption, the idea being that it inhibits bribery and the trading of favors. That has long been given as a reason for India’s legendary red tape, and is doubtless one of the explanations for Italy’s. But whatever the original intent, the effect is often to facilitate corruption, rather than limit it: faced with administrative obstruction, the exasperated victim reaches into his or her pocket in an attempt to persuade the official in question to take a shortcut. Officials, of course, know that full well, and will sometimes deliberately make things more difficult in the hope of extracting a sweetener.

Basilicata’s Tempa Rossa oil field was discovered in 1989. But it was not until twenty-three years later that the government gave the thumbs-up for petroleum to be extracted, by which time the consortium involved had been required to assemble around four hundred official authorizations. Since there are four layers of government in Italy—national, regional, provincial and municipal—any relatively large project will almost certainly require approval at more than one level and, in many cases, at all four. And since it is highly unlikely that the town council, the provincial authority, the regional executive and the central government will all be of the same political orientation, an investment that is welcomed at one level may well run into hostility at another. Sometimes it proves impossible to reach the necessary consensus even when the enterprise has the full backing of the government in Rome. In 2012, the multinational gas producer BG gave up on plans to build a giant liquefied natural gas terminal near the port of Brindisi after eleven years of wrestling with the various layers of authority. By then, it had spent some €250 million.

The diffusion of power in Italy has deep historical roots. Many of the territories that are regions today were once nations in their own right. And in many towns and cities—particularly in the center and north of the country—there is a folk memory of the days when the citizens were absolute masters of their affairs. Their elected representatives are usually fiercely resistant to any kind of interference by a higher authority. As the saying has it,
Ogni paese è una repubblica
—“Every village is a republic.” But the complexity of Italy’s administrative and governmental arrangements often seems to reflect something else: a downright mistrust of simplicity.

Tourists who come to Rome are often struck by the fact that many of the capital’s pedestrian crossings have been left without repainting for so long that it is hard to know whether they are still in existence, legally or otherwise. For a long time I thought it was because of a lack of sufficient funds. But then my wife and I went to live in a flat overlooking just such an ill-defined semi-crossing. Because it was so difficult for motorists to see, especially when it grew dark, it was notorious for accidents. After an entire family was mowed down there one night, action was finally taken. A team of workmen arrived and painted blindingly white stripes at intervals across the road. From being the merest hint of a pedestrian crossing, it suddenly became the clearest in that part of Rome. But, it would seem, it was just too strident—too adamant—for someone in authority. A few weeks later, another team of workmen turned up and painted a thin layer of some murky substance over the stripes so that they became a comfortingly dim off-white.

A crossing that stated incontrovertibly—in black and white, no less—that pedestrians had an unconditional right to go, at that point, from one side of the road to the other would have come perilously close to affirming an objective truth, and the notion of objective truth is something that in Italy often causes unease.

Perhaps Roman Catholic doctrine has something to do with it. All Christians are taught that the Truth is something only God knows, and indeed embodies.
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But the concept is particularly borne in on Catholics by the sacrament of confession. Contrary to what many non-Catholics—and indeed some Catholics—believe, the priest in the confessional does not forgive sins. What he gives is a sort of provisional absolution on the basis of the penitent’s apparent repentance. But whether the sins have really been wiped from the celestial slate depends on the sincerity of the repentance, which only God can know. That said, subjective truth is hardly Catholic doctrine. Indeed, Pope Benedict XVI singled out “moral relativism”—the idea that there are no ethical absolutes or certainties—as a philosophical aberration that represented a grave threat to Christianity.

Whatever the reason, a lack of belief in ascertainable truth, and even incontrovertible facts, can be detected in many aspects of Italian society from the media to the legal system and from politics to macroeconomics. In all sorts of areas, issues remain stubbornly disputable, no matter how much hard evidence is thrown at them.

Take, for example, Project MOSE,
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the plan for constructing movable barriers at the mouth of the Venice lagoon so as to protect it from flooding. The plan was first mooted in the 1970s. Faced with interminable wrangling between supporters and opponents of the scheme, the NGO Venice in Peril finally decided to establish the balance of scientific opinion. In 2003, it organized a conference in Cambridge that brought together more than 130 of the world’s most distinguished experts on civil engineering, marine ecology and lagoon hydrology. Their conclusion was clear: a barrier would not, of itself, solve Venice’s problems, but it would make a valuable contribution in the short term while longer-term solutions were found.

If the good souls behind Venice in Peril thought their conference would put an end to debate back in Italy, they were greatly mistaken. For the opponents of the scheme, which was eventually begun that year, it was as if the engineers, scientists and environmental experts who’d gathered in Cambridge had never written or delivered their papers. After work began on the MOSE project, I found myself traveling in from the Venice airport one day on a water taxi with a very senior Italian official. The subject of the barriers came up and I remarked that the start of work was good for the city. A shadow passed over the face of my traveling companion. He was clearly distressed by such professed certainty.

“Well,” he began, shifting uncomfortably. “My friends in Venice are not so sure . . .”

The official was—I happen to know—fully aware of the conclusions of the Cambridge conference. Yet here he was giving equal weight to the opinions of the world’s leading experts on the one hand and his friends in Venice on the other.

Skepticism about ever being able to reach firm conclusions is both reflected in, and encouraged by, the Italian language. The word
verità
means truth. But it also means “version.” If a dispute arises, there will be my
verità,
your
verità
and doubtless the various
verità
of others. Italian newspapers are full of headlines like “The Portofino Slaying: The Countess and the Latest Truth.”

The implicit—if not explicit—acknowledgment of more than one truth gives rise to some of the distinctive characteristics of Italian journalism. Let me say straightaway that, like most of the foreign correspondents who have worked in Italy, I have developed great respect for the acumen of my Italian counterparts; their energy, persistence and ability to identify in a trice the essence of a story are all admirable. They also work longer and later than journalists in any other country I know. But the conventions according to which they operate frequently stand in the way of clarity. In the newspapers and on the news Web sites of Anglo-Saxon nations, and indeed those of many countries, for example, good practice consists of beginning a news story with a crisp summary of the facts: “The trial arising from last year’s disaster at the Acme Italia plant heard that the foreman in charge had been left by his wife on the night before,” for instance. Some Italian newspapers, particularly regional dailies and the financial newspaper
Il Sole 24 Ore,
do indeed begin their stories that way. And the practice has become more common on news Web sites. But most of the national dailies still tend to use what is known in the trade as a “dropped intro,” which defers the main point of the story until later. In most other journalistic traditions, these are reserved for features.

An Italian report of the same court hearing might begin, for example, with the fly that buzzed persistently around the head of the presiding judge—a metaphor for the nagging doubts surrounding the case that will then be wound skillfully through the rest of the story. Or it might open with a reconstruction of events that owes at least as much to the assumptions of the reporter as to established fact: “As he stepped from the bus outside the Acme Italia plant on that fateful Wednesday, Luigi Rossini’s mind was not on the problems that had dogged his production line for months, but on a woman. And a very special woman. His wife.” Whatever the approach, it is more than likely that what crass Anglo-Saxons and others would regard as the main point will be left to a later—or in extreme cases the very last—paragraph of the dispatch. The impression left with the reader is that he or she has been told a story. Usually, it is a well-written and gripping or entertaining story, but a story all the same. The reader can accept it as true, dismiss it as fiction or quibble over the details.

Much the same approach can be discerned in the reluctance of the Italian media to provide readers with the facts they need to make a judgment on what is said by public figures. Italian politicians, like politicians the world over, often talk self-interested nonsense. In most other journalistic traditions, it is seen as part of the reporter’s job to check what politicians confidently declare against published records and statistics. If, as happened in Italy not long ago, the prime minister tells a press conference that his country’s schools are the best funded in Europe, it is expected that the journalist reporting those words will make a check and perhaps insert a paragraph to the effect that, according to the European Union’s statistics, school funding in Italy is only slightly better than average. Some Italian reporters do exactly that. But it is not the norm. It would be considered a bit disrespectful. The prime minister, like everybody else, should be allowed his
verità
. That is not to say that his political opponents will not contest his assertions, and that their
verità
will not then be conscientiously reported in the media. But it is left to the reader to decide which side is right.