by John Hooper
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 Democrat
s 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
Roberto 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.
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.* 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.2 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.