The Italians

by John Hooper

  It is tempting to speculate that the Italians’ abiding fascination with illusion also helps explain the unusually prominent role in their culture of masks. Noble families in ancient Rome kept death masks of their ancestors. Masks were an integral part of the Commedia dell’Arte, which emerged in Venice during the sixteenth century. And it was in Venice too that the masked ball developed at about the same time.

  The masks used in a masked ball are used to withhold identity, by placing an assumed face in front of the true one. This is close to what Jung had in mind when he adopted as his term for the apparent self the Latin word for “mask,” persona. But masks can be used for more than one purpose. In the Commedia dell’Arte, they served not to distract from reality, but to heighten it by presenting the audience with a caricatured representation of the character of the wearer. In ancient Rome, they were intended to mirror reality: death masks were donned by professional mourners at the funerals of family members.

  Illusion and falsehood can certainly be used to deceive. But they can also be used to communicate. Many of the events in Shakespeare’s Othello never actually happened. Michelangelo’s David is not a real man, any more than Botticelli’s Venus is a real woman. But no one would think of calling Shakespeare a liar or accuse Michelangelo and Botticelli of deception. Their creations transcend the issue of authenticity because they serve to communicate ideas and represent ideals. And nowhere is this power of fabrication to send messages grasped more instinctively or used more widely than in Italy.

  This is partly because Italians, like other Southern Europeans, are naturally theatrical. There are exceptions, of course. I have known plenty of Italians who are less animated than the majority of Swedes. But you only have to spend time in Italy, and particularly in bars and restaurants, to see that people interact with one another using facial expressions and hand movements that are, in general, more animated and expressive—more dramatic, in a word—than is the case in the more temperate north.

  This often complicates relations between Italians and foreigners in their country. One of the other foreign correspondents in Rome when I first worked there had spent much of his professional life in the Far East and was convinced that the relationship of Italians to Northern Europeans and North Americans was a bit like that of Europeans and Americans to Asians.

  “People in much of Southeast and East Asia show their emotions in ways that are barely discernible to us, so we tend either to think that they lack feelings or dismiss the issue altogether by labeling them as ‘inscrutable,’” he once said. “I think a lot of Italians regard us in the same way. Our expressions of surprise or disappointment or annoyance or whatever are so much less evident than theirs that we just go ‘under their radar.’”

  It is certainly more difficult to show Italians that you are angry. So you gradually develop an ability to lose your temper at will. As you turn up the volume and your physical gestures become increasingly expansive, you can sometimes see on the faces of the people you are dealing with an expression of dawning realization mingled with almost pleasurable surprise: all of a sudden, and in a way that has nothing to do with philology or semantics, you are speaking their language.

  If Pirandello is the archetypal Italian writer, then opera—packed with searing emotion expressed without reserve—is the quintessential Italian art form. Its origins, in the late sixteenth century, are exclusively Italian. It grew out of the discussions and experiments of the Camerata, a group of Florentine writers, musicians and intellectuals whose main aim was to revive the blend of words and music that was known to have existed in classical Greek drama.* An Italian, Jacopo Peri, composed the earliest recorded opera, Dafne, which was first performed in 1598. And it was in an Italian city, Venice, that the first public opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano, was opened in 1637.

  In the nineteenth century, moreover, opera became entangled with the concept of Italian nationhood (as it did, with rather more questionable effects, in Germany with Wagner). This was largely because of Giuseppe Verdi.* Nabucco, one of Verdi’s early operas, deals with the Jews’ Babylonian captivity. It includes the stirring “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves,” often known by its opening words as “Va Pensiero,” in which the exiles sing of their longing for their homeland “so beautiful and lost.” In recent years, scholars have questioned whether Verdi intended Nabucco to carry a political message. But there is no doubt that the composer was an ardent supporter of the nationalist cause or that “Va Pensiero” came to be seen in retrospect as a metaphor for the subjugation of the Italians by their foreign masters. The subject matter of some of his later operas, such as La battaglia di Legnano, was overtly nationalist, and in 1861 Verdi became a member of Italy’s first parliament.

  It can often seem as if there is still a close link between Italian politics and opera, or at least operatics. You might expect, for example, that of all the parties in Italy the Northern League (which, by the way, has taken “Va Pensiero” as its own) should be the most down-to-earth. Its founder, Umberto Bossi, claimed to speak for the hardy, less demonstrative folk of the Po Valley—the descendants not of florid Latins, but supposedly of the Gauls, Goths and Lombards who settled in the north of Italy over the centuries. These are the people who like to think of themselves as living in l’Italia che lavora—“the Italy that works.” Bossi termed northern Italy “Padania” and at different times called for it to have autonomy or independence.

  Back in the mid-1990s, he decided he needed to realign his movement by making it more separatist in orientation. Anywhere but Italy, a party leader in the same situation would summon an extraordinary congress, make a rousing speech in favor of independence and then set up working groups and policy committees to recast the party’s program. Bossi opted instead for what one newspaper columnist at the time called “the most colossal political farce ever seen in Europe.”

  The playacting began one Sunday when the League leader went with his most senior officials to the spring that gives birth to the Po, almost seven thousand feet up in the Alps. There, he ceremoniously filled a glass vial with the “sacred water of the Po.” Then he and his supporters descended the Po in a flotilla of boats, carrying the vial to Venice, where Bossi read out a declaration of independence that began with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson.

  “We, the peoples of Padania, solemnly proclaim that Padania is a federal, independent and sovereign republic,” he intoned. An Italian flag was then lowered and the Northern League’s green and white standard raised in its place. A so-called “transitional constitution” distributed at the same time made it clear secession would not take place immediately. It empowered a “provisional government” that had already been formed by Bossi to open talks with the central government on an agreed separation, but set a deadline of September 1997. After that, failing agreement, the Northern League’s unilateral declaration of independence would take “full effect.”

  Wars have broken out over less.

  But not in Italy. A former president of the Constitutional Court called in vain for Bossi to be arrested. Police clashed briefly with far-left-wing and far-right-wing demonstrators protesting at his initiative. But the overwhelming majority of Italians understood his descent of the Po for what it was: an elaborate symbolic gesture. They were right to do so. September 1997 came and went, and Padania—if it can be said to exist—stayed firmly within Italy. In fact, no one much noticed that the deadline had expired. But everyone had been made aware that the Northern League’s orientation had changed—at least, until the next tactical switch.

  Part of the fascination exerted by Italy’s mafiosi is the way that they too communicate by means of signs. Less than a year after Bossi’s melodramatic descent of the Po, I was at the other end of Italy, in Catania, at the foot of Mount Etna, being driven through crime-infested backstreets in a police car code-named “The Shark.” At the time, Catania was Italy’s most violent city—a battleground on which Cosa Nostra was fighting for territori
al ascendancy with a variety of more or less organized criminal gangs. The underworld murder rate—in a city the size of Cincinnati or Hull—was running at two a week.

  On the night I arrived, the latest victim was found. He had been shot in the face and throat. Either before or after, his skull had been battered in with a rock. The way he met his death was violent, but no more so than if he had been killed by rival hoodlums in Moscow or Macao. What made it stand out was that the circumstances of his death had apparently been arranged in such a way as to send a message. An Uzi submachine pistol of the sort favored by Cosa Nostra had been laid across the corpse at a point just above the knees.

  The police officers with whom I spent the morning were certain this would have a precise significance—that it would be immediately comprehensible to at least one other mobster, and that if they could only decode the message, it would help advance the investigation into the gang war raging in their city. For much of the patrol they debated why the gun had been put at that specific point on the body, whether it really belonged to a member of Cosa Nostra, whether any significance could be attached to the position of the safety catch and whether there was a meaning to be read into the way the victim’s limbs were arranged.

  The officers were behaving in a way Italians do instinctively when faced with something new or dramatic or out of the ordinary. Nothing—but nothing—is ascribed to chance. This is maybe the single biggest difference between the worldviews of Northern Europeans on the one hand and Southern Europeans, and especially Italians, on the other. The former tend to view the latter, condescendingly, as besotted with conspiracy theories. But the fact is that Southern Europeans, and particularly Italians, are conspiratorial. What is more, they often talk in metaphors and communicate with symbols. And since so much is therefore deceptive or illusory, given a choice between a simple explanation and a tortuous one, you are just as likely to be right if you plump for the second.

  This is also the rationale behind what is known as dietrologia (literally, “behind-ism”)—the peculiarly Italian art of divining the true motive for, or cause of, an event. If a minister successfully campaigns for, say, greater resources for the physically handicapped, the dietrologo will not believe for one second that it is because he had their best interests at heart. He will note that the minister’s brother-in-law’s wife is on the board of a company that makes, among other things, prosthetics. And if a newspaper mounts a campaign against, say, a firm for secretly selling eavesdropping equipment to an unsavory foreign dictatorship, the dietrologo will note that the paper’s shareholders include a company that operates in the same sector as the one whose wrongdoing has been uncovered. The essence of dietrologia is that it dismisses the notion that anyone could act purely for reasons of moral conviction.

  But then in Italy what you get is seldom what you see—or hear. Long after I returned, I was having coffee with a fellow journalist and the conversation turned to an incident that had made news that week. It was election time, and Silvio Berlusconi was bringing his campaign to an end in Rome. The pollsters all agreed that the capital was critical to the outcome of the vote, but Rome had never been particularly easy terrain for Berlusconi, who comes from Milan. So it was not difficult to understand how his campaign aides had reacted when the AS Roma captain, Francesco Totti, said he would be voting against Berlusconi’s candidate in the mayoral election that was being held at the same time. The engaging Totti had the status of a demigod among AS Roma fans and in a city where, for many, soccer is more of a cult than a sport, his remark could have swung the vote. The night before at his closing rally Berlusconi had made things worse for himself by saying Totti was “out of his mind.”

  But that morning, he had abruptly changed his tune. In a radio interview, he had praised the Roma captain as “a great lad and great footballer.” He went on: “I’ve always been fond of him. And anyway his wife works for a TV channel in my group.”

  Returning from the bar, I must have said something like, “So, Berlusconi has buried the hatchet,” because my Italian colleague stopped dead in the street and looked at me with utter astonishment.

  “You really haven’t understood, have you?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “That wasn’t a burying of the hatchet. For me, that was a warning. He was saying: ‘Watch it, Totti. Remember that your wife works for my company. One more remark like that before election day and she could be looking for work elsewhere.’ That’s the way any Italian would have understood it.”

  The use of symbols and metaphors, the endless interplay between illusion and reality, the difficulty of getting at a commonly accepted truth: these are all things that make Italy both frustrating and endlessly intriguing—not least because they raise the tantalizing question of why a people who spend so much of their time peering behind masks and facades should nevertheless be so concerned with appearances, with what they see on the surface.

  CHAPTER 6

  Face Values

  L’unico metodo infallibile per conoscere il prossimo è giudicarlo dalle apparenze.

  The only infallible way to know another person is to judge him by his appearance.

  Antonio Amurri

  The hero of Sandro Veronesi’s novel La forza del passato never got along with his father.1 For one thing, his late father was—or at least seemed to be—a die-hard right-winger. At one point, Veronesi’s hero-narrator remembers an evening in the 1970s when they were watching a press conference given by Giorgio Almirante, the then leader of the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). His mother was in the kitchen, baking a cake.

  “He and I were alone, without mediators, an ideal situation for degeneration. Almirante was speaking, and I kept quiet in order to let my father make the first move, the better to decide on which attack to unleash; but strangely, rather than his usual opening provocation (something like ‘He’s certainly not wrong there’), this time he kept quiet too. By then Almirante had gotten to the fourth answer and neither of us had yet said a word, when, finally, my father spoke. ‘Never trust men who wear short-sleeved shirts under a jacket,’ he said.”

  Astonished, the narrator looks more closely at Almirante. The suntanned MSI leader seems perfectly dressed, “but his naked arms peeped out from beneath the sleeves of his impeccable blue jacket, and once you noticed it, that detail made him look vaguely obscene.”

  A lot of people—Americans in particular—like their politicians to look good. But Italians not only want their politicians to dress immaculately; they and their media are endlessly scrutinizing what they call—using the English word—their look, the way in which they dress, in a search for clues to their true personalities. I remember a comparison that covered an entire page of one of the national dailies between il look favored by Silvio Berlusconi and that projected by his then rival for the prime ministership, Romano Prodi. It began with their ties (Berlusconi stuck rigidly to a white bird’s-eye pattern on dark blue, while Prodi favored regimental-style diagonal stripes in various colors), and progressed by stages to their choice of underpants. Prodi apparently wore roomy boxer shorts, while Berlusconi favored clingy briefs. The source of this information about their underwear was not disclosed.

  Whenever a new president is elected, he too will be given the head-to-toe treatment. Giorgio Napolitano, Italy’s first ex-Communist head of state, presented quite a problem, because his fashion sense was, well, rather what you would expect of a man who was then in his early eighties. But that did not stop the style analysts from dissecting his “southern-cultured middle class” look, starting with his Borsalino and ending at his lace-up shoes. Readers were solemnly informed that the incoming president “favors those in black or brown, and always made of leather.”

  This same narrowed sartorial gaze is trained on foreign politicians too. When the Italian American Nancy Pelosi was chosen as Speaker of the House of Representatives, newspapers back in her “old country” inevitably reported
the event with pride. But the focus was not perhaps what she might have expected. “Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi, age 66,” ran a caption beneath a large photograph of the lady who had just become the highest-ranking woman politician in U.S. history. “Born in Baltimore. Moved to California. Likes to dress in Armani.”

  Some years later, when the British went to the polls, I was sitting at my desk in Corriere della Sera’s Rome office when the telephone rang. At the other end of the line was a colleague on the political staff of the Guardian.

  “John, I’ve just had the most extraordinary call from someone who claimed to be working for Corriere,” she began.

  “No, she’s entirely genuine,” I said. “I gave her your number.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a relief,” said my colleague. “You see, all she wanted to know about the candidates was how their wives were dressing. It was quite bizarre.”

  I have the resulting article on the desk in front of me as I type. “Styles Compared” is the headline. In a graphic spanning the width of a page, each of the main party leaders is shown next to his wife. There is a general description of their tastes in fashion. But in addition there are little inset circles with magnified photographs of the telling details: Sarah Brown, the wife of the Labour leader, “red wedges with opaque blue tights (€63)”; Miriam González Durántez, the Spanish spouse of Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat contender, “bag made by hand in Brazil from the ring-pulls of 1,000 tin cans (€52)”; Samantha Cameron, wife of the Conservative candidate, “Jigsaw belt (€33).”