The Italians

by John Hooper

  His other, immense advantage, of course, has been his hold over the media. He entered politics as the owner of a publishing house, Mondadori; he also owned a weekly newsmagazine, Panorama, and through his brother he controlled a daily newspaper, Il Giornale. But it was Berlusconi’s hold on television that counted more than anything.

  Italians are unusually dependent on TV for their news and information. Even before the Internet began to make inroads into circulations, less than one Italian in ten bought a daily newspaper. And as recently as 2014, and despite the spread of the Internet, an unusually extensive poll of voters found that more than half took their news predominantly or solely from TV.8

  While in opposition, Berlusconi was able to count on the support of the three channels belonging to his Mediaset network. But when he was in government, he could also exert influence on the three belonging to the state-owned Rai. The effect of this videocracy, as it has been termed, is impossible to demonstrate in any quantitative way. But it can be illustrated.

  In 2010, for example, a poll was carried out to determine Italians’ perceptions of the economy. One of the multiple-choice questions asked when in recent years unemployment had been at its highest. In fact, it had been rising ever since Berlusconi’s government had come into office two years earlier. Yet the largest number of respondents gave as their answer 2007—the year before he returned to power. There was a similar misconception about the overall health of the economy. On average, those who took part in the survey vastly underestimated how much it had shrunk. It was not until the following year that Italians began to realize how bad the situation was.

  Ever since 1994, Berlusconi and his media flunkies have succeeded in changing not only perceptions, but the meaning of words. The head of Mediaset began his political adventure with a massive handicap. Casting around for support, the only people he could find, apart from the Northern League, were the neo-Fascists, the pariahs of postwar Italian politics. When he first expressed support for them, most people were deeply shocked.

  So, instead of acknowledging that he had put himself at the head of an alliance packed with far-right-wingers, Berlusconi began to refer to his followers and allies as “moderates.” His coalition was of the “center-right.” At first, people took it for the nonsense it was. But Berlusconi and his television channels hammered at the terms relentlessly—“moderati . . . centro destra”—and gradually, over the years, they have become universally accepted.

  Gianroberto Casaleggio, the Internet guru who cofounded Italy’s antiestablishment Five-Star Movement, once quipped that living in Berlusconi’s Italy was rather like inhabiting the simulated reality of the 1999 sci-fi movie The Matrix.9 Certainly, perceptions inside the country were markedly different from those outside. And it helps, I think, to explain one of the paradoxes of recent years: why a man widely regarded in the rest of Europe as a buffoon was able to garner such a high level of support from a society where people are almost obsessively concerned with the impression that they make on others.

  A lot of non-Italians have heard of bella figura. Far fewer understand what it really means. In the case of English speakers, this may be because neither of the words corresponds exactly with an English equivalent. In Britain and the United States, beauty is thought of as something almost entirely separate from virtue. But in Italy the two concepts overlap. Bello (bella in the feminine) translates as “beautiful,” “pretty” or “handsome.” But it also means “nice,” “fine”—and “good.”* A good deed is una bell’azione.

  As for figura, it covers a range of meaning that extends from “picture” to the impression made on others. Perhaps “image” is the nearest English equivalent, except that figura has more to do with the way you appear to others than the effect you wish to project.

  Fare una bella figura is to make a positive impression, though not necessarily in a visual way. The shop assistant who wrapped that present will probably have told you, for example, that by turning up with a large box of fruit jellies or a bottle of vintage malt whiskey,* you will fare una bella figura (though it goes without saying that you will make an even better impression on your hosts if your gift has been exquisitely wrapped; in fact, you would fare una brutta figura were you to turn up at the door with your gift, however pricy, wrapped in nothing but a paper bag).

  In several respects, figura is close to Far Eastern concepts of “face.” And since Italians generally agree on the need to avoid losing face, they are prepared, in the same way as Chinese or Japanese, to go to great lengths to ensure that others do not do so. A chief executive who has utterly mishandled the running of a firm will not usually be openly berated at the annual general meeting and denounced in excoriating fashion in the financial media. It will be quietly agreed between all concerned that he is not up to the job, at which point he will be got rid of in the most discreet manner possible and in a way that allows him to keep his dignity and reputation.

  Dread of facendo una brutta figura—a losing face—is omnipresent in Italian society. It explains why there are so few laundromats, and why the few that do exist are used mostly by poor immigrants and foreign students. It is why Italians put on tanning lotion before they get to the beach or pool. It is why town and city councils arrange for their best-looking cops to direct the traffic in the main square. And why Italians above a certain social standing are reluctant to travel on public transport.

  Bella figura is also why Italians of both sexes will endure remarkable discomfort in the interest of keeping up appearances. Throughout the rest of the Mediterranean, from Spain to Israel, male workers cope with the summer heat by changing into short-sleeved shirts sometime around June. But in Italy that would be to run the risk of being thought, like Almirante, “vaguely obscene.” So, even as the temperatures climb into the high nineties in late July, the sort of Italians who wear a suit or jacket and trousers to work remain stubbornly—and willingly—imprisoned in shirts that allow them to shoot their cuffs. Look down and you will probably see that they are also wearing heavy leather shoes (because they keep their shape) and long socks (because one of the worst sartorial gaffes you can commit in Italy is to reveal an expanse of flesh between sock top and trouser hem). The women, meanwhile, will very likely be wearing clinging tops and figure-hugging skirts or trousers. Like the men, they cannot be comfortable. But they feel they are facendo una bella figura, and that matters more than mere comfort.

  The same need for the approval of others would seem to lie behind the boom in demand for plastic surgery. The international statistics in this area are unusually patchy, but figures taken from a report compiled for the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (ISAPS) and based on statistics for 2010 indicate that Italians are exceptionally ready to submit themselves to cosmetic procedures of all kinds. In a cross section of twenty-five countries, Italy was second, behind Greece, for the number of plastic surgeons per hundred thousand inhabitants and third, behind South Korea and Greece, for the number of procedures—surgical and nonsurgical—relative to the population. The number of cosmetic procedures carried out in Italy in 2010 was proportionately more than 30 percent higher than in the United States. France, Spain and Germany all lagged behind Italy while the figure for Britain was barely a quarter of that for Italy.

  What makes these figures all the more striking is that they refer to a country widely regarded as having an unusually high proportion of good-looking men and women. I am struck, for example, by the number of Italian women who have had lip enhancement procedures. The evidence is all too painfully visible, many having apparently been done on the cheap and botched. This is doubly tragic because you suspect they were unnecessary in the first place: most Italian women have good, full mouths that need no attention at all.

  It brings to mind the anorexic teenagers who look into the mirror as slim girls and see fat ones staring back. And if the results of a survey for the U.S.-based nutrition firm Herbalife are to believed, that is precisely the
frame of mind of about one in seven Italians. In 2005, the pollsters the company commissioned found that while 40 percent of Italians thought they were overweight, only 26 percent actually were.

  For the most part, the preoccupation with bella figura is harmless enough. It can be argued that it makes the human landscape more decorative and life in Italy generally more attractive and enjoyable. There are elements in the bella figura mentality of a concern to fit in with the other members of society. In some respects, it counterbalances what Italians call menefreghismo: unbridled egotism, not caring a damn about other people.*

  But the bella figura mentality also points to a deep-seated insecurity, oddly at variance with menefreghismo, that echoes Italians’ historic vulnerability and fragile sense of national identity. What is more, the corollary of all this reverence for whatever is bello is a tendency to despise, shun and hide whatever is brutto—or rather, anything judged to be so.

  It sometimes takes months, or it may take years, but sooner or later you notice something odd: that handicapped people in Italy are almost as rare as redheads on the streets and in the bars and restaurants. There are disabled mendicants in the bigger cities, for sure. But they are almost always foreigners. And the same is true of the tourists you see being pushed around in wheelchairs.

  So where are the Italians with evident physical deformities? Where are the blind and the paraplegic? And where, among all these beautiful people, are the Italians who suffer from Down syndrome or cerebral palsy? The sad truth is that large numbers are at home and out of sight—kept there, in many cases, by their relatives’ feelings of shame, discomfort and embarrassment, and, in other cases, by the lack of facilities for the handicapped in a society that seems never really to have made provision for them.

  The invisibility of Italy’s disabled, like much else in society, may also owe something to the huge influence on society of the Roman Catholic Church. Ideas that developed in medieval times, though long since discredited, continue to exercise a subtle influence. One was that deformity was a punishment from God.

  Handicapped Italians are not the only invisible ones. My personal experience, and that of friends, is that Italians are exceptionally reluctant to be seen when they are seriously or terminally ill. It is also noticeable how few women you see in Italy in the last months of pregnancy. This is paradoxical since pregnancy in Italy is wrapped in a fair amount of encouraging rhetoric. Women who are expecting a child are referred to as being in dolce attesa (in sweet expectation): a phrase that is not just used by solicitous elderly relatives, but in, for example, airport announcements telling them they can go to the head of the queue. In practice, as well as in theory, mothers-to-be are treated with reverence. But then they are carrying within them that most precious of all gifts: life.

  CHAPTER 7

  Life as Art

  L’unica gioia al mondo è cominciare. È bello vivere perché vivere è cominciare, sempre, ad ogni istante.

  The world’s only joy is beginning. It is wonderful to live, because living is beginning, always, at every instant.

  Cesare Pavese

  Tyson was trouble on four legs.

  A huge-jawed brute, his forebears had been bred to fight in the pits of old. Unfortunately, no one ever managed to get across to Tyson that those days were over. He was ready to take on any dog in the neighborhood. His owners assured us he was perfectly friendly with human beings. But that verità wore thin on the day my wife tried to stroke him and only just managed to pull back her hand in time.

  Others might have had difficulty in seeing Tyson’s qualities. But his owners adored him. And as he grew old and infirm they lavished progressively greater attention on him. It is hard to overstate their selfless devotion to their pet.

  As time passed, it became equally hard to resist the thought that they might have been doing Tyson a favor if they put him out of his misery. Night after night, he was taken out and—barely able to stand, let alone walk—he was encouraged with infinite patience to drag himself, paw over shaky paw, into the street to relieve himself. In the end, even that became impossible and Tyson was finally put to rest.

  His case was by no means exceptional. A foreign vet I knew said that Italian owners were noticeably more reluctant than, say, Britons or Americans to have their pets euthanized. They extend to animals, in other words, a belief that has immense weight in Italy: that life is so precious it must be prolonged and protected in all circumstances and to the very last.

  One way in which this shows up is in opposition to capital punishment. No matter how conservative in other aspects an Italian politician may be, he or she is likely to be as appalled as the most fervent radical by the sorts of executions that are common occurrences in the United States. Occasionally the case of some unfortunate American on death row is given publicity, perhaps in a magazine article or a television documentary, and it becomes a national scandal in Italy. Sometimes the prisoner facing execution is an Italian American. Often there is a doubt over the condemned person’s guilt. But not always. After the case is brought to light, a barrage of letters and e-mails is loosed off at a doubtless bemused state governor and, as the days and hours tick away toward the moment of execution, growing pressure is brought to bear on politicians in Italy and Italy’s diplomats in Washington to lobby for a reprieve. When, as usually happens, the campaign proves to be in vain, there is a sense of national outrage. However disunited Italians may be in other respects, on this issue they think almost as one.

  Why? The obvious answer is Roman Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life. But is it the right one? The Church’s “theology of life” is a comparatively recent evolution in its thinking, which has served to ensure that its attitude to capital punishment is consistent with its doctrine on such matters as artificial birth control, in vitro fertilization and stem cell research. But the fact is that executions were commonplace in the old Papal States, and the Vatican City State did not get around to abolishing the death penalty* until 1969—123 years after Michigan, the first U.S. state to do so.

  It could be argued that, since Italians have had such an overwhelming influence on the Catholic Church, it is their reverence and enthusiasm for life that has shaped the Vatican’s teaching and not the other way around. The first state in modern times to abolish the death penalty was an Italian one, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in 1786. The day on which the death penalty was dropped from its penal code, November 30, was declared a public holiday in Tuscany in 2000. The ruler of Tuscany at the time was an Austrian, but he was inspired to enact his reform by an Italian, Cesare Beccaria, who has a claim to have been the world’s first penologist. The short-lived Roman Republic was the next state to do away with executions, in 1849, and the Republic of San Marino was not far behind.

  The view that life is infinitely precious goes hand in hand with Italians’ determination to live it to the full. As much as possible is done to improve on mundane reality, minimize what is dull, maximize what is agreeable and generally file off the rough edges of existence.

  Flattery is all pervasive. Imagine you have just got into a taxi in Rome and are going to a street that not everyone has heard of. You give the name of the street to the driver and he says something like, “I know it—it’s the one that runs between Via Settembrini and Via Ferrari.” A Londoner in the same situation might answer, “Exactly.” A New Yorker might say, “Right.” But in Italy it would be positively curmudgeonly not to exclaim, “Bravo!,” the term for “well done,” which literally means “clever.” The driver has been flattered and it is now incumbent upon him to make the rest of the journey as pleasant an experience as possible. In the same way, all women are automatically belle and the genuinely pretty ones are bellissime.

  This very Italian talent for dusting life with a thick layer of stardust is deployed liberally throughout the year. But perhaps it comes to the fore with greatest effect during Lent. In the Catholic tradition, this is meant to be the grimmest f
orty days in the calendar—a time of repentance and self-denial leading up to the commemoration of Jesus’s trial and agonizingly painful death. But in Italy it never seems to be quite that bad.

  First of all, as in many other countries, there is Carnival—a brief spell of self-indulgence before the long weeks of abstinence. This is when, in Italy, you see small children on the streets dressed up in a range of bizarre outfits: some as princesses, others as ghouls, superheroes, pirates and so on. Depending on the calendar, Carnival falls some time in the period from early February to early March, and the children’s costumes introduce a touch of color to one of the more doleful phases of the year.

  Carnevale, like every other festival in the Italian calendar, also brings with it a range of seasonal delicacies like sfrappole (thin strips of pastry that are fried and sugared) and castagnole or frittelle (little doughnuts sprinkled with sugar and filled with crème pâtissière). These hypercalorific delights are meant to be swept from the shops once Lent begins, yet somehow they remain temptingly available for weeks after Ash Wednesday, only starting to disappear once Saint Joseph’s Day is firmly within sight.

  The feast day of Mary’s husband always falls in Lent and is marked by Catholics as a day of abstinence on which meat is kept from the table. But—at least in the south, from Rome downward—the deprivation is alleviated more than a little by the appearance of zeppole: baked cream puffs, often topped with candied fruits. By the time the last zeppole have been consumed, the end of Lent is nigh.

  Before it is reached, however, there is the bleakest day in the Christian calendar to be got through—Good Friday, when altars are stripped of their adornments, priests officiate in black and no bells are rung. This most sorrowful of festivals is a public holiday in many countries that Italians regard as semi-heathen, including Britain, Denmark and Sweden. It is also a national festival in several others that do not even have majority Christian populations, including Indonesia. But in Italy, it is just another day. The shops are open, as are the banks and theaters. And you cannot help but wonder whether this is not because Good Friday is the day of the year Italians consider most brutto.