The Italians

by John Hooper

  Ordinary Italians continue to regard judges and prosecutors as having similar functions. It is not unusual, in fact, for prosecutors to be referred to, even in the media, not just as magistrati but as giudici. Garantisti complain that the two branches of the magistratura share a common esprit de corps and that judges are all too ready to grant prosecutors’ requests for, among other things, the imprisonment of suspects. Indeed, it would be unnatural if a judge who had spent several years of his or her life as a prosecutor did not intuitively see things from the prosecution’s standpoint.

  But what of Berlusconi’s assertion that the magistratura was infested with left-wingers? Some of his followers even talked about a partito della magistratura. A subtler version of the same contention is that Italy’s judges and prosecutors are like the Turkish military—a body of men and women with a broadly similar political outlook who do not need to belong to a party or group in order to act in concert.

  It is probably true to say that the number of left-wingers among Italy’s magistrati is higher than among their counterparts in other countries. Lawyers in general, and judges in particular, tend to be conservative. For many years, the same was true in Italy. The judiciary bequeathed by Mussolini stood well to the right. Partly as a way of loosening the conservatives’ grip on the institutions, the Italian Communist Party during the Cold War adopted what it termed “a war of position.” The idea was that the proletariat—or rather its allies in the intelligentsia—would infiltrate key areas of power and influence. After 1968, the idea was taken up in a modified form by followers of the New Left, a movement that had gathered strength from the student revolts. There is little doubt that in the years that followed a number of radical idealists did indeed enter the magistratura.

  But to imply, as Silvio Berlusconi has done, that the judiciary is saturated with Marxists is nonsense. If that were the case, he would not have got off as many times as he has. And Adriano Sofri would never have been convicted. The overwhelming majority of judges and prosecutors belong to the Associazione Nazionale Magistrati (ANM), which is simply a professional association. Within the ANM there are two so-called correnti (currents): Magistratura Democratica, which aligns with the left, and Magistratura Indipendente, which leans to the right. But judges and prosecutors alike deeply resent the implication that their political views play any role in the decisions that they make in a professional capacity. Most of the defense lawyers I have spoken to have been more critical of the minority of prosecutors who have one eye on a career in politics and who take up cases they know will give them a high profile in the media.

  “But if I thought that when I went into court to argue a case I needed to worry about the political affiliations of the judge, then frankly I’d give up this job and go off and do something else,” said one avvocato.

  At the time of writing, Magistratura Indipendente is the stronger of the two factions, its candidates having had more success than those of Magistratura Democratica in the most recent elections to the profession’s self-governing body, the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura. The prosecutor in the Court of Cassation who in 2013 successfully argued for the rejection of Berlusconi’s final appeal against his conviction for tax fraud belonged to Magistratura Indipendente.6

  CHAPTER 19

  Questions of Identity

  Italia significa Verdi, Puccini, Tiziano, Antonello da Messina . . . Io non penso che Tiziano sia nato lassù e Antonello da Messina sia nato laggiù: per me sono due italiani.

  Italy means Verdi, Puccini, Titian and Antonello da Messina . . . I don’t think of Titian as being born up there and Antonello da Messina as being born down there; for me, they are two Italians.

  Riccardo Muti

  In 2011, Italy had its hundred fiftieth birthday. On March 17, the day in 1861 that King Vittorio Emanuele proclaimed the foundation of the Kingdom of Italy, there was a ceremony in Rome and the air force aerobatics team used vapor trails in the national colors to trace what was claimed to be the world’s biggest Tricolore.

  Elsewhere, though, the celebrations were mostly limited to exhibitions recalling this or that local aspect of the Risorgimento. By the standards of a relatively young country, it was all fairly muted. To some extent, this was because the governing coalition at the time included the Northern League, which regards unification as an unmitigated disaster. And by then Italy was immersed in the deep economic crisis that had begun to swamp the eurozone two years earlier. Its modest anniversary celebrations were nevertheless taken by many, inside and outside the country, as further evidence that the work of nation building that started in the 1860s was far from complete.

  Italians tend to reinforce that notion. Most seem more eager to tell foreigners about the differences between them than their similarities. So, unsurprisingly, it is an idea that runs through much of the foreign writing on Italy: entire books are still being written around the view that Italy today is little more than a “geographical expression.”*

  As a geographical term, in fact, the word Italia is not all that useful, since it has been understood in different ways at different times. For the Romans, it meant only the peninsula. The Po Valley was regarded as part of Gaul. The idea that the entire area south of the Alps comprised a natural geographical territory seems to have taken shape only after the collapse of the Roman Empire and may have had something to do with the fact that the roads that the Romans had built through the mountains gradually fell into disrepair, limiting contact between Italy in the modern sense of the term and the rest of Europe.

  As outlined earlier, geography and history combined to divide the inhabitants of the territory that stretched down from the Alps to Sicily.* But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they regarded the people who invaded them from beyond the Alps or across the Mediterranean as being more foreign than other Italians. There were even moments when they felt a certain amount of mutual solidarity. When, for example, in the fourteenth century one Cola di Rienzo seized power in Rome and declared a republic, he convoked an assembly of representatives from all over “Italia.” Quite a few of the communes of the day sent delegates to speak on their behalf.

  Occasionally, moreover, the states that coexisted uneasily in what we now call Italy were able to see a common interest in banding together to overcome a foreign invader. Most of the city-states of northern Italy combined their forces to defeat Emperor Frederick I at the Battle of Legnano in 1176,* and just over three centuries later, in 1495, the Republic of Venice allied with the Duchies of Milan and Mantua to drive out the French king Charles VIII at the Battle of Fornovo. By then, an idea of Italy had taken shape in the minds of several Renaissance intellectuals. Machiavelli ended his greatest work, The Prince, with an appeal for a leader who could unite the Italians and liberate Italy “from the barbarians.”

  It was not, however, until the late eighteenth century that anything resembling an Italian nationalist ideology began to take shape. Even then, the idea of a united country seemed like an unrealizable dream until well into the nineteenth century. The great Piedmontese statesman Camillo Benso, the Count of Cavour, who was instrumental in bringing about Italian unification, never really believed in the idea and tried to undermine Garibaldi’s audacious expedition to Sicily, which brought the Mezzogiorno into the new state. Not that ordinary Italians were themselves much convinced: more than half the population abstained from Italy’s first general election in 1870.

  But that was then. And this is now. It seems to me that many Italians, and many of those who write about their country, fail to make a crucial distinction: between diversity and disunity. The two concepts are related, but different. The United States, for instance, is a country of immense diversity. But it is scarcely disunited. In the same way, Italy is hugely diverse—geographically, linguistically, ethnically and culturally. But that does not necessarily mean it is disunited.

  Italians, who as a nation tend to be quite self-absorbed* and not particularly inter
ested in what happens outside their frontiers, seem largely unaware of the considerable diversity—and disunity—to be found in other European countries. Unlike France and Spain, for example, Italy does not have a sizable minority like the Basques, whose language is not even Indo-European. Italians certainly have a tradition of parochialism. Many have a fervent attachment to their town or city, and there is even a special word in Italian to describe it: campanilismo, which derives from campanile, or “bell tower,” the bell tower of the church being historically the focal point of Italian communities. But the effect of campanilismo is to detract from the loyalty that might otherwise be felt toward a bigger territorial unit, such as a region, which in turn could form the basis for a movement in support of autonomy, or even independence. Since 1970, Italy has had a fair degree of regional self-government. Yet so far none of its regional administrations has served as a springboard for the promotion of a separatist movement, as has happened in Scotland and Catalonia.

  In the 1940s, a Sicilian independence movement took shape that had links to the Mafia. But it fizzled out after the Second World War. And while there has long been widespread support for an independent Sardinia, the island’s separatist movements remain hopelessly divided. The most important regional grouping in recent years has been the Northern League. But though from time to time its leaders play at being separatists, their real concern is with what they and their supporters perceive as the squandering of northern taxes in southern and central Italy. After the League was ravaged by the financial scandal that engulfed its founder, Umberto Bossi, and his family in 2012, there were signs of an emerging nationalism in Veneto that aimed not to invent Bossi’s ahistorical Padania, but to restore the old Venetian Republic, the Serenissima. It remains to be seen whether it will gain traction.

  In several ways, the Italy viewed from outside by foreigners is a more homogenous country than the one seen from inside by its inhabitants. However different Italians may be in other respects, perhaps the greatest similarity—the attitude they most often share—is a reliance on the family. It is probably most intense in Sicily and least so in the far north. But the difference is one of degree. The point was highlighted in a made-for-TV movie based on the life of Felice Maniero,1 the boss of the Mala del Brenta, an organized-crime syndicate active in Veneto in the 1980s and 1990s. There is a scene in which Maniero arrives to buy a consignment of drugs from the local representative of Cosa Nostra. He introduces the man with him as his cousin. The Sicilian observes wryly that, when it comes to money, even northerners like Maniero will trust only the members of their family. “You’re not really so different from us, are you?” he says.

  Because they take it for granted, Italians seldom notice that they are all—or almost all—brought up within a Catholic culture. That does not mean they all go on to become observant Catholics. But even the atheists among them absorb a wide range of common attitudes and assumptions. Compare that with, for example, the deep historic rifts between Catholics and Protestants in Germany and the Low Countries.

  Nor do Italians remark on the fact that the vast majority of children in their country have the same education. More than 80 percent attend state schools. Of the remainder, all but a handful go to schools run by the Catholic Church. And since, on average, the educational standards of the public sector are higher than those in the private sector, Italy does not have to contend with the sort of insidious social division that exists in Britain between the mass of the population and a privately schooled elite.

  Language remains divisive, to be sure. But not to anything like the same extent as was once the case. It is likely that, at the time of unification, less than one Italian in ten could speak the literary tongue based on the dialect of Tuscany that was adopted as the country’s official language. Even the new state’s first monarch, Vittorio Emanuele, had difficulty speaking it fluently. Over the years that followed, compulsory military service did much to spread a working knowledge of standard Italian, as did the movement of millions of Italians who left their homes in the south to travel to the north during the years of the “economic miracle” and thereafter, when internal migration resumed in the late 1960s; it has been calculated that by 1972 more than nine million people had moved from one region to another. One of the consequences was marriages between men and women from different parts of the country, and in a family in which, say, the wife was from Puglia and the husband from Piedmont, the common language was highly likely to be Italian.

  Even so, by the early 1980s less than 30 percent of the population spoke only, or predominantly, the national language. Since then the figure has risen steadily, largely because of television. A study published by Istat in 2007 found that it had reached 46 percent. And there were striking differences according to age that suggested that the proportion of habitual Italian speakers was almost certain to continue rising; among people under the age of twenty-four, it was almost 60 percent.

  Every so often, there is a reminder of how many Italians still converse in dialect. Not long ago, the judges chose a Miss Italia who came from a rural area of Calabria. In her first encounter with the media after her victory, she demonstrated all too clearly that her Italian left much to be desired. But the amused and slightly disparaging way in which her mistakes were reported made an important point: that the use of dialect is regarded in most parts of Italy today as a sign of lack of education, something to be slightly embarrassed about. So far at least, there is no sign that any of the dialects or languages of Italy (with the possible exceptions of Sardu and Venetian) could form the basis for an effective independence movement.

  Another variation on the “no such thing as Italy” argument has it that, despite internal migration, Italy continues to suffer from a vast disparity in wealth between north and south—and, what is more, one that is widening. History has indeed divided the Mezzogiorno from the rest of the country politically and socially. Historians are still wrangling over whether the south has always—or at least since Roman times—been poorer than the north. But what is certain is that Sicily, Amalfi, Salerno and Naples all enjoyed moments of splendor in the Middle Ages. The world’s first medical school was established in Salerno, perhaps as early as the ninth century.* The world’s oldest public university is in Naples; it was founded in 1224 by Frederick II and still bears his name today. In later centuries Naples had periods of great affluence and influence, particularly in the setting of Europe-wide trends in fashion and cuisine. For a time, it was the continent’s second-largest city after Paris. The first railway line to be built in Italy, in the early nineteenth century, did not run along the Po Valley but through the Mezzogiorno. By the time of unification, Naples was the most industrialized city in Italy. Most of the evidence nevertheless suggests that the south was still poorer than the rest of the country (though not much poorer than the Papal States, or indeed Tuscany).

  What is clear is that unification did anything but help. The early, Piedmontese-led governments imposed higher taxes and seized Church lands, sparking an insurgency that the authorities dismissed as brigandage. By the mid-1860s, there were a hundred thousand Italian troops struggling to keep the peace in the Mezzogiorno. Palermo was bombarded into submission by the navy. In the decade that followed unification, almost ten thousand people were sentenced to death in the south. The northerners not only imposed their laws but wrecked the emerging industries of the Mezzogiorno by lifting the protectionist measures that had shielded them from competition under the Bourbons.* It is quite possible that if the south had remained independent, it would be richer today than it is.

  Whether there would have been less inequality among southerners is another matter. Though the prosperity of the Mezzogiorno as a whole may at times have rivaled that of the north, there seems always to have been evidence of immense disparities in wealth as far back as Roman times, when the southern countryside was a patchwork of latifundia, vast landed estates worked by slaves. Poverty deepened in the rural Mezzogiorno in the eighteenth
century when landowners, in a movement that had parallels elsewhere in Europe, grabbed much of the common land. The peasantry never forgot or forgave the expropriations, and the recovery of what they believed was theirs was a constant theme in the rural uprisings that erupted at intervals in the centuries that followed.

  The poverty of the rural south was the driving force behind the emigration from the mainland Mezzogiorno and Sicily that began in the 1880s. In the years that followed, millions of southerners flooded across the Atlantic to begin new lives in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere. Strict immigration laws in the United States and depressed economic conditions in much of Latin America contrived to keep Italians at home during the Fascist era. But in the postwar period more than a million departed. This was when many Calabrians in particular emigrated to Australia and Canada.

  By then, however, the Italian authorities were making genuine efforts to tackle the “Mezzogiorno question.” There were some clumsy and only partially successful attempts at land reform in the late 1940s. But a fund for public investment in the south, the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, was founded in 1950, and as the economy recovered from the devastation of war, private investors became increasingly keen to sink money into an area that offered lower wage costs than the north. That, however, was an indication of the continuing deprivation in the Mezzogiorno. As late as 1973, Naples was hit by an outbreak of cholera, a disease caused by poor sanitation and associated with what in those days was called the third world. When Italy equipped itself with a comprehensive welfare system, many of the benefits flowed to the south and pensions, notably for disabilities, were often given—or fraudulently obtained—as a way of saving the beneficiaries from destitution rather than in response to genuine disability or other qualifying circumstances.