by John Hooper
*The late Giulio Andreotti, a former Christian Democrat prime minister who wielded a vote in the upper house as a senator for life, cast the decisive ballot in a no-confidence vote. According to one version, Andreotti, arguably the Vatican’s most loyal friend in Italian politics, was given his instructions by an envoy from across the Tiber early one morning at Mass in a church in the center of Rome.
*In 1987 the Italian government claimed that Italy’s GDP had overtaken that of Britain in absolute terms—an event that came to be known as il sorpasso (“the overtaking”). Some economists challenged the claim at the time, but the dispute over the authenticity of the sorpasso gradually lost relevance as it became clear that Italy had fallen back in relative terms. By 2011, almost twenty-five years later, Italy’s GDP per capita at purchasing power parity as calculated by the International Monetary Fund was 16 percent lower than that of the UK.
*See here.
*Giovanni was later made a cardinal—at the age of sixteen. He died of malaria two years later.
*A member of a uniquely Italian profession whose practitioners combine some of the attributes of surveyors and architects, but without having to attain anything like the same educational qualifications. If you have ever wondered why, in a country renowned for its beautiful architecture, there are so many hideous modern buildings on the outskirts of towns, it is because in many instances their design was entrusted to a geometra.
*The colloquial term for the intelligence services, both military and civilian.
*“Favorite team” is the only—but hopelessly inadequate—translation into English of squadra del cuore. It does not even begin to convey the passion, anguish and blind, unquestioning loyalty that is wrapped into the Italian term, which translates literally as “team of the heart.”
*In a different context stare insieme means “to go steady.”
*See below, Chapter 16.
*If you have ever wondered why the national sporting representatives of a country with a red, white and green flag all wear blue, there is a reason: it is the color of the House of Savoy, which provided Italy with its kings until after the Second World War. Italy’s footballers wore blue shirts for the first time for a game against Hungary in 1911. Even after Italy became a republic, the azzurro uniform remained.
*Literally meaning “small shield,” the term refers to the league championship. The winners acquire the right to wear on their shirts a little shield bearing the Italian colors throughout the following season.
*The top division in the league—and another of Fascism’s contributions to Italian football—it was inaugurated in 1929.
*A petiole is the stalk that attaches a leaf to a stem. I leave it to the botanists among my readers to judge whether it can also be used in the context of fruit—or whether Brera was just using an obscure term because that was what was expected of him.
*See here.
*A latecomer to the league, AS Roma was formed in 1927 by the merger of three existing teams. The capital had a special significance for the Fascists because it was the center of the empire they sought to emulate. It was felt its soccer team ought to be worthy of the heirs of the Caesars—an example of the way that politics and football entwine in Italy.
*The final s is correct. The term came from French.
*A rare exception, who inspired pride, respect and even a degree of affection among fans, was the charismatic, shaven-headed Pierluigi Collina, who refereed the 2002 World Cup final.
*In honor of Tangentopoli, or “Bribesville,” the name given to the slew of scandals that led to the fall of Italy’s political order in the early 1990s.
*See here.
*Calciopoli gave rise to two sets of criminal proceedings. In the first, Moggi and his son were accused of duress and attempted duress respectively. They were found guilty at both the trial and appeal stages, and received prison sentences. But in 2014 a statute of limitations quashed the charges against them. The second case, involving charges including conspiracy, had not run its course at the time of writing. After the first of two appeals, Moggi faced a sentence of two years and four months; the former managing director of Juventus, Antonio Giraudo, risked a sentence of one year and eight months. Five other ex-officials and referees faced sentences of between ten months and two years. However, because of a retrospective pardon enacted in 2006, it was highly unlikely that any of the defendants, who denied wrongdoing, would see the inside of a prison cell.
*The Vatican’s condemnation was lifted in 1904, but only after it decided that Socialism represented an even greater danger.
*See here.
*See here.
*Hereafter, a capital M is used to designate the original, Sicilian Mafia, while a lower case m will be used to refer to Italian organized-crime syndicates in general.
*In the early 1990s, the ’Ndrangheta helped create the Basilischi, an alliance involving members of the ’Ndrangheta and small groups of gangsters in the Basilicata region. Major police operations were launched against this “fifth mafia” and the threat posed by the organization is thought to have since receded, though not to have disappeared.
*Messina, Ragusa and Siracusa have always been largely mob-free.
*In 2013 Grasso went into politics and became speaker of the Senate.
*See above, Chapter 13.
*Onore in this context does not really translate as “honor” in the sense that that term is understood nowadays in English. The meaning is closer to “respect.”
*In recent decades, a school of revisionist historians has argued that the history of the south has been distorted by being viewed largely through northern eyes. Some have stressed the relative prosperity of parts of the Bourbon Mezzogiorno and the marginalization of the region after unification.
*It also meant “grandson.” The Italian nipote has the same dual meaning.
*Mopeds. But the term is often applied to scooters as well.
*Known charmingly in Italian as a centauro, or centaur.
*See above, Chapter 8.
*I stress “most.” Very broadly speaking, rule breaking diminishes as you head north. There are towns in places like Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont where the population is as law-abiding as anywhere in Scandinavia.
*With a fine literary—or is it biblical?—flourish, a condono that buries an infraction for good is known as a condono tombale.
*Overbearing, authoritarian fathers. Padre padrone is the title of an autobiographical work by Gavino Ledda, the son of just such a parent. His father, a Sardinian shepherd, removed him from school before he could learn to read and write, and kept him in check with savage beatings. By dint of sheer determination, Ledda provided himself with an education. After graduating from university, he returned to Sardinia as an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Cagliari. His story, published in 1975, was made into a film of the same title by the Taviani brothers.
*Known by the name of cronaca nera. The news in Italian newspapers, apart from sports, business and foreign news, is divided between two sections. One is politica (which also includes news about the Vatican); the other is cronaca, which takes in everything else. Reporters who do not cover the police and courts form a subsection known as cronaca bianca.
*Berlusconi himself has never made the distinction, and was still describing his left-wing opponents as comunisti almost a quarter of a century after their predecessors had forsaken Marxism.
*He was acquitted of bribing the revenue guards. The other accusations gave rise to two trials. One was cut short by a statute of limitations. The other had to be abandoned after Berlusconi’s own government changed the law on false accounting.
*See here.
*The contemptuous description applied to Italy in the early nineteenth century by the then Austrian chancellor Prince Klemens von Metternich.
*See above, Chapter 1.
*The battle has been made a central part of the nationalist mythology created by the Northern League, which depicts it as an example of “Padanians” uniting to drive out the hated Germanic interloper. This is more than a little inconsistent with the rest of the League’s reading of history, according to which the Padanians are ethnically separate from other Italians, being descended from the Lombards, who were, well, Germanic invaders.
*In 2005, Corriere della Sera reported the discovery by NASA of an asteroid named Apophis that was on course to collide with the earth later this century. The headline was: “2036, un asteroide contro l’Italia” (“2036 is an asteroid [directed] against Italy”).
*One of its most distinguished teachers was a woman, Trotula, believed to have been the author of the first treatise on gynecology, published around the year 1100.
*It is therefore ironic that the pejorative term used by northerners in reference to southerners should be terrone, which derives from terra (earth) and equates very approximately to “yokel.”
*Only those born after 1947 qualify for descent through the maternal line.
*Romania became a member state in 2007. But under transitional arrangements, its citizens did not acquire an automatic right to work in Italy until 2012. It was at around the time that Romania entered the EU that the term immigrati began to replace extracomunitari, perhaps because it could be used to encompass the Romanians and preserve their “otherness.”
*See here.
*Balotelli was born in Palermo to parents from Ghana. His parents moved to Lombardy, where at the age of three he was adopted by a Jewish Italian family whose name he later took.
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