The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  Partisans and other party militants hoped the end of the war would leave them in a position to seize power and carry out a revolution – as their comrades in Yugoslavia were doing just across the border. They were thus dismayed by the cautiousness of their leadership. Palmiro Togliatti, a stalinist and former functionary of the Comintern, was a realist who guessed that the British and Americans would not allow a country to go communist just after they had taken the trouble to liberate it. Italy was not like eastern Europe; it was more like Greece, where communist guerrillas were in the process of being defeated by royalist forces that had British and later American help. Togliatti was convinced that, in order to survive, communist parties in western Europe had to adopt the Popular Front strategy of alliances with the democratic Left that the Comintern had promoted in the mid-1930s. What he called ‘the Italian road to socialism’ would be one that led first to national unity and only later, when the time was right, to socialism. In his new identity as conciliator he accepted the monarchy until its demise and also the place of the Church in national life. He got very little in return except for a short spell as a minister before De Gasperi expelled him and his party from the government in 1947.

  The Italian road to socialism might be leading to an unhappy destination – that of permanent opposition – but at the time it proved attractive to millions of voters who flocked to communist festivals and enjoyed the amenities of the case del popolo, the ‘people’s clubs’. The Communist Party was especially strong in areas of the former Papal States, in which misgovernment had fostered a strong tradition of anti-clericalism. By 1976 it had nearly half a million members in a single region, Emilia-Romagna, and in two of the most prosperous provinces in the country, Bologna and Modena, nearly half the votes in local elections regularly went to the communists. Although excluded from national power in Rome, the party dominated the ‘Red Belt’ (Tuscany, Umbria and Emilia-Romagna), controlling both municipalities and regional governments. The towers of San Gimignano overlooked one of the few towns in the world that voluntarily gave nearly two-thirds of its votes to a communist party. Visitors to Bologna were impressed by the communists’ administration of the city, by the hospitals and public transport, and by the absence of that drabness and bureaucracy associated with Eastern Europe. In Emilia and Tuscany it was easy to get the impression that Italian communists were different from other communists, that they were harmless social democrats who enjoyed their pasta and salami and ran their cities with admirable efficiency.

  Yet they were not social democrats: if they had been, they could have joined the socialist or social democratic parties. The PCI revered Stalin and remained unctuously attached to the Soviet Union for many years. On the death of the Russian dictator in 1953, its newspaper hailed ‘the man who [had] done most for the liberation of the human race’. Party intellectuals, who must have known the truth, were especially servile in their praise for the achievements of the Soviet Union: one of them, Mario Alicata, a former fascist, went to Russia and described it in 1952 as ‘the first country in the history of the world in which all men are finally free’.11 In 1956 the Italian communists supported the Russian invasion of Hungary and refused to break publicly with the Soviet Union even when later they criticized its policies in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Afghanistan. The leaders felt the need to balance criticism with ‘fraternal’ messages of support for the principles of the Bolshevik Revolution; they also seem to have feared that a real break would have led to a schism within their own party and the creation of a rump of hardliners financially backed by the Kremlin.

  The communist leader from 1972 until his death in 1984 was Enrico Berlinguer, a Sardinian of clear integrity and intelligence. Like Togliatti, he put national unity before other priorities and believed that it could be achieved in Italy only through a partnership, or at least a compromise, between Catholics and communists. He himself embodied this approach not only in his ideas but also in his life, for his family was of noble origin, his wife was religious, and his children were brought up as Catholics. Under his leadership the party’s electoral popularity increased, and many people believed it might displace the christian democrats as the largest force in parliament after the elections of 1976. Like Santiago Carrillo in Spain, Berlinguer epitomized the idea of ‘Eurocommunism’, a somewhat nebulous term suggesting a more modern and moderate form of the ideology, one that was more democratic, more independent of the Soviet Union and more inclined to cooperate with non-marxist parties. Yet he was nervous of coming to power in a left-wing coalition because he feared it would provoke a civil war or a right-wing coup or even some kind of intervention from the United States. Perhaps he was too cautious. In any case, as soon as Chile’s left-wing government was overthrown in 1973 in a coup that ended the life as well as the regime of Salvador Allende, he offered the christian democrats what he called ‘an historic compromise’. At the beginning he envisaged that the communists would cooperate with the government and help deal with the post-1973 economic crisis but later, he hoped, they would receive tangible benefits in the shape of social reforms and ministerial posts. In his quest for conservative approval, Berlinguer even declared that Italy should remain in NATO and announced that his party opposed any extension of public ownership, a statement that put Italian communists to the right of French socialists and the British Labour Party.

  The communists’ attempt to join the government failed chiefly because few christian democrats were interested in the idea of an historic compromise. Aldo Moro, prime minister from 1974 to 1976, was one of the few but he was a procrastinator who kept begging the communists to be patient while he ‘educated’ his own party’s right wing. His successor, Giulio Andreotti, was another delayer, keen to have Berlinguer and his colleagues support the unpopular measures of his unpopular government while giving them nothing in return. Moro, however, remained their best hope, and he was close to making them formal partners in the parliamentary majority when, in the spring of 1978, he was kidnapped and later murdered by the revolutionary Red Brigades, whose aim was to sabotage the chances of the historic compromise, an ambition they duly achieved.

  Terrorism was a tactic used by groups on the extreme Right as well as the extreme Left, and some 500 people were killed by it in the two decades after 1969. Fascists committed the more spectacular atrocities, such as the bomb in Bologna’s train station in 1980 that killed eighty-five people, while left-wing terrorists carried out a selective campaign of assassination and kidnappings of industrialists, politicians, lawyers and journalists. Curiously, both sets of terrorists had a similar objective: they hoped that, by creating tension and destabilizing the state, they could provoke a military takeover and the installation of a regime that the Right would love and protect and the Left would loathe and overthrow. Both were trying to take the country back to the conditions of 1920–22, yet neither of them enjoyed popular support. ‘Front Line’, ‘Workers’ Power’, the Red Brigades and similar groups claimed to be taking ‘proletarian action’, but their members were middle-class students and intellectuals playing fatally at being Che Guevara. Over the years they were defeated by a patient and intelligent police campaign led by a general of the carabinieri, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.

  Left-wing terrorists were contemptuous of the Communist Party, which had long renounced its revolutionary pretensions. Even in 1968 party leaders had criticized the student revolt, and by 1974 they seemed to have abandoned socialism altogether: Berlinguer was offering his supporters nothing more than the prospect of ‘implementing measures and guidelines that are in some respects of a socialist type’.12 After the elections of 1979, when the communists lost an eighth of their 1976 vote, even Berlinguer realized that his pursuit of the historic compromise, however laudable as a sentiment, had been a mistake and a failure. In elections to the European parliament in 1984 the communists received, for the first and only time, slightly more votes than the christian democrats. Yet commentators recognized that this was not a sign of resurgence. It was more in the
nature of a sympathy vote, a consequence of the death six days before the poll of the most respected man in Italian politics, Enrico Berlinguer.

  The 1980s were the decade of the pentapartito, government by a coalition of five parties – the christian democrats, the social democrats, the socialists, the republicans and the liberals. For the four middle years of the decade, the DC relinquished the premiership and allowed it to go to the leader of the Socialist Party, Bettino Craxi, a man who had little in common with earlier Italian socialists. He was a leader, he understood power, he preferred government to opposition and he liked and admired wealth; he made friends with both Ronald Reagan and Silvio Berlusconi, the Milanese businessman, who asked him to become the godfather of his son. Many of Craxi’s subordinates also discarded their socialism and became notorious for their taste for fast cars, smart nightclubs and luxurious holidays. Their party soon became regarded as the most corrupt in Italy.

  In the meantime the communists grew increasingly irrelevant. They supported Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies in the Soviet Union and hoped that some kind of reformed and democratic communism would survive. Yet their support was being eroded at home both by the decline of the traditional working class and by the visible fragility of their ideological raison d’être. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 signalled the end of the Communist Party in Italy, but its half-century of influence had not been wholly negative and unproductive. Although it had been excluded from power in Rome, the party had run local governments and, from Togliatti to Berlinguer, it had played a stabilizing role in the life of the nation. Its influence was especially clear in Italian culture, which it dominated for decades after 1944. Italy naturally had a conservative culture as well, a largely anti-communist press and many non-marxist publishers; Feltrinelli, itself a left-wing publishing house, achieved success through the publication of two very unrevolutionary novels, Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago and Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Yet cultural glamour belonged to the communists: they had the support of the celebrities, of most of the artists and writers and directors who were famous and revered both in Italy and abroad.

  In 1947 Pier Paolo Pasolini declared that only communism could provide ‘a new culture’ for Italy, a view with which thousands of people in the arts, especially those in literature and the cinema, agreed. It became axiomatic that a serious director had to be ‘engaged’ in political issues, that he had to have impegno (commitment), that his films had to take political sides and make ideological statements. Marxism and the Resistance had fused to create a left-wing Zeitgeist, and many artists found life simpler if they joined the Communist Party or at least became fellow travellers.

  ‘Neo-realism’ was an obligatory first phase for post-war directors who wished to be taken seriously, and some fine films resulted from it, such as Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) by Vittorio De Sica or La terra trema by Luchino Visconti, who was the champion of neo-realism until decadence became a more appealing theme. The products of this genre are usually gritty, worthy and well made, shot on the street often with non-professional actors. Yet they are also humourless, comfortless and unglamorous, and they were not very popular with Italians. Working-class people understandably found it more diverting to watch John Wayne fighting ‘Red Indians’ or Charlie Chaplin outwitting huge bullies than to see themselves represented as exploited fishermen in Sicily or Romans so poor that they could not afford a bicycle. Yet neo-realism continued, alongside brighter genres, for decades. In 1978 Ermanno Olmi directed one of the longest and bleakest of all films about the misery of peasant life, L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs). It begins with scenes of warm-hearted rustic life in Lombardy in the nineteenth century: the peasants are trying to make the best of a hard existence, singing as they tear the husks off the corn-cobs and sitting together in the evenings, the men telling stories and the women knitting and saying prayers. But the central story recounts the tribulations of a hard-working peasant, who is persuaded by the local priest to send his clever son to school; as the little boy’s shoes are broken – and he has a long way to walk – the father cuts down a small tree to make him some clogs, the landowner notices the stump, and as a result the entire family is evicted. Olmi’s political message could not be clearer: rural Italy was divided between pure and good-hearted peasants and brutal and rapacious landlords.‡

  One era of Italian cinema is often said to have ended with Mussolini, and another, largely unrelated, to have succeeded it in 1944. Naturally it did not happen in quite this way: like other Italians, film directors changed their spots, and the creators of fascist films mutated into makers of committed, left-wing, neo-realist cinema. One of them, Carmine Gallone, was briefly ostracized for his work under the dictatorship but redeemed himself with a film about the opera Tosca set in nazi-occupied Rome.13 Others escaped ostracism. Roberto Rossellini had been a friend of Mussolini’s children and the director of three war films known as his ‘fascist trilogy’. Yet in 1945 he reinvented himself as an anti-fascist by making the famous Resistance film, Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City). This is a work that realistically and evocatively conveys the atmosphere at the end of the German occupation, but it is also a work of distortion and propaganda. The only bad people in Rossellini’s film are oafish German soldiers under the command of an effetely sadistic officer. The Italians are nearly all good, high-minded folk who make sacrifices in expiation for the fascist aberration. The new Italy rising from the ashes is represented by a stoic priest, an indomitable partisan and a compassionate working-class woman, who are respectively executed, tortured to death and shot by the nazis. Neither of the two men blink or shake or show the slightest sign of nervousness, even when they know they are about to be tortured or shot. Their deaths symbolize the rebirth of the nation, their Christian resignation heralding a resurrection of its people.

  Another, much later, work that combined neo-realism with political propaganda was Novecento (1900), a film made for international audiences in 1976 by Bernardo Bertolucci, a young but already famous director whose previous film had been Last Tango in Paris. The beauty of both the photography and the music – a typically haunting score by Ennio Morricone – is undoubted, but the work is dominated by the politics of the director, one of the Communist Party’s celebrities, a man who made no secret of his belief in ‘the victory of the masses’.14 In his film the entire history of the inter-war years is reduced to a Manichaean struggle between a small number of ugly fascist bullies and a multitude of handsome, down-trodden and noble-hearted peasants.

  It opens with a scene in the Emilian countryside on Liberation Day 1945. The peasants are up in arms – the men grabbing rifles, the women wielding pitchforks – and are hunting down the local fascist leader, a brute played by Donald Sutherland, suitably sinister in a bald wig and suitably named Attila. Eventually they capture him, together with his sadistic wife, and are on the point of killing him when the scene stops and the film goes back to the beginning of the century. We have to wait five hours, until the end of Part Two, before we observe his end.

  We are now in 1901, on the day of Verdi’s death, and the film is appropriately shot near the banks of the River Po, close to the composer’s home, with many of the extras gathered from Roncole and Busseto. The early scenes are almost uplifting. Peasants with austerely noble faces toil in the fields and sometimes take time off to dance under the poplar trees; the sense of camaraderie is ubiquitous and even shared by the old landowner, an eccentric aristocrat played by Burt Lancaster, who feels a sense of obligation to his employees. Yet soon the action advances a few years, and it becomes clear that matters have deteriorated. Burt is dead, his inheritance grabbed fraudulently by an appalling younger son, and the peasants, now enrolled in the Socialist Party, are on strike with red flags flying, while an ancient accordionist, dressed symbolically in a Russian smock, strolls along a railway platform playing the ‘Internationale’.

  Things get even worse after the next skip, which takes us to the end of the First World War.
A peasant woman’s bastard son, who was born in an early scene, has now grown up to become Gérard Depardieu, acting very poorly as a demobbed soldier transformed into an heroic socialist with the assistance of his girlfriend, a young marxist teacher. An agricultural crisis is upon us, and the evictions of peasants have begun, cartloads of families with their pitiful possessions traversing the countryside along paths beside the river. When some peasants refuse to be evicted, Depardieu and the schoolteacher organize defiance by persuading the women to lie down in front of a cavalry charge aborted only at the last moment by a relatively humane officer. All this is happening, somewhat surreally, in full view of the ghastly landowner and his equally repellent friends who, clad in fur coats, are shooting duck from boats on adjacent canals. Disgusted by the withdrawal of the mounted troops, one of the duck-shooters fires both barrels of his shotgun at the peasants. He and his fellow sportsmen then retire to a church in which, having realized that the liberal government is not going to suppress the socialists, they give money to Attila to establish a branch of Mussolini’s fasci di combattimento. There are only two dissenters, one of them played by Robert De Niro (the landowner’s son), who has spent part of the duck shoot masturbating his insatiable cousin Regina (Attila’s future wife) with the butt of his shotgun. His role is to spend the rest of the film as the weak, cowardly, non-fascist aristocrat who allows himself to be manipulated by the fascists.

  Soon a drunken band of Mussolini’s thugs appear, brandishing clubs and lurching about in a lorry. After they have burned down a casa del popolo, killing some pensioners, Depardieu drags the charred corpses around in a cart; a vast crowd of mourners in red scarves unexpectedly gathers – perhaps they are not real – and a band plays the ‘Internationale’. The camera shifts back to the fascists, some of them lounging in a bar while others are at a tailor’s, watching Donald Sutherland trying on a black shirt and urging his followers to buy one too. Snarling demonically, he is suddenly inspired to demonstrate his virility by head-butting a cat, screaming as he kills it that this is the way to treat communists.§ In Part Two of the film his Attila becomes even more revolting. The director evidently thinks that a fascist cannot be simply a fascist: he must also be a sadist, a paedophile, a pervert and a murderer. In a moment of pederastic delirium, Attila kills a young boy and blames the murder first on Depardieu, who is duly beaten up by his fascists, and then on a wandering simpleton, who is carted off to prison as a result. Next, Attila murders a widow and impales her on her railings and soon, after angry workers have pelted him with horse manure, he carries out a general massacre of peasants in the estate farmyard. Eventually (and far too late), blue skies arrive along with liberation, and Sutherland is captured and shot in a graveyard.