Until the 1970s many people in Sicily continued to deny the existence of the Mafia. One cardinal-archbishop claimed it was an invention of the Communist Party, while his successor shrugged it off with the astonishing observation that it killed fewer people than abortions. Yet soon the revelations of pentiti, penitent mafiosi who gave evidence against former colleagues, proved that it was – or at any rate had now become – a highly structured and organized entity. Gone were the old-style provincial bosses who, inviolate in their strongholds, had dispensed favours, arranged killings and managed protection rackets from a café in their home piazza. Their replacements were less visible and more violent, men who moved into the cities and made millions in the building industry and even more millions in the narcotics trade; in the 1970s Palermo became the global capital of the heroin market. The most ruthless of these new men belonged to the Corleone clan, which gained a spurious glamour in foreign imaginations because it shared the surname of the characters in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, which in the films based upon the story were played by Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. Yet it is hard to think of many people less resembling Robert De Niro than Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina, the squat psychopath and principal boss of the 1980s, or his henchman Giovanni Brusca, who admitted to murdering ‘many more than one hundred but less than two hundred people’.22
At the beginning of the 1980s the corleonesi exterminated their rivals and in the same period declared war on the nation. Until then, the Mafia had been careful not to target members of the Italian ‘establishment’. Now, under Riina, it reversed direction and chose to challenge the state by assassinating policemen, politicians, journalists and magistrates. Their victims – known collectively as ‘the eminent corpses’ – included the president of the Sicilian regional government, the chief prosecutor in Palermo, the communist leader in Sicily and the christian democratic leader in Palermo, a man whose father had protected the Mafia as a minister in Rome but who himself was bravely trying to detach the DC from the criminals. Despite the outrage of many islanders, there was woefully little response from the christian democrats who, while doubtless disapproving of the murders, did not dare to break with the Mafia. It was not until 1982 and the most audacious killing of all – that of the police general Dalla Chiesa, vanquisher of the Red Brigades and newly appointed prefect of Palermo – that the ruling coalition made any serious response. One consequence of the murder was a law criminalizing ‘associazione mafiosa’, a phrase difficult to define and an offence even more difficult to prove, but it enabled the courts to convict Ciancimino and several other politicians later on. In 2003 a court in Palermo accepted that even Andreotti was guilty of Mafia associations but judged that these had taken place too long ago for that octogenarian politician to be imprisoned now.
Another consequence of Dalla Chiesa’s killing was the establishment of a pool of deft and dedicated magistrates in Palermo who, armed with the evidence of numerous pentiti, were able to round up hundreds of suspected mafiosi. At the end of 1987, after a ‘maxi-trial’ in Palermo that had lasted nearly two years, some 350 suspects were convicted and sent to prison. The guilty men were not too concerned about this because they knew that under Italian law they still had two chances of getting off, both in the appeal court and in the Supreme Court, the Court of Cassation. At the appeal stage they had the good fortune to come up against a judge notorious for acquitting mafiosi on technicalities and who himself was later charged with associazione mafiosa. Many of them were duly released and remained confident of equally benign treatment when their cases came up for review in the Supreme Court. They thought that Salvo Lima would fix the trial, that the presiding judge would be on their side, that ultimately Andreotti would protect them from having to serve their sentences. They were wrong and, when many of the original verdicts were upheld, they responded predictably with vengeance. One of their first victims was Lima, their ‘friend’ for over thirty years, who was murdered both as a reprisal for his failure to protect them and as a warning to Andreotti and the christian democrats that they too were in danger. Next, they targeted the magistrates who had caught them, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, men who had grown up with mafiosi in the Kalsa district of Palermo and who knew how greatly they were risking their lives when they took up the challenge. Italians were convulsed by the murders in 1992 of these heroic figures – and their wives and their police escorts – and some declared themselves ashamed of being Italian. Reactions were so strong that the state was goaded into taking sustained action; even the Polish pope, John Paul II, who had been reticent for too long, condemned the Mafia while on a pastoral visit to Sicily in 1993. Over the next three years thousands of mafiosi were arrested, including the ineffable Riina, and the murder rate dropped dramatically. For the only time in the history of the Italian republic, it seemed that the Mafia might be defeated.
The Mafia in Sicily had gained the reputation of being a uniquely brutal, secret and effective organization of criminals. In fact there were others in southern Italy with rival qualifications. Calabria had the ’Ndrangheta, which was equally ruthless, and Apulia had the Sacra Corona Unita (United Sacred Crown), against which magistrates in Bari fought with some degree of success. The most powerful of all was the Neapolitan Camorra which, like the Mafia, had close connections with the christian democrats. One of its ‘friends’ was Antonio Gava, who was known as the ‘viceroy of Naples’ and who in the 1980s was appointed to several ministerial posts in Rome, including minister of the interior, the man supposed to be in charge of fighting organized crime; he subsequently spent thirteen years trying – ultimately with success – to clear himself of the charge of associazione mafiosa. At the time the Camorra rivalled the Mafia in the scale of its violence, the two between them murdering on average over 500 people a year, but it later overtook its Sicilian equivalent in size, wealth, killings and corruption. In the thirteen years after 1991 seventy-one municipalities in Campania were dissolved because they were being run by gangs of the Camorra. In the twenty-six years up to 2005, ‘the system’ – as its members liked to call it – murdered 3,600 people.23
The Italian state had helped make its citizens prosperous but it had failed to provide them with security or to protect the lives of its officials. Politics, prosperity and corruption seemed to mix very easily – and not only near the tentacles of the Mafia and the Camorra. In the late 1970s corruption brought about the resignation of a president of the republic (Giovanni Leone) and the imprisonment of a former minister for defence (Mario Tanassi), and in the following decade the disease became endemic in the parties of the governing coalition. As magistrates soon discovered, building and other business contracts were being awarded only to those companies prepared to pay bribes to the politicians who were awarding them.
In February 1992 a prominent Milanese socialist was caught red-handed receiving a bribe from a company that did the cleaning at a geriatric hospital administered by himself. Taken into custody, he stayed silent for a while until, finding himself reviled by his party leaders, he was persuaded to answer questions put by local magistrates. It soon became clear that this was not an isolated case but a piece of a vast, rambling and seemingly infinite jigsaw puzzle of corruption. The chief prosecutor of Milan decided to investigate the alleged crimes and put together an effective team of magistrates,** men whose detective work and interrogation skills persuaded many of the guilty to confess. Their investigations, known as the ‘mani pulite’ (‘Clean Hands’) campaign, found hundreds of people from the government coalition guilty of receiving bribes and putting the money into their parties’ coffers and, in many cases, their own pockets.
The scandal engulfed and destroyed the political system of the previous half-century. Over the sixteen years of Craxi’s reign as their leader, the socialists had already acquired a reputation as Italy’s most dishonest party, and the magistrates’ investigations now confirmed it. Craxi himself brazenly denied the many charges of corruption against himself but, on realizing a conv
iction was inevitable, he fled to his villa in Tunisia, never to return. He was declared a fugitive of justice and sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison; meanwhile his deputy went to jail, and his party disappeared. Other parties, also guilty of corruption, disbanded or simply disintegrated. The christian democrats dissolved their party in 1994, although many of them refused to accept that their political lives were over. Whatever future they might still have made together was sabotaged, however, by internal divisions, and their members were soon dispersing in different directions, some to the neo-fascists, some to new formations and others to a Centre-Left coalition known as ‘the Olive Tree’; one independent group tried for years to make itself a pivotal force at the centre of politics but never quite succeeded in doing so.
As well as rejecting their discredited politicians, Italians also condemned the process that had produced them. Fed up with proportional representation, a system that had immobilized politics and kept the same party in power, they voted in a referendum in 1993 for something more like Westminster. As the appropriate legislation proceeded through parliament, the Governor of the Bank of Italy, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, was appointed prime minister to take care of the economy. By the time he resigned, a few months later, Italy had a new system: the Chamber of Deputies would have just one-quarter of its members elected by proportional representation and the rest by a ‘first-past-the-post’ system in single-member constituencies.
13
Modern Italy
CENTRIFUGAL ITALY
United Italy had begun its life designed as a centralized state by Camillo Benso di Cavour, and it had become more centripetal during the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. Yet after the Second World War many of the constitution-makers wondered whether Cattaneo might have been right and Cavour wrong on the issue of federation; they also wondered whether fascism might have been more difficult to establish in 1922 had the administration been less centralized. Aware that a certain degree of federalism could be justified by Italy’s historical traditions, they therefore divided Italy into regions, five of which were to be considered ‘special’ and granted a substantial measure of autonomy. Sicily, Sardinia, Val d’Aosta and Trentino-Alto Adige all became autonomous regions in 1948, with Friuli-Venezia Giulia following in 1963 after various problems with Yugoslavia had been resolved.
The government’s reasons for giving these places their own executives and legislatures were practical and pragmatic. Autonomy was an attempt – a largely successful one – to neutralize separatist demands, which were especially strong in Sicily, and to defuse tensions in those northern regions where large numbers of people did not regard themselves as Italians and spoke French, German and Slovene as their first languages. After 1948, however, enthusiasm for regional plans waned, partly because the christian democrats were reluctant to see a great belt of central Italy run by communist councils in Florence, Perugia and Bologna. The ‘ordinary’ regions came into existence only in 1970, when they elected their first assemblies, and they then proved something of a disappointment. While most Italians were happy to be dealing with councillors who were aware of local issues, they were sometimes frustrated with both the poor quality of their new administrators and the limits set on their autonomy, which was much more restricted in the ordinary regions than in the islands and the linguistically divided areas of the north. The establishment of the regions also sometimes led to violence. In the Abruzzi there were riots in L’Aquila and Pescara, which both wanted to be the capital, while in Calabria protests left several people dead and more than 300 wounded when the population of Reggio discovered that Catanzaro had been chosen as the region’s administrative capital.
Demands for more autonomy increased in the 1990s, and at the turn of the century additional powers in such areas as tourism, transport and welfare were transferred to the regions. When in 2008 the finance minister proposed to devolve tax-raising powers and thus give the regions what was called ‘fiscal federalism’, it seemed that Italy was at last on the road to becoming what it should have been all along, a state that recognized the importance of regionalism and diversity. Yet sceptics sometimes wondered whether the creation of the regions had done anything more than add another tier of government and bureaucracy. Italy is now divided into twenty regions and subdivided into more than one hundred provinces and more than 8,000 comuni or municipalities. This situation leads to much duplication in local government and to some bewilderment for the population: until recently the citizens of Udine were under a left-leaning separatist mayor, a right-wing provincial president and a centre-left president of the region.
The obvious solution would have been to abolish the provinces, which became increasingly irrelevant after 1970, especially in those regions that had only two: Umbria, Molise, Basilicata and the Trentino-Alto Adige (the Val d’Aosta has none at all). Yet anyone who suggested such a thing was assailed with shouts of ‘Hands off the provinces!’, branded a heretic and told that the provincial system was part of the nation’s heritage as the departments were in France. In consequence the provinces survived without any real purpose: local government remains mainly in the hands of the comune, and wider issues are dealt with by the regions, yet Italians still have to pay large salaries to the provincial presidents, the deputy provincial presidents, the presidents of the provincial assemblies and a total of 4,000 provincial councillors.
Regionalism has led to considerable extravagance and self-importance on the part of these devolved governments and their leaders. In 2004 the entertainment expenses of the president of Campania were twelve times higher than those of the president of Germany. Across the Straits of Messina one Sicilian president spent much of his reign trying to expand his powers, requesting a cabinet place in Rome whenever his island was discussed and attempting to conduct a personal foreign policy with Colonel Gaddafi and other north African neighbours. Regional officials are especially keen on inventing international roles for their regions, whether establishing little ‘embassies’ for themselves in Brussels or promoting their regional products in expensive and unsuccessful ventures such as Casa Sicilia, branches of which were set up in such unpromising places as Sofia and Beijing. Lombardy alone has twenty-five ‘consulates’ dispersed among twenty-one countries, including Cuba and Uruguay.1
In recent years much of the passion for devolved government has come from the north, particularly in those areas of Lombardy and the Veneto where people had traditionally voted for the christian democrats but became disillusioned both by the party’s corruption and by its heavily southern bias. Inspired by the example of the communes that had defeated Barbarossa at Legnano 800 years earlier, the Lombard League was formed in the 1980s by a small group of northerners determined to fight for their rights against the exactions and inefficiencies of the central government. Joined in 1991 by the Venetian League and a few other groups, it was renamed the Northern League and instantly became an electoral force.
Folklore and nostalgia were a part of the League’s appeal from the beginning. Rallies were held at Pontida, where the communes had sworn an oath against Barbarossa in 1167; efforts were made to revive dialects and recover the north’s ‘linguistic heritage’; followers were encouraged to put on fancy dress, carrying toy swords and wearing helmets with horns on them when attending medieval ceremonies and re-enactments. Although protection of the environment was not one of the League’s priorities, green was chosen as the party colour, and a Miss Green Shirt beauty contest duly came into being. As for the anthem, the choice went to ‘Va pensiero’ from Nabucco, an odd choice considering that northerners, whatever grievances they had, could not easily empathize with the slaves in Babylon; the only connection with Verdi (who was not even a Lombard) seems to have been that the composer also wrote an opera about Legnano.
Yet the League’s real appeal is not sentimental but economic. Its message attracts those with a visceral resentment, people you hear grumbling in bars how they pay high taxes and receive few benefits, how they make the money which the government in
Rome then steals or squanders on bureaucracy, mismanagement and allowing corrupt and idle southerners to live beyond their means. Without the north, they very reasonably point out, Sicily and Calabria would be unable annually to spend 50 per cent more than they earn. One town which exemplifies the hard-nosed side of the League is Treviso in the Veneto, a place so unsentimental about its past that it erects modern structures in its centre and, even when it is moved to ‘restore’ a building, guts it almost completely and starts again. In Treviso you do not find souvenir shops or knights in armour but citizens living for the future rather than in the past, people determined to keep their revenues and spend them on projects in their own region.
The League’s founder and leader was Umberto Bossi, a wayward, mercurial and charismatic figure with a talent for demagoguery and political acrobatics; he also had a touch of megalomania, was intolerant of dissent and was derided by a leading member of his own party as the Lombard ‘Braveheart’.2 He delighted in being provocative and he appealed to the rankest instincts of his followers when he mocked homosexuals and referred to southerners as Africans or mafiosi. Apart from their commitment to federalism, he and his party were unencumbered by ideology and even on the federal question they were happy to adapt to the times and their electoral prospects. In the early 1990s they campaigned for an Italy of cantons, as in Switzerland, and were astonished by the degree of support they received. Their blunt and primeval message – ‘the north for the northerners’ – had such appeal that between 1987 and 1992 their vote was multiplied by a factor of seventeen. They elected fifty-five deputies in elections in the latter year, won Milan and fifteen other cities of the north and indicated that they would henceforth play a pivotal role in the making and unmaking of governments. In 1994 they did even better, fighting the election in alliance with Silvio Berlusconi and doubling their representation in parliament. The League was suddenly in national government.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 45