The Secrets of Italy

by Corrado Augias

  In an off-the-cuff column written in the summer of 1887 (a year before the book was drafted), the author repeatedly returned to a character named Diambra, “Princess of Scurcola,” to whom he devoted various episodes that seem like studies for his upcoming novel. One study exploring the female nude and feminine sensuality is undoubtedly a description of a striptease: “She begins with slow, languid, occasionally hesitant gestures, pausing with each move, as if to stop and listen. She takes off her fine silk stockings … then lets the ribbon holding her last bit of clothing, her thinnest, most precious camisole, slip off her shoulder … its snowy whiteness flows down over her breasts, along the arch of her lower back, and stops for a moment at her hips; then it suddenly falls to her feet, like a wisp of sea foam.”

  Behind the lead characters lies Rome, or rather the part of Rome centered around Piazza di Spagna and Via Sistina, between the Spanish Steps and Piazza Barberini, and from there outward, across Via dei Condotti and Via del Babuino to the many eighteenth-century churches (in the famous baroque style of the Counterreformation), piazzas large and small, fountains and papal shrines. D’Annunzio’s Rome isn’t the Rome of Chateaubriand, Stendhal, or Goethe; instead, it’s the Rome of the newborn Kingdom of Italy, the one best suited to act as a backdrop for the time in which he experienced it: “The grand receptions, auctions, wolf hunts, streets, small shops, concerts, fencing academies, the silvery sheen of the court, and the feathers adorning the large hats of the ‘ladies along the Tiber’ all came together to form the massive chorus of this great ballet.”

  This is the Rome D’Annunzio brings us with his refined ability to paint a full picture: he offers up a series of scenes, some as sumptuous as rich oil paintings, others as transparent and liquid as watercolors. Later in the same column from July 1887 he writes: “Have you ever contemplated the city on a July afternoon from the shade of the holm oaks that stand like a rigid green wall in front of the Villa Medici? When has Rome ever seemed more solemn, more sacred? When has Rome ever inspired the heart with such a strong feeling of divinity? The boulevard is deserted. The vast, motionless trees protect the fountain and are reflected in the pool where the water, in their shade, is as dark and soft as velvet.”

  Even Benedetto Croce, who wrote D’Annunzio off as a “sensational dilettante” (a dilettante, but nevertheless an artist, he added), had to admit that he not only “saw things with extraordinary lucidity,” but also “perfectly portrayed” what he saw.

  Sometime before The Child of Pleasure came out, D’Annunzio had announced in the political and literary weekly Fanfulla della Domenica that he was working on a “novel about contemporary customs.” In truth, the “customs” he describes weren’t yet “contemporary”; but certain social circles soon adopted them after reading his narrative, turning them into a trend, and sometimes being caricatured in turn.

  Scandal and controversy also played a part. Some of the story’s apparent affirmations irritated people more than its sexual transgressions did. For example, the phrase with which Andrea comments on the tumultuous repercussions of the Italian soldiers massacred in Dogali in January 1887. Short, terrible words. Watching the scene from within his carriage as it moves past a riled crowd, Andrea murmurs: “And all this for four hundred brutes who had died the death of brutes!”27

  As early as his first reading of the manuscript the publisher had intuited that the phrase might cause a stir given the political atmosphere of the time, and tried to convince D’Annunzio to tone it down a bit. The author refused, writing: “Dear sir, any and all advice is useless. That statement is uttered by Andrea Sperelli, not myself, and it fits well in the mouth of such a monster. I trust you will have understood that by studying Sperelli I aimed at studying the moral order of a monster. Why should critics go insane over it?”

  Obviously, he was lying. A few years later he wrote to Georges Hérelle, the book’s French translator, affirming: “Dans Andrea Sperelli, il y a une part vivante de moi” (“There is a living part of me in Andrea Sperelli”). None of his readers had ever doubted it.

  I’ll try to draw a conclusion, even if I shouldn’t even really say—all literary considerations aside—why these two novels are essentially, as I mentioned earlier, two anthropologies, insofar as they faithfully portray two different ways of being Italian: two categories, two lifestyles, two different ways of perceiving oneself, one’s relationships to others, and one’s relation to the country and the “national pact” Asor Rosa spoke of.

  De Amicis idealized the Piedmontese bourgeoisie by celebrating their values; D’Annunzio titillated the Roman bourgeoisie by seeking to spark a scandal, albeit with such skill that he made the most of inciting real irritation, transforming it into an even greater source of success. The former openly adheres to his own history, is moved by the characters he’s created, and lives their same life; the latter feigns detachment to make ironic observations. But his detachment is only an affect, because in reality he, too, experiences his characters with an equal intensity. He steeps himself in their moods, mixing them in with his own.

  Looking back at these two novels today, with the comfort of hindsight, we can clearly see what kinds of human archetypes followed, imitated, and surpassed the characters that populated those pages, carrying them through the past century and a half of Italian history.

  Traits like heartfelt sentiment, political correctness, and middle-class diligence are all descendants of Heart. People who are satisfied with what they have, who carefully tend to their family so they can make it to the end of each month, who are basically good, if sometimes a bit dull, all come from that same place: a place of dimly lit apartments furnished as well as could be managed, short trips to the beach, new shoes for Christmas, a respect for institutions, a reverence for those in power, the compulsion to recycle as a contribution to a more decent coexistence.

  The writer Guido Gozzano (in his book L’amica di nonna Speranza) described them thus:

  Stuffed birds and busts of Alfieri and Napoleon,

  framed flowers (good things in bad taste!)

  a dark hearth, boxes without candies,

  marble fruits protected under glass bell jars,

  the occasional plaything, little chests made of half-shells,

  objects emblazoned with words to the wise, welcome, remember, coconut shells,

  little mosaics of Venetian scenes, somewhat faded watercolors,

  prints, trunks of things, albums painted with archaic anemones.28

  It’s all so nineteenth century. Nowadays, of course, the objects are different. Nobody (well, almost nobody) decorates his dresser with a snow globe of Venice. But the spirit remains the same, I mean the measure of things—the size of people’s horizons, of their lives—is the same.

  The other Italians are descendants of Count Andrea Sperelli. They’re the ones who are unreliable, imaginative, uninvolved, the ones capable of spending money they don’t have, who mysteriously always live beyond their means, who say “jail is for the poor,” who have yachts and glitzy lights, who gamble, who have affairs, who like sex as a fleeting kind of mayhem—taken by force, bought, stolen. They’re quick to laugh, have loose tongues, like to make bets, challenges, like to beat their adversaries by force or by slander; institutions exist to serve them, and they cozy up to the powerful, whoever it might be today. And then there are their slogans: “they’re sad so we’re happy”; “they want rules but we love freedom.”

  Back in the day it was easier to distinguish between the former and the latter, but over time everything’s grown a bit more confusing. Nevertheless, these two key archetypes remain, and the second kind of Italians described above, although they’re certainly in the minority, are almost always the ones who most recognizably shape the era.

  I’ve told you about two novels, but really I should’ve talked about three in order to give you a full trilogy of 1880s Italy. In 1885 Antonio Fogazzaro published his second novel, Daniele Cortis. Fogazzaro was a Catholic from Vicenza, and was open to the cultura
l current that later became known as modernism. The motto of the day was non expedit (“it is not expedient,” which were the words the Holy See used to discourage Italian Catholics from voting in parliamentary elections). After the Breach of Porta Pia, Pope Pius IX prohibited Catholics from participating in the newborn democracy, arguing that engaging in politics was “inopportune.” Fogazzaro’s novel also deals with that subject. Daniele Cortis, the main character, is a parliamentary representative from Friuli; he’s conservative but openminded; he rails against corruption and would be happy to see a strong man lead the nation, someone in the vein of Bismarck; so he goes against the pope’s orders because, like Cavour, he wants a free State and a free Church, safely separated from one another. What’s really curious is that at one point Daniele seems to invent, so to speak, the name of what would later become Italy’s majority political party for more than half a century: “In my mind, I’m picturing a bright, possible ideal that might best be called Christian Democracy.”

  In the book, passages about the young representative’s political life are mixed in with ones about his love affair with his cousin Elena, who at nineteen was mismatched and married off to the Sicilian baron Carmine di Santa Giulia, an inveterate gambler and philanderer.

  Elena is incredibly elegant and burns with love for Daniele just as he does for her, although the most they exchange is a kiss, perhaps two kisses. All the rest is just holding hands, caresses given by prudently well-covered limbs: “She released herself from the gallant hands that had been holding her, and moved toward the entryway. Once there she turned and, quickly gazing at him, silently poured her soul out before his eyes. Then she disappeared.”

  The book also depicts life in Montecitorio, Italy’s chamber of deputies; Fogazzaro made the long journey to Rome in order to observe it up close, filling several journals with his notes. We see representatives from the provinces as they wander lost through the city or the parliament building’s endless hallways, reacting with dismay upon discovering the feel of corruption in the air, overhearing conversations among certain groups of colleagues and trying to understand what it’s all about, receiving threats in the form of anonymous letters.

  In Daniele Cortis, Fogazzaro wrote the first true “parliamentary novel,” which completes our picture of Italy in the years it began to take shape as a unified state. Considered from the viewpoint of literature as a mirror of life, the scope and realm of his pages is utterly new compared with the other two novels we discussed. Fogazzaro has none of the idealized respectability of De Amicis, nor does he have the ante litteram “dolce vita” of D’Annunzio. Instead, reading his book we read the first signs of democratic representation’s degeneration—a type of decay that, as we know all too well, became much more widespread and commonplace over the following years.

  3.

  LEOPARDI IN ROME

  One fine autumn day I retraced the route Giacomo Leopardi took on his way to Rome more than a century before. He had set out in the autumn of 1822, at the age of twenty-four, and it was the first time he ever left the “despised tomb” of Recanati, his hometown in the Marche region.1 The poet sought freedom but did not find it in Rome.

  To reach the capital (of the Papal States, as Italy had not yet been unified) he spent nearly a week aboard a horse-drawn carriage that belonged to the Antici family, relatives on his mother’s side. He ascended the Apennines along a tightly winding road carved into the bottom of a valley that still looks almost exactly like it did back then, nestled amid dense forests punctuated here and there by an ancient hermitage. He crossed the light-filled plains outside the Umbrian town of Colfiorito, descended toward Foligno, and visited the source of the Clitunno River.2 The small group of travelers he was with stopped off in Spoleto and spent the night at the Albergo della Posta. From there he wrote his father Monaldo a letter that was so disjointed he felt obligated to follow up a few days later, after he had finally arrived in Rome, with another letter, swiftly sent to his brother Carlo: “Please have father read this letter, as I cannot be sure of what I wrote from Spoleto: you and he should both know that I was writing from a table amid a bunch of scoundrels from Fabriano, rascals from Jesi, etc.” From this correspondence we also learn that, even though he was barely into his twenties, Leopardi already enjoyed a degree of fame as a poet, which he rightly found gratifying. Another man seated at the same table of raucous folk from the vicinity was a priest who apparently liked to crack crude jokes. The letter describes him as follows: “A clever rascal of a priest, who was with the rest of them, tried to joke around with me as he had with the others; but believe you me, upon my first reply he suddenly changed his tone, and he and everyone with him became as kind and gentle as a bunch of meek sheep.”

  Leaving Spoleto he passed through Terni, Narni, Otricoli, Civita Castellana, and finally spotted Rome, whose ragged skyline of bell towers and domes dominated by Saint Peter’s came into view as the road began to descend from the surrounding hills. The spectacle made a real impact on him, as he wrote to his sister Paolina (on December 3): “I myself saw the cupola, with my nearsighted eyes, from five miles away … and it appeared so very distinct, with its spherical shape and cross, looking much as the Apennines do from our hometown.”

  I followed his same route, but in the opposite direction, going from Rome to Recanati. I wanted to see the outlines of the mountains, the gorges, the stubbly ridges, the city walls that he saw—such as the “frightful” walls of Spoleto, which no longer fill anyone with dread, much as the enormous fortress known as the Rocca Albornoziana looming over the whole town no longer instills any fear. The fortress’s history is quite strange. Pope Innocent VI had it built as a stronghold to defend the Church’s territory. His ambassador, Cardinal Egidio Albornoz, summoned the architect Matteo di Giovanello (known as “il Gattapone”) and commissioned him to design the castle. That was back in 1362, and for several centuries thereafter the fortress was the cornerstone of Spoleto’s history. Its dominant position and the luxuries built into it made it fit for hosting many prominent guests, including Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI, who was governess of the territory during the late fifteenth century, to name just one illustrious visitor. Later on the papal government turned it into a prison, and it remained in use even after Italy was unified, all the way up to 1982.

  Italian history is so densely woven with echoes and interconnections that it is easy to go off on tangents, following multiple forking paths. Let’s get back to Leopardi on his voyage toward Rome.

  Obviously a lot has changed since his day, above all the quantity and density of buildings along his route. But, asphalt aside, I believe a few stretches of the road have remained exactly as they were, judging from the tight curves and steep rises and falls. And if you take a look around, here and there you can spot mountainous contours, patches of forests, meadows, and countrysides that must look much the way they did to him, with his poor vision and nearsighted eyes.

  Leopardi’s idea was to settle into the capital and free himself of his father’s suffocating tutelage. He was prepared to do anything, even enter the priesthood, to escape that prison. But in word only—and, as they say, actions speak louder than words. When Cardinal Consalvi, Pope Pius VII’s secretary of state, replied to a request on behalf of Leopardi by offering him an opportunity to “don court garb”—that is, accept a mid-level position between the prelate and the secular authorities, which would have swiftly granted him a career in the Church—he declined in a fit of pride, or perhaps because of some deeper revulsion, writing that his life “had to remain as independent as possible.”

  Once in Rome he held up for about six months as a guest of his maternal cousins, who put him up in a chilly room on the mezzanine level or on the floor just below the attic—in any case, he wasn’t staying in a nice room on the piano nobile with everyone else. The poor poet often complains in his letters of the chilblains he suffers that, once opened, remain painful sores that are very slow to heal.

  The Anticis were a
typical family under papal rule—neither too poor nor too rich, contented yet a bit bedraggled, unorganized and utterly devoid of any cultural interests, driven by sadly opaque tastes that Leopardi deemed “momentary, indefinable, unpredictable, incomprehensible.” His reports of mealtime conversations with them paint a full picture of their narrow-mindedness.

  From the letters to his siblings Carlo and Paolina we catch glimpses of a vast, chilly home with bare walls; as you read them you can picture waitstaff in threadbare livery and worn-down shoes, adept at pilfering leftovers from the Anticis’ plates to make up for their meager wages.

  The 945 letters of his entire correspondence, which tell the real story of his life, are filled with unforgettable characters and sketches. On November 25 he writes Carlo: “I’m forced to live life as our Antici relatives do—the kind of life that you and I, in our past discussions, had no idea of: neither what it consisted of nor how it kept afloat, nor, indeed, if it were any kind of life at all, in any sense of the word.”

  But life back in Recanati, in their fine ancestral home, couldn’t have been that much different, aside from their father Monaldo’s noteworthy erudition and the library he was so proud of, where Giacomo spent much of his youth.

  Alfredo Panzini, a well-known novelist and lexicographer, wrote a great book titled Casa Leopardi on the home and its inhabitants, wherein he paints this expressive portrait of Count Monaldo: “One of the most singular men of his time, the throne and the altar—that is, the Church and the Sword—had few defenders as staunchly convinced as he … The count was neither tall nor short, neither handsome nor ugly; his face was clean-shaven, of course, and his wig was tied back. He always wore black, as if he were a member of the Ancien Régime, with short trousers even when longer ones were the fashion, black stockings, flat shoes with silver buckles, a white cravat … he took curious pride in wearing his sword each and every day, like an olden-day knight … He looked out on the world from his high palazzo atop Recanati. He constantly corresponded with all the most famous reactionaries, Jesuits, and other legitimists of the day.”3