The Secrets of Italy

by Corrado Augias

  Milan and Lombardy’s entrepreneurial class continued to desert public life even after the war, turning its back on public government and, by extension, on the general interests of the community. One of the criticisms that is occasionally leveled against northern entrepreneurs in Milan is that they dove headlong into the pursuit of profit (be it for their family or their business), neglecting all civic duties and commitments. From Alcide De Gasperi onward, postwar Italy has had many brilliant politicians from the North. More rarely have its public administrators of equal stature been Northerners. Northern entrepreneurs walked away from such duties and, absorbed in their own businesses, they left everyone else to worry about everyone else’s business.

  According to Carlo Galli, professor of history and political science in Bologna, the relationship between Italy and its elites has never been fully resolved.6 The country’s ruling classes, including intellectuals and entrepreneurs, have only rarely and in exceptional periods played an active role in bringing people together for the purpose of working in favor of everyone’s mutual interest. On the contrary, these classes have often distinguished themselves by short-sightedly defending their own privileges, when not forming outright pro-business lobbies. Galli analyzes the backstory with his usual interpretive acumen. One remarkable example is the reversal of the cliché that claims so-called civil society is far better than political society, often referred to as a “caste.” According to Galli these two layers of society, if they are even distinguishable, instead reflect one another like a funhouse mirror, giving each other a distorted image of themselves. It is no coincidence that in Parma, back in 2001, Silvio Berlusconi received a standing ovation from Confindustria, the country’s most powerful industrial association, with his famous phrase: “Your program is my program.” Here, the politician who ought to have defended the interest of the general public—not only one narrow category—acted like just another self-interested entrepreneur among fellow self-interested entrepreneurs. It is no coincidence that those entrepreneurs’ enthusiasm declined, to the point that they let him fall from political power, when they (finally) realized that Berlusconi’s program was in fact only “his” program, nothing more.

  According to Galli, just a few of Italy’s greatest—he includes Giacomo Leopardi and Alessandro Manzoni, an atheist and a liberal Catholic, respectively (we could also add Antonio Gramsci)—managed to describe in detail the regressive characteristics that plague the country’s ruling classes. Those characteristics are a chief cause of its backwardness, its failure to modernize, and even its inability to come together as a unified nation.

  And to think that the history of unified Italy had begun in such a completely different way … Throughout the nineteenth century most high-level administrators for the Kingdom of Italy were Piedmontese, ostensibly for reasons of efficiency and integrity. Cavour himself had willed it: he considered his fellow Piedmontese the most solid guarantee that the government would be able to deal with the disintegration and corruption that were so widespread in southern society. In an article published in La Stampa on June 23, 1900, the prominent Piedmontese economist and politician Luigi Einaudi wrote: “We [Piedmontese] have had a greater percentage of government employees—both high- and low-level—than most [regions]. But that had been necessary early on, in order to cement national unity under a bureaucracy imbued with the spirit of unity and a devotion to existing government institutions; such a bureaucracy could only be found in Piedmont.”

  There have been many studies on this topic, and practically all have come to the same conclusions. One of the most enlightening is by constitutional-court judge Sabino Cassese, and its title sums up the essence of this “historical” problem: Questione amministrativa e questione meridionale (“The Administrative Question and the Southern Question,” Milan: Giuffrè, 1977). These two “questions” are cast as the two sides of a problem that has remained unsolved over the last century and a half of Italy’s postunification history. To put it simply, that problem is the division (according to some, the deep rift) between the “productive” North and the “unproductive, bureaucratic” South.

  Even the Piedmontese predominance in public administration did not last long. Remarkably, by the end of the nineteenth century most government administrators and employees were from southern regions. In a speech given June 26, 1920, marking the final term of Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, the Socialist Filippo Turati (born near Como, Lombardy) famously stated:

  The South is the largest supplier—virtually the only supplier—for the entire Italian bureaucracy at all levels, from department heads down to prison guards … In Northern Italy, the industrial area, it is safe to say that not a single graduate of our polytechnic schools or upper schools aspires to hold any government office. These offices have become hiring halls for what I would call, if the phrase did not sound too immature, the unemployed desk-job workforce, unfit for any useful service.

  The phrase did not “sound too immature”—quite the contrary, it was a rather harsh judgment that reflected current opinion, which has remained virtually unchanged ever since. Just a year earlier, in 1919, the great jurist and historian Arturo Carlo Jemolo, born in Rome, observed more or less the same: “The administration of the state is besieged by inopportune requests from many members of the petite bourgeoisie who are unable to find a profitable job in the professional world and lack the energy required to don laborers’ overalls.”

  I mention all this because numerous later studies have confirmed that, after the first few years of primarily Piedmontese governance, the “southernization” of government has been a key characteristic of unified Italy, straight through Fascism and World War II up to today. In the sixties, for example, the Left was widely convinced that the Christian Democrats occupied government, facilitating the entry of “consensus bureaucrats” on every administrative level. Eighty to 90 percent of Italy’s administrative “leaders” came from the South; 80 percent of the applications for police and other public-service jobs came from central and southern Italy, and only 20 percent from the North.

  All that is true, but it is also true that this clear division would not have existed, at least not to this extent, if the ruling classes from the North had been more attentive to the res publica, to public affairs. That could have been a part of the postwar wave of energy and creativity that swept in—indeed, for a few months people had the feeling that even this seemingly entrenched geopolitical aspect of the country was changing. The boom hit Milan head-on, and the city made the most of it. Consider, to return to this chapter’s first anecdote, how the city government reacted to the idea of opening a new theater at a time when most of the houses and factories destroyed by the bombardments had yet to be repaired. Just compare that with current administrations’ inability or unwillingness to act on today’s pressing issues and cultural projects, and you can see the stark difference. The courage, bold vision, and momentum of those years is distinctly lacking.

  That spirit perished all too quickly, unable to maintain the necessary energy. Oftentimes people’s criticism focuses, rightly, on the bad public behavior so prevalent in the South; more rarely are similar criticisms leveled against Milan and the North. Obviously there are visible differences, but underneath those differences lurks a more general problem concerning the country as a whole: the ruling classes (in both the public and private spheres) often seem unsuited to fulfill their professional and moral duties.

  10.

  LAST JUDGMENTS

  The first time I ever saw a painting of the Last Judgment it was not in the Sistine Chapel, as you might expect for a boy born in Rome, but in the Scrovegni Chapel, up in Padua. It was by Giotto. I was there with my parents, and of course that was a key stop on our itinerary, as no civilized traveler dare miss it. But the explanations of the work bored me: I did not really understand its beauty, nor was I capable of grasping how revolutionary it was. I could not appreciate how it marked a clean departure from all previous paintings in terms of sheer quality, as we
ll as the way it depicted space and the perspectival solutions Giotto had come up with to portray the many narratives involved: the stories of Joachim and Anne, Mary, the story of Christ from his birth up to his torture on the cross, and many others. Inspiration for this vast cycle of images was drawn from various sources—not only the four canonical gospels, but also the saints’ lives of the Golden Legend compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, and the Gospel of James and the so-called Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, both from the apocrypha.

  Amid the splendor of that space, evident even to the eyes of a child, I was struck by one detail in particular: the two angels at the top, on either side of a three-mullioned window, whom Giotto depicted in the act of “rolling up” the sky. You read correctly: they are rolling up the sky as if it were a theatrical backdrop, in strict keeping with a long visual tradition (which I only learned about many years later) devised to signify the end of days after the Last Judgment. This evocative medieval iconography was inspired by the Apocalypse scenes in the book of Revelation, one of the greatest visionary texts of all time, the archetype of all other flights of fancy into the uncharted realms of the unconscious and of guilt. After an impressive procession of terrifying apparitions, the end is announced by four angels sounding trumpets to usher in the final calamities.

  The first angel sounded

  and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood,

  and they were cast upon the earth:

  and the third part of trees was burnt up,

  and all green grass was burnt up.

  And the second angel sounded,

  and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea:

  and the third part of the sea became blood;

  And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died;

  and the third part of the ships were destroyed.1

  This frightening description continues until catastrophe consumes the entire planet and the firmament, including all the stars and planets. But here is how it sounds in Belli’s folksy retelling in Roman dialect:

  All’urtimo usscirà ‘na sonajjera

  D’angioli, e, ccome si ss’annassi a lletto,

  Smorzeranno li lumi, e bbona sera.2

  In the end a gaggle of angels

  Will appear and, as if going to bed,

  They’ll snuff out the lights, and that’ll be good night.3

  A similar scene of the rolled-up sky appears in Rome, in the tiny oratory of San Silvestro, right next to the church of the Santi Quattro Coronati, one of the city’s most fascinating and least-known spots. Giotto worked in Padua from 1303 to 1305. But roughly half a century earlier a few anonymous Byzantine masters had decorated this chapel in Rome with the (false) story of the Donation of Constantine, by which the emperor Constantine I supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the pope. The paintings in Rome are almost a political manifesto, implying that the emperor ceded power when in reality he never did. But the oratory of San Silvestro echoes the same scene as the Scrovegni Chapel: Christ, enthroned, is flanked by the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist, as two angels hover overhead: one sounds the trumpet of the Last Judgment, the other rolls up the starry sky to show that the end has come.

  Naturally, Giotto’s work is on a whole other level, and much more complex. Below, at the base of the cross on the left, we see the artist’s patron, Enrico Scrovegni, offering Mary the building he commissioned to atone for the sins of his father, Reginaldo, a usurer of such infamy that Dante includes him in the long list of sinners in the Inferno. Giotto, too, condemns him to roast amid the fires of hell, and in the lower right corner we see Reginaldo venturing down a gloomy tunnel that feels a bit like the burrows of an anthill, headed toward eternal damnation; behind him, a servant with a sack on his back schleps all of his riches. In such a setting—chock-full of references to both earthly and eternal life, with symbols nodding to the scriptures’ and prophecies’ most poignant and tragic episodes—this realistic little touch of the rich man trying to carry a bag full of gold with him is deeply pathetic. It is not hard to imagine that just a few steps farther, as the man crosses the fatal threshold, a guardian devil will snatch it all away, casting both him and his bag of treasures into the eternal flames.

  Another spectacular Last Judgment is depicted in a Byzantine mosaic on the island of Torcello, in the Venetian lagoon. Not only is it spectacular, it is powerfully evocative—moving, even. Today, just a few dozen people live on this island. The low skyline of its few buildings is only interrupted by a tall bell tower and the large cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta. Approaching the island by boat amid a silence broken only by the steady hum of the engine, those two structures stand out above the otherwise the homogenous line of rooftops and low vegetation as the boat floats forward through the stagnant waters, passing marshy tufts of grass as you catch glimpses of the lagoon’s sandy bottom here and there. Compared with everything else, the sheer scale of those imposing structures gives you an idea of how important they have been over the past ten-plus centuries since their construction. The cathedral, later rebuilt and renovated several times, dates back to 640, the umpteenth bit of evidence that each and every corner of this country has marked the passage of its remarkable history with some marvel.

  The Last Judgment scene covers the entire entrance wall, so in order to see it you have to get at least halfway down the nave and then turn back to face the door. In keeping with the Byzantine tradition, it shows the death of Jesus followed by his descent into hell before the resurrection. The avenging angels, armed with long spears, chase the damned down into the flames of hell, reigned over (just like in Padua) by a monstrous Hades holding a tender young child in his arms. The name Hades refers to both the king of the underworld as well as the place of eternal punishment. Here he represents the Antichrist, whose deceptively innocent appearance tricks human beings into following him. And here, once again, we see an angel rolling up the starry sky, signaling the end of all creation.

  Among the many others that dot this extraordinary country, another spectacular Last Judgment is the one painted by Luca Signorelli in the cathedral of Orvieto. It was created about four or five centuries after the more Byzantine version on Torcello. This brings us up to the height of the Renaissance, and two immense angels dominate the panel depicting the resurrection of the flesh. Their trumpets awaken the dead: some have already risen, shreds of flesh hanging from their bones; some are still skeletons; others struggle to emerge from the ground and are shown half buried, half risen. There could be no clearer evocation of the spirit of Revelation—you can hear Dante’s Inferno, but there is also a hint of Michelangelo at work here. Indeed, just thirty years later he created his own masterful Last Judgment for the Sistine Chapel. The apocalyptic feeling grows even stronger in the panel depicting hell itself, shown with hallucinatory realism: amid a mass of palpitating limbs, devils with green buttocks pierce, prod, maim, and blind the damned; up above, flying demons throw down yet more sinners, whose flailing limbs foreshadow those of the poor souls who, terrified by the flames gushing from the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, leapt out into the void. At center stage the archetypal “prostitute” (a detail that has become even more famous on its own) is carried off to eternal damnation on the back of a horned demon with batlike wings. His face expresses anguish, and perhaps regret that his life could have been better. Above, three unwavering angels, swords in hand, stand guard so that no one escapes punishment.

  Michelangelo’s immense painting has inspired its own vast literature, to which nothing need be added here. I would just like to mention a few curiosities and some meaningful or funny details—the human touches that encapsulate the spirit and aim of these terrifying scenes; happily for us, in this case they also reveal the artist’s irreverent and irrepressible free spirit. Amid the crowd in the lower right corner of the fresco, which covers a total of 1,830 square feet, there is a man with a haggard countenance and donkey ears. A
large serpent encircles his chest, its coils descending to his groin, its fangs biting his testicles. Who is this unfortunate Minos, surely one of the most miserable of all the damned? It is Biagio da Cesena, who served Pope Paul III Farnese as master of ceremonies. He had stopped in to see the work in progress, and had imprudently said he thought it more suitable for a bathhouse than a chapel. Michelangelo took revenge by including this immortal portrait. Vasari gives us some background, in a tone that betrays his amusement:

  Michelagnolo had already carried to completion more than three-fourths of the work, when Pope Paul went to see it. And Messer Biagio da Cesena, the master of ceremonies, a person of great propriety, who was in the chapel with the Pope, being asked what he thought of it, said that it was a very disgraceful thing to have made in so honourable a place all those nude figures showing their nakedness so shamelessly, and that it was a work not for the chapel of a Pope, but for a bagnio or tavern. Michelagnolo was displeased at this, and, wishing to revenge himself, as soon as Biagio had departed he portrayed him from life, without having him before his eyes at all, in the figure of Minos with a great serpent twisted round the legs, among a heap of Devils in Hell; nor was Messer Biagio’s pleading with the Pope and with Michelagnolo to have it removed of any avail, for it was left there in memory of the occasion, and it is still to be seen at the present day.4