The Dark Heart of Italy

by Tobias Jones

  Even on a more low-brow level, the visual finesse of the country is always obvious: everything is simply beautiful. When I look out of my window I can see exquisite, geometrical chaos. Ripples of pink tiles, each roof facing a different direction to the one next door. The city looks like something from a fairy-tale, or at least from another century. The whole place is immaculately lit up, with minimal white lights which, through the foggy air, look like candles. People ride bicycles that seem to have been in the family for generations. Palazzi are propped up by columns which look as delicate and thin as pencils. The house-fronts are all brightly coloured, normally the mellow, vaguely regal yellow which is called Parma yellow (a colour popularised by the Duchess Maria Luigia, Napoleon’s widow, who reigned in Parma in the early nineteenth century.) The care put into buying shoes, tablecloths, handbags and clothes is extraordinary and, for a foreigner, unfathomable. When you buy a bouquet of flowers, it will take twenty minutes for the florist to prepare its presentation: leaves and sprays are added and discussed, paper and ribbons turned and twisted, and then removed if the colours are thought to clash. Shops are like stylised grottos: salami hanging like bats from the rafters, corridors of fresh basil and rosemary lining your path to the counter.

  The consequences of a visual rather than literary culture are evident everywhere. It’s often hard to find anything that is remotely ugly, be it a building or a painting or, especially, someone’s clothing. Italy, of course, produces the world’s most esteemed fashion retailers, be they for the high-street or the cat-walk: Versace, Armani, Valentino, Max Mara, Benetton, Diesel, Dolce & Gabbana. The care about clothing means that you can go into a shop and describe the colour, cut, stitching style and buttons you want on a shirt, and the shopkeeper will invariably find it. Like in the restaurants, the more specific and picky you are, the more you’re esteemed: ‘I would like a black shirt of a silk-cotton mix, no pockets, horizontal button-holes, French cuffs but with a Venetian collar. Oh, and preferably minimally tapered towards the waist …’ If you get that far, however bad your Italian, you will have the respect of everyone in earshot. (The sartorial vocabulary is, like that for food, enough to fill a separate dictionary.)

  That preening might sound like vanity, but it’s not. It’s simply a precision about presentation. Even at two in the morning, groups of women gather outside shop windows and discuss the width of sandal straps in the same, amicably heated way that old men discuss Verdi. Fashion is followed slavishly. When the season changes, and it happens almost overnight, the cognoscenti all begin wearing the same colour: last year lilac, this year yellow. Personal grooming is taken very seriously, by both men and women. As you drive out of town, huge billboards advertise the transplant cure for baldness: ‘Hair For Anyone Who Has A Head’ says the slogan. Often if you casually say to someone that ‘you’re looking well’ the reply is: ‘Thanks. Yep, I’ve just done a [UV] lamp.’ I, being British, would be embarrassed, but here there’s no bashfulness about wanting to look good. Tanning techniques are minutely discussed and dissected. A mountain tan, I learnt, has a different depth and tone to a beach tan.

  Linguistically, of course, beauty is ever-present. I sometimes play football in a team on the outskirts of Parma and whenever I arrive in the changing room – and it happens to everyone – I’m greeted with kisses: Ciao bello or else ciao carissimo (‘Hello dearest’).

  ‘Listen,’ I said to Luigi, our speedy winger, as we were lacing up our boots one Saturday, ‘you’ve got a trial with an English team next week, right?’

  ‘Yes, carissimo.’

  ‘In England?’

  ‘Yes, carissimo.’

  ‘Well, Luigi,’ I wanted to say it tactfully, ‘just don’t call the English players ‘beautiful’ or ‘dearest,’ and don’t kiss them, OK?’ The effect was as if I had told him that the English don’t have friends. He couldn’t understand how men could behave so coldly towards each other.

  ‘But,’ he was clearly bewildered, ‘if I can’t tell my new football friends they are beautiful and dear to me, what can I say?’

  ‘I don’t know. You have to remember, carissimo, that you Italians are just much more civilised than us.’

  By now I’m so used to the sheer style that I can recognise a northern European at a hundred metres. They have grey hair, or none at all. They look awkward with their sunglasses. Young male backpackers don’t have the complicated facial hair that is another Italian art form. Each time I look in the mirror I hear Italo Calvino’s description of

  … goofy and anti-aesthetical groups of Germans, English, Swiss, Dutch and Belgians … men and women with variegated ugliness, with certain trousers at the knees, with socks in sandals or with bare feet in shoes, some clothes printed with flowers, underwear which sticks out, some white and red meat, deaf to good taste and harmony even in the changing of its colour …1

  Northern Europeans, Italians know, are simply less stylish. The British also, I’m often told, spend so much time reading they forget to wash. Either way, British personal presentation is like British football: inelegant.

  That search for beauty and style has its logical extension: a simmering, but unmistakable sense of erotica. Every Italian town has one street that becomes, at that idyllic sunset hour when everything slows down, a free-for-all catwalk. Couples and widows and children and the card sharks from the square walk back and forth, greeting and gossiping with friends. In Parma people will almost always look you up and down to get an overall picture of your size and style. Women, often men, will hold your stare for a second longer than is subtle (which, I suppose, makes shades imperative). It often seems that flirting is the oil of all human interaction. Frustrated young men in Italy constantly complain that it’s all fumo e niente arrosto (‘smoke and no roast’) that – crudely – all the flirtation is a road to nowhere. Whatever the destination, though, it’s an amusing journey because there are so many siren voices, so many seductive distractions.

  It was late spring when the sexual tension in my university class, latent throughout the long winter, came to the fore. Maria Immacolata (‘Mary Immaculate’), my favourite student, began coming to class with little more than a chiffon sarong thrown over a minimalist bikini. She’s the daughter of an ice-cream magnate from Bari, and was always the first to arrive, the last to leave. ‘What I miss most from Bari,’ she said coquettishly, aware that we were alone and that I was admiring her iodine skin, ‘are the waves’. To illustrate, she rocked her pelvis backwards and forwards as if making love to the chair. Then, as casually as if she were asking the time, she said: ‘Are you betrothed?’ A few days later I found a fantastically explicit love letter rolled up and shoved inside the handlebars of my bicycle.

  Eroticism is everywhere. Even going shopping, if you’re of a mildly puritan bent, is unnerving. The underwear section of one national department store is called ‘cuddles and seduction’. There are more intimerie, ‘intimate’ lingerie shops, in Parma than any other kind. The shop with the highest turnover per square metre of shop-floor in the whole of Italy is a lingerie shop on the outskirts of the city. It is, you quickly realise, another art form, taken to giddy heights of detailed eroticism. I have even been asked by a sleek shop assistant, on one apparently simple mission to buy candles, what sort of girl I was entertaining: ‘If it’s a first date I would suggest either pine or opium as the appropriate scents.’

  ‘But it’s just for myself. Can’t I go with something simple like vanilla?’

  ‘Ah, you’re English!’ she said sympathetically, as if suddenly understanding my ignorance about the nuances of buying wax.

  I used to ask my students to give ten-minute lectures in English on whatever subject they wanted. In the course of the year three girls chose, independently of each other, to lecture on lingerie. Never was the classroom so alive. There was a heated debate about when exactly a perizoma (a G-string) should be worn, about whether showing knicker straps outside your skirt is now out of fashion, about which push-up (wondabra) suits which form
of breast. The male students, too, were suddenly awoken from their slumber, asking earnest questions about the implications of suspenders as presents and the strength of transparent straps.

  That refreshing candidness about erotica means that never is there a sex scandal in Italy. Politicians, despite their Catholic avowals, proudly partner the most pendulous, beautiful celebrities, doing their credibility only good. In Britain sex-and-drugs is the dream tabloid story; in Italy it’s just not news. One of Bettino Craxi’s Socialist ministers in the 1980s enjoyed such a swinging lifestyle that he even wrote a book about Italian discos and their culture. Another book published on the golden years of Bettino Craxi was written by Sandra Milo, an ‘actress’ and acolyte of socialist circles. She described orgiastic parties, invariably placing herself and famous politicians centre stage. Being much more mature than the British about such things, most Italians, if told that their local politician is enjoying a sex-and-drugs lifestyle, would express envy rather than outrage. Thus Berlusconi’s Undersecretary at the Culture ministry, a learned art critic called Vittorio Sgarbi, is admired for his fine taste in not only Renaissance art but also in women taken from the ‘dubious actress’ drawer. He has such an amorous reputation that he stars in advertisements for a coffee brand: he’s married to an ugly woman until he takes a sip, and he’s then surrounded once again by beautiful nymphs. Every week he’s asked onto talk shows to give his opinions on the female form, and on the etiquette of sexual encounters. Berlusconi himself fell in love with his second wife, Veronica Lario, as she stripped off on-stage during a performance of Fernand Crommelynck’s The Magnificent Cuckold.

  Cuckoldry is, of course, the flip-side of the flirting. There is a knife-edge between flirting and infidelity, and given the ubiquity of the former, there’s also a widespread paranoia about becoming a cuckold (which, as Italian referees know, is the worst insult you can level at a man). Long television chat-shows are dedicated either to how to cheat successfully on your partner, or how to avoid it happening to you. Another frequent billboard seen in Italy is the one with a giant magnifying glass, advertising the services of a private detective: ‘Are you sure you can trust her?’ goes the slogan. Graffiti on street walls often just publicises an enemy’s shame: ‘Rinaldi is a Cuckold!’ There’s a whole niche humour about cuckoldry, and understanding the various nuances about ‘being horned’ takes years. Listen to the endless conversations on the subject and it becomes obvious that, as well as that seething jealousy, there is a more mature attitude towards the improbability of monogamy: ‘Horns are like teeth,’ goes a Roman proverb, ‘it hurts when they grow, but they give flavour to life.’

  In a culture which is so visual, and which eschews anything written, television has become the crucial source of infotainment. The time spent in front of TVs in Italy is on average, according to ISTAT, around 240 minutes per day (the figure creeps up each year). Which naturally means that, as an instrument of political propaganda, it is unrivalled. It reminds me of something Sofri had said, about how Italians outside prison live the same life as him, as if they were actually locked up and stuck in front of the television. It is also omnipresent: in most bars and even restaurants the noise of a football match or a garish quiz show will accompany conversation. If you walk down any street you will hear the drone of a dozen television sets.

  I had expected television to be another example of Italian visual brilliance, a continuation of the enjoyable beauty and erotica. Instead, switching on the television was like introducing an insistent shopkeeper into the living room. Almost all the time, the TV was trying to sell me something. Programmes are interrupted by promotional messages, which are also euphemistically called ‘consumer advice’ by presenters who walk to another part of the studio to chat about a new product. Then a few minutes later there will be an advertising break proper: the volume of the TV, at least on the three Mediaset channels, actually increases during the ad breaks. Football matches, if there’s a pause for an injury or a free-kick, are interrupted and ‘the line returns to Rome’ for more consumer advice. Programmes, after a while, come to seem like sing-along fill-ins between the adverts, rather than vice-versa. (57% of all Italian advertising budgets are sunk into television; in Britain the figure is 33.5%, in Germany only 23%).

  Watching the news is barely more engaging. Reports are accompanied by pop-music and proverbs. It’s seemingly obligatory on each day’s news to have a slot advertising a new Hollywood film, a slot on football, another on pop music and finally a fashion story. During the summer, each edition of the ‘news’ is accompanied by the ‘deck-chair interview’, a slot in which beach-bums can talk about the latest tanning techniques. Or else an investigative reporter is dispatched, microphone in hand, to interview holiday-makers about the latest trend in sand-sports: beach volleyball or frisbee-throwing techniques. And (almost without exception) during the ‘news’ the whole system goes into melt-down, and the newscaster reaches for the phone on his desk. ‘Apologies, we’re having technical difficulties.’

  Breasts are ubiquitous, even boringly so. It’s unthinkable to have a glitzy studio show without a troupe of dancing girls dressed up in bikinis, and often even less. During a recent election, one local television debate was hosted by a woman who, other than serving the men coffee, took off an item of clothing each time the political debate became tedious. A friend and I remained glued to the tedious discussion until she was stripped to the waist. A typical stunt from another show will have a woman in a bikini slipping into a glass bath tub filled with milk. To great yelps of delight from the studio, she will then strip off whilst hidden by the milk and pass the bikini to the excited presenter. Each channel has its own little starlet, who introduces the evening’s entertainment, addressing the viewers as cari amici, ‘dear friends’, and smiling at the camera as it zooms in on her shapely form (perfectly displayed as, hands behind her back, she swings her shoulders backwards and forwards, her top perforated by a ‘teardrop’ at the intersection of her bosom).

  The best programme on Italian television is called ‘Blob’ (on RAI 3, the ‘Communist’ channel). It broadcasts out-takes from the cheapest TV of the previous 24 hours. It has a section called protette, a play on words which implies both ‘protection’ and ‘pro-tits’. It works, of course, because it pretends to be taking an ironic view of ‘scorching’ TV, whilst re-running all the best bits: bosoms falling out of skimpy dresses, female presenters pole-dancing to pop music, or else a famous politician enjoying a coy lap-dance. Another lead news item, towards the end of the year, is who is doing which calendar, and with which ‘artistic interpretation’. Actresses are interviewed in soft-focus, with their twelve semi-naked photographs superimposed. A few weeks later, when you go to the edicola there are row upon row of these mildly sexy calendars, hanging up next to the Communist daily and various soft-porn videos.

  All of which is nothing compared to the hype surrounding ‘Miss Italia’. Every year in Salsomaggiore, a small spa town near Parma, the most beautiful girls from throughout Italy gather to compete for the prize of becoming the country’s ‘Miss’. For an entire week the contest obsesses the nation: friends bet on likely winners, debate their various attributes. By the time of the gala final on Saturday, there’s nothing else on the peep-show television. Sofia Loren was a competitor in the 1950s, winning the runner-up award of ‘Miss Elegance’. Since the advent of the Northern League, there’s also a competition called ‘Miss Padania’.

  It quickly becomes clear that Italy is the land that feminism forgot. It’s not that there aren’t many successful women in Italy, it’s that they’re never in the hungry public eye (unless they come with heaving cleavages). It’s hard to think of any female role models in Italy other than those confined to the role of television confectionery. With a few notable exceptions, the Italian parliament is a famously male domain. In one survey taken recently, it was analysed how much television time was dedicated to male and female governmental ministers: for every four hours of masculine chat, seven mi
nutes were spent interviewing women ministers. On Berlusconi’s Mediaset channels, women were granted 57 seconds of air-time for the entire month of June (one half of one percent of the overall coverage). If they’re not tinsled starlets on television, lay women are simply famous for being mothers or relatives: women are rarely famous in their own right, but instead by virtue of their (virtuous) relationship to their men. Berlusconi often quotes his mother (‘as my mother once said about me – I’m a kind of wizard’); Cecchi Gori, president of Fiorentina football club, always used to sit next to his during Fiorentina football matches. To be close to a mother gives off an aura of goodness.

  ‘How on earth can you put up with all this nonsense?’ I once asked one of my female students, noted for her firm, feminist opinions.

  ‘That,’ she said smiling, ‘is exactly what we ask of British food: how can you possibly swallow that rubbish?’

  ‘Fine. But the difference is that we don’t spend a third of our waking lives watching TV, consuming what’s been put on our plate by the country’s most powerful politician.’

  ‘Fine. But I would rather have crap television than crap food,’ she laughed.

  Another instance of the importance of television in Italy is the fact that the country boasts a quarter of the world’s terrestrial channels: 640 of a total of 2,500. Most local channels have a sexy, middle-aged lady talking on the phone to a viewer as she displays her tarot cards on the carpeted table and narrates how much money you can win if you put the following numbers down for this week’s lottery. Others are dedicated solely to reading horoscopes or dispelling an amorous curse cast by a rival in love (there will be a mage, complete with aluminium foil mitre). Much the most common, though, are the channels selling dubious beauty products: for half an hour there might be a close-up of someone’s buttocks as little pads send electric shocks into the flesh. On other channels there will be a man, pretending to be outraged that he’s selling so much jewellery for so little money, placing plastic necklaces on busty girls.