by Tobias Jones
The cost, unfortunately, isn’t only financial. When I first arrived in Italy, in the spring of 1999, there was a short news flash: a block of flats had collapsed in Foggia in Puglia. 71 people died. I was astonished, not just by the fact of what had happened (the flats, constructed at the cheapest costs conceivable, had just caved in to gravity), but by the fact that a few days later it wasn’t even mentioned. It was, I was told, a not uncommon occurrence. Three and a half thousand people have been killed since the war in landslides alone. Part of the reason is that Italy has a uniquely sensitive ecosystem: 6,400 miles of coastline, two mountain ranges, tectonic fault-lines, volcanoes. Britain appears geographically very gentle by comparison. Many reports from around the country, whatever the season, are about the physical battle for survival. Earthquakes flatten entire suburbs, landslides obliterate villages, fires rip through ancient forests and volcanoes spit out molten lava. The elements, given the sheer number of human lives they claim, seem simply crueller than elsewhere. But the problem is compounded by the human desecration of the landscape, and the deaths often seem an almost biblical revenge for the violations of the land.
The tragedy of Vajont was Italy’s worst civilian disaster of the post-war period. For years, until a ‘protest-play’ by Marco Paolini was broadcast in 1998, it was simply forgotten. Now the valley in the Dolomites has become a place of lay-pilgrimage, where thousands of people from across the country visit and pay their respects. The atmosphere there is like that at the former trenches from the First World War in France and Belgium. As you walk around the rough scrub you know that here, in the earth, lie thousands of people swallowed up by the soil. In October 1963, Mont Toc, a mountain of porous rock, gave way under the weight of a man-made lake whose capacity had been endlessly increased despite the warnings of every visiting expert. As the mountain collapsed into the lake, fifty million cubic metres of water slopped like a tidal wave over the edge of the dam. The water fell vertically for hundreds of metres before ripping through the villages below. Two thousand people lost their lives.
Another – this time on-going – man-made disaster is the car culture. Car-production is the foundation stone of the Italian economy, and the country now has a higher per capita ownership of cars than any other country in the world (it overtook America in the late 1990s). No other country in the world is as obsessed by its cars and their possible speeds. Driving is a white-knuckle ride: everyone seems embarrassed by being anywhere other than the fast lane (the slow lane is known as the corsia della vergogna, the ‘lane of shame’), so it thus gets slower. Then impatient drivers overtake on the inside, slaloming between the other cars and flashing their lights to persuade a lorry to pull onto the hard shoulder. Many are simultaneously talking on telephones, or else gesticulating to a driver in the adjacent lane who is going too slowly. Even on narrow streets in the centri storici of medieval cities, four-wheel jeeps career like large bobsleighs through the shoppers, the drivers shouting wildly if someone holds them up. The consequence is a mortality rate that is nearer something from a war zone: in the last decade, 72,000 people have died on Italian roads. News reports are invariably dominated by the latest multiple crash on a motorway. At the same time, levels of smog throughout the plain of the Po are suffocating. Often the traffic in Milan has to be literally halved, meaning that only odd or even numberplates are allowed into the city centre in order that pedestrians might breathe.
The response of the new government to the car problem was to announce plans to notch up the speed limit by another 20 kph, to 150 kph on certain roads. For the first time since emigrating to Italy, I felt completely disgusted by the whole situation and desperate to go home. More people, I repeated aloud to myself, have lost their lives in the last decade on Italian roads than America lost in the entire Vietnam war… seventy-two thousand people. And yet the solution is to increase the speed limit. As with abusivismo, the new government appeared on the side of the lawless bandits and the menefreghisti (the ‘I couldn’t carers’). Any rules or laws were by now nothing more than an affront to individual freedoms, and were to be ignored or done away with. That lawlessness might sound vaguely attractive unless you’ve seen it first-hand: hundreds of miles of beaches replaced by concrete slabs, cars which career onto the pavement and into prams and which never stop after an accident, residential buildings which give way like sandcastles at sunset.
After a few days watching immobile bulldozers in Agrigento, I decided to make my way back to Palermo. Most of the other journalists had already left weeks before. Waiting for the train in Agrigento’s railway station I went into the little chapel. Under a little image of a Madonna were the words: ‘Monsignor Montucci decrees that whosoever pronounces four glorias in front of this shrine shall receive one hundred days of indulgence.’ It’s that, I suppose, that lies at the heart of the moral conundrum of abusivismo in Sicily: transgressors are indulged rather than punished, and everyone’s sins are forgiven as long as they say the right prayer, or else pay the fine to the politicians’ coffers.
I left the railway station’s chapel and decided instead to hitchhike back to Palermo along the coast. I had little optimism, given the rude grunts I had received in many bars and hostels. By then, though, I knew that each time I was exasperated by life in Italy, an act of breathtaking civility was only just around the corner to restore my faith. Within five minutes a man stopped. The car, like most in Sicily, was so dented that it looked like aluminium foil folded over a leg of lamb. There were already seven in the car. The driver had just stopped to explain why he couldn’t pick me up. Auguri, he said. ‘Best wishes’. Another soon stopped to explain he had to turn off. It’s inconceivable that something of the sort would ever happen in the north. Two rich kids predictably stopped slightly ahead of me. One step towards them and they sped off, laughing. Then a baker picked me up. ‘I’ll take you to where there are a lot of girls. You’re still up to that at your age aren’t you? You American then?’
‘British.’
‘Myself, I’ve never been to the continent,’ he said, examining me as he overtook a lorry loaded with lemons. I wasn’t sure if he meant ‘continent’ as in Italy or Europe.
‘Britain’s not really the continent either. It’s a collection of islands like Sicily…’
The baker then delivered a soaring, eloquent monologue explaining exactly what he had intended by the word ‘continent’: ‘For me,’ he said, ‘the continent implies anything that creeps onto this island, that tells me what to do. I don’t care whether that’s Rome or London, if you come here and want to be my boss, you’re the continent.’ He went on for an hour, summarising his notion of autonomy from any authority. Each time his voice sounded stern about the ‘continent’, he would offer me another of his arancini, his balls of fried, orange rice. He left me at a beach full of adolescents, including the two, now-sheepish, rich kids who had driven by earlier. ‘My house is over there if you ever need anything,’ the baker said extending his flour-dusted fingers.
That was in Marsala, a town whose name implies in Arabic ‘the port of God’. It’s famous as the home of the sweet dessert wine and as the landing place of Garibaldi and his ‘thousand men’ in Sicily as they exported the unification movement to the south. I sat on the beach watching the huge rollers crash against the coast, splashing the private deck-chairs which everyone has to hire. (Even in Sicily the beaches have all been privatised.) Huge speakers blared out Europop. Stunningly beautiful girls, their fluorescent bikinis flattering their dark skin, were throwing frisbees to each other, seemingly hoping that they got taken in the wind to the deck-chairs where the single men were sitting.
I looked at the sea and beyond, trying to catch sight of the north African coast. Sicily, I suppose, has always been held up as the epitome of what’s wrong with Italy. And yet, sitting there in the sunset, it also seemed exactly what’s right: despite poverty, the generosity is instinctive. Despite daily reports about murders and kidnappings, it also appears blissfully peaceful and serene. Things
might be serious, but I had never heard so much laughter. In fact, behind the stereotypical lawlessness is hidden what many consider the real, earthy intellectual caste of Italy. Sicily has been the cradle of some of the country’s greatest writers: Giovanni Verga, Luigi Pirandello, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia. Reading them, you get an idea of the sheer aridity of the island. Always in the background there’s a sense of mortality amidst the dust. Grandiose concepts like dignity and honour still dominate the moral and immoral spectra. And because everything is a hall of mirrors, in which nothing is ever quite understood, words are always carefully chosen, no utterance is ever idle.
Sicilians are admired because, as Sciascia wrote, they ‘little love to speak’, their lives are ‘made up more of silences than words…’ A friend from Parma who now teaches at Palermo university talks admiringly of Sicilians’ flemma serafica, their ‘seraphic phlegm’, which enables them to put up with poverty whilst watching the profiteers. Another friend from Parma, a middle-aged man whose son spent a long time on the island recovering from heroin addiction, says that Sicilians are the most noble and intellectual of all Italians. ‘They have,’ he says, ‘the perfect combination of hardness (durezza) and refinement (raffinatezza). You see it in all that studied politeness, the dutiful examination of their own behaviour…’
After a few idle days at Marsala, I went to Mozia, which is, along with Agrigento, one of the southern Mediterranean’s richest archaeological sites. It was here that an Englishman named Joseph Whitaker began painstakingly retrieving bits of boats and weapons and burial sites from the shallow waters around his offshore island, San Pantaleo. In his villa you can still see marine charts, tracing the Carthaginian sailing routes between southern Sicily and Spain, north Africa, and Greece. Nearby improbable windmills sit in the shallows, sucking in the sea to produce hillsides of glistening salt.
When I got back to Palermo it was July 14, the day of La Santuzza or Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of Palermo. The city centre is still largely as it was after the Allied bombing raids from the Second World War: some houses have no front walls, so you can peer in and see abandoned cookers and a tree sprouting in the kitchen. Lone walls rise up and lean randomly without any purpose. There are still piles of mortar and horizontal doric columns where the bombs fell over fifty years ago. Against that backdrop, La Santuzza appeared beautifully, elegiacally pagan. Loudspeakers were hung from street corners to relay the voice of a husky French actress which was alternated with the stern tones of the Arcivescovo of Palermo. ‘I am Santuzza,’ said the actress, ‘I am the city, I live between the mountains and the sea.’ Meanwhile beautiful, busty girls mounted on huge iron horses were wearing twelve-foot dresses and lighting extravagant fires. Fat, topless men were looking bored as they pushed the oars of the float, occasionally stopping for a cigarette when the man in a suit at the front received an order from his walkie-talkie. The air smelt of lighter fuel and incense. Behind me a Vespa screeched to a halt inches from my calves. The guy took off his helmet, excused himself, and made the sign of the cross.
Within weeks of returning to Parma there were more bombs, this time more professional and consequential. One blew apart Venice’s marketplace outside the city’s tribunal the day before Berlusconi was due to arrive. Another, a few days later, at Vigonza (again in the Veneto) targeted the headquarters of the Northern League. After the bombing, the outside wall of the headquarters looked like a spider’s web – the masonry and plaster cracked into interconnecting lines. The response was, again, paranoia that the country was slipping back towards the irrational reprisals of the anni di piombo. Berlusconi responded by trying to knit together another ‘historic compromise’, drafting the left wing onto his side to denounce and isolate the ‘terrorism’. No one really bought it though. Everyone realised that Italy was nowhere near the violence and terrorism of the 1970s. It was much shallower, more superficial, and no one really thought, however tragic his death at the hands of the forces of order, that Carlo Giuliani was going to become a new Pino Pinelli, the Anarchist who suffered the ‘accidental death’ back in 1969. There was, certainly, a strange nostalgia for the anni di piombo amongst a tiny minority, in the same way that in the 1970s there was a yearning to recreate the Resistance. But all the vital ingredients that made the 1970s so bloody were entirely lacking. The government, however, appeared to enjoy the anni di piombo comparison more than anyone else. Given the twin threats of Communism and terrorism, the Christian Democrats were for decades electorally invincible. Berlusconi was trying the same tactic, talking up both threats in the hope that his politics and his past could be ignored. From July onwards, any opposition to Berlusconi would be labelled ‘terrorism’, and protesters were likely to feel the full force of the forces of order.
Francesco Cossiga, a former President of the Republic, was once described as playing ‘a Pirandellian game of double truth and double lie… [he was] even fantastic in his wish for rationality filtered through ambiguity’. That ambiguous reputation arose because of the suspicion that he knew more about the country’s terrorism than he let on. (There was, in the early 1980s, an attempt to indict Cossiga when he was Prime Minister because he lied about tipping off terrorists about imminent arrests. The indictment failed.) Now, though, Cossiga is nicknamed ‘pick-axe’ because of his violent, provocative outbursts. Having witnessed the terrorism first-hand in the 1970s, he has frequently urged peace negotiations between Italy’s warring sides. In the aftermath of the G8 and the bombings of August 2001, however, he changed his attitude. As the country was worrying about the next international conference (due in Rome in November) Cossiga outlined his advice to Berlusconi:
If I were Berlusconi, who has changed a lot since 1994… I wouldn’t even put one policeman in the piazzas, I would let those kids break every window. I would let them do it: go ahead with iron and fire… your tango. I would want these kids to vent their anger. And then: Bang! Armoured vehicles on the streets… you would see that even today, exactly as in my era, the left invokes the police, the hard hand… This autumn will be ‘hot’ because the target is a big one. People will beg us to stop them. And we will stop them with armoured cars and with loaded guns, authorised to shoot and also to kill… And we will clean up the piazzas.
As a synthesis of strategic, Christian Democratic advice to the government it was breathtaking: let a few hooligans riot, and then truncheon them into submission (or worse). The very politician who had tried to bring the two halves of the country together was now advocating the settling of some old scores with the left. Given Italy’s history it wasn’t surprising that many Italians, going into another ‘hot autumn’, were mildly paranoid.
Such was the atmosphere in Italy immediately prior to the terrorist attacks on America. The Allied response to 11 September was a mixed blessing for Berlusconi. They allowed him to play the patriotic card and, according to his supporters, to add to his stature in the international arena. For one half of the country, Italy could finally be proud once more. After years of feeble government, they said, the country at last had a leader who could strut the international stage. There was a tangible upsurge in patriotism. The national anthem, the words of which are notoriously unknown by most Italians, was even played before a local derby in Verona. Tricolour flags were hung out over balconies and little lapel-badges of the red, green and white were dusted off by television presenters and politicians. Italian troops were offered to the Americans and were, to the delight and surprise of the patriots, actually accepted.
For the other half of the country, though, what was happening was worrying. Television, as usual, was the first to register the subtle changes. Dancing troupes began wearing military outfits: khaki bikinis or mini-skirts made up of stars-and-stripes. In another toe-curling show, a group of girls danced dolefully in burqas before the band struck up Yankee Doodle and they stripped off to the all-Italian sequin underwear. Films about the Crusades were shown repeatedly throughout September, and government ministers began going on
air to denounce Islam and any other religion not subject to the Vatican (one of the Catholic leaders likened Bin Laden to Luther). Berlusconi, at the end of September, told journalists in Berlin about ‘the superiority of our civilisation’ over Islam. It was, he said ‘1,400 years behind’. It was the first signal that his presence on the world stage was to be an awkward, blundering one. What appeared swashbuckling bravado in Italy looked like ignorance abroad. Every Western government distanced itself from his comments: ‘It’s clear that Berlusconi’s remarks were offensive and offence has been taken,’ David Blunkett observed the next day. Realising that he had made a mistake, Berlusconi then denied ever having made the comments. The unfortunate phrases were, said Berlusconi, the malicious inventions of Italian Communists.
When the war on terrorism found a ‘financial front’, his position became evermore unfathomable. As the international community began taking an ever-tougher line on the movements of unsourced money, Berlusconi’s domestic legislation was going in exactly the opposite direction. With the eclipse of the Italian currency, the Lira, just around the corner, his government passed legislation which was little more than a licence to launder money. In return for a fine of 2.5% of the sum involved, illegally exported (or earned) capital would be allowed to return to Italy. It was called, simply, rientro dei capitali, and was introduced as a sly amendment to a vote on the introduction of the Euro. Apart from the international derision that the legislation incurred, the government won on both counts: financially the Treasury would benefit from the fines and the influx of funds, and politically Il Presidente seemed to have honoured his side of the dark bargain struck before the election. Stashes of illegally exported cash could now, for a small fee, be put through the governmental washing machine. Such was the unease at the legislation that, only months after coming to power, the government was forced to make the ‘reentry of capital’ legislation a vote of confidence in the government.