The Dark Heart of Italy

by Tobias Jones

  Political passion often reaches a disturbing intensity, and yet these people are highly attractive and hospitable and generous and have a highly developed sense of humour. It must be the sun, a terrible sun which beats on their brains during the summer, or perhaps it is the fog, a heavy fog which oppresses them during the winter.3

  That mention of humour reminds me that I spend large amounts of my days laughing. Wit, in the sense of both humour and intelligence, must be the defining characteristic of most Parmigiani. Never is there a dull moment because everyone is a natural raconteur. The humour is exceptionally surreal and intelligent, perhaps because everything that goes on is so incredibly complicated and byzantine.

  Singing the words to that national anthem – ‘we’re ready for death’ – I noticed that there’s one, admittedly morbid, theme which touches all the aspects of Italy which have interested or infuriated me over the course of four years (the exquisite culture, the excruciating bureaucracy, all the style and the superstitions): I Morti. If you spend long enough in the country, you begin to notice that there’s something very unique about death in Italy. I noticed it during my first few days in Italy. It was during a question about birthdays in a bar (the conversation, as it often is, was about horoscopes). Someone asked me when mine was, and I told him the date. In Britain, sharing a birthday with ‘All Souls’ had never raised eyebrows. Here, within seconds, everyone was frowning, backing off or else laughing, slapping me on the back and telling me I was a bit sfigato, ‘jinxed’. My birthday, I was told, was the day of I Morti, ‘the day of the dead’.

  That initial wariness about a date of birth was, I supposed, the normal suspicion about ever mentioning death. To talk about future extinction is not the done thing, and is thought to bring ‘the evil eye’. If you do venture in that direction, it’s wise to ‘make the horns’ with index finger and pinky, pointing to the ground, as a sign of superstitious courtesy. In the south, many even wear an imitation chilli-pepper on bracelets or necklaces, the curling ends of the peppercorn producing those ‘horns’ which ward off evil spirits and therefore, for the time being, death. Given that wariness, someone born on the day of the dead is obviously thought to be a close cousin of the Grim Reaper and bound to bring bad luck.

  Like the political mysteries and the Catholic miracles, when it comes to death there’s still a sense of magical intervention: we don’t know who’s pulling the strings, but we know we’re only puppets. A superstitious bracelet (or the vulgar version: touching the testicles) will ward off the bad luck in the same way mages and astrologers, the staple personalities of Italian television, will tell us which numbers to put down for the lottery. It might seem absurd to a modern rationalist, but there really is a belief in what Fellini called Italy’s ‘ancient cults’. It’s half paganism, half Catholicism. I remember once going into the cathedral at Siena and seeing lines of motorbike helmets hung up on a wall. In front of them were candles, dutifully being lit by the sort of young men you don’t normally see in churches: tough, tattooed, pierced. I asked one what he was doing, and he explained that the orange helmet on the top left of the collection was his. He had had a particularly gruesome crash a few weeks ago, and had come here to hang up his helmet in front of the Madonna with the rest. It was, he explained, a way of giving thanks for the fact that he had cheated death. It hung there like a modern, financial sacrifice to the deity in gratitude for his life.

  When death does come, the rituals of mourning and commemoration are incredible: touching and communal in a way unthinkable elsewhere. I’m normally surprised by the collective amnesia, by the speed with which recent history is brushed under the carpet, but when it comes to I Morti the memory in Italy is a very long one. Every city or village feels like Shelley’s ‘widowed’ Genoa where the ‘moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs’. From every direction the faces of the dead stare back at you, either in sculptured busts or photographs. Every country, of course, has its memorials, but only in Italy is there such a sense that you’re walking in someone else’s footsteps. Perhaps it’s because of the Catholic notion of purgatory, of companionship with and prayers for the dead; or else because, especially in the south, there’s a kind of ancestor cult. Almost every alleyway seems to have its own plaque or memorial; I’ve often paused to look up at them, only for someone to stop and explain who the local dignitary was and explain the highs and lows of their lives. It’s that communal, public side of death which is different. In Sicily especially, but all over the country, you see hand-written notices up on the street corners of parishes: ‘The Gambino family thanks everyone who has been close to them in their time of mourning.’

  If you open the back pages of Italy’s oldest newspaper, the Gazzetta di Parma, dozens of faces stare back at you: these are I Morti, the dead. Some have passed away recently; others have had their photograph put there by relatives or friends on the anniversary of their death. In many other newspapers, national or local, the obituaries section runs on for as many pages as do the financial or sporting sections. When someone from the editorial team of a television channel or a newspaper dies, or even one of their relatives, there are often long threnodies for the following days and weeks.

  Funerals themselves are spectacular. When there’s a particularly famous passing-away, the funeral will always, without fail, be televised. Flags and fists are raised, huge crowds applaud coffins. It doesn’t matter if the deceased is an actor or an anonymous victim of a sadly spectacular murder, the funeral is more than just a send-off, it’s a pageant. Millions of viewers watch the catwalk of politicians who come to pay their respects. The coffin is open, the cameras rolling, microphones are placed near sobbing mothers. In more remote parts of Italy there’s even someone called the prefica, the hired female mourner who guarantees that the wailing will be at a respectable pitch. The spectacle of death is especially marked in football. At every Roma home match, on the southern terrace of the stadium, there’s a banner to supporters who have died that week, or even one to those who died on that day years ago. It’s hard to imagine something so noble happening on the terraces at a British football ground. Many cemeteries are covered with football flags and scarves. ‘W Parma’ is often scrawled on the city walls (the ‘W’ being viva); or else ‘M Juve’ (Morte to Juventus).

  But the dead aren’t just seen, they are also ‘heard’. The point about hearing the dead is that in Italy words are habitually put into the mouths of I Morti, as if there really were voices from the grave. It’s part of the uncanny continuum that happens between Italy’s life and death. In one cemetery in Naples, after the first, extraordinary championship won with Diego Maradona in the 1980s, someone wrote graffiti in the local dialect: Guagliò, che ve site persi! (‘Kid, what you’ve missed!’). Legend has it that a few weeks later the reply from the cemetery, scrawled on another wall, arrived: ‘I didn’t miss a thing!’

  It might simply have been an idle piece of graffiti, but ‘voices from the grave’ is Italians’ favourite poetic genre. The Spoon River Anthology is, by a very long way, the best-selling poetry book in Italy. With its voices from the other side, the dead seem to be heard as they recount their simple, short lives. (When Pino Pinelli was finally laid to rest in 1980 – after his body had again been re-exhumed and examined for evidence – he was buried in the Anarchist section of the graveyard at Carrara, with an inscription from Spoon River.) Spoon River was also the cause of yet another nickname I had been given (to go alongside Zio Tobia and Il Calvinista). At the beginning of one academic year, a couple of students referred to me as Il Suonatore, the ‘player’ or ‘musician’. They never explained why, and by the end of the year the whole class were happily giving me the bemusing epithet. It was eventually explained to me that Fabrizio De André, the plaintive Genovese singer, once issued an album of songs which were ‘liberal’ translations from the Spoon River anthology. The last song on the album is called Il Suonatore Jones:

  Libertà l’ho vista svegliarsi

  ogni volta che ho suonato,


  per un fruscio di ragazze

  a un ballo,

  per un compagno ubriaco.

  (The English by comparison sounds rather dull: ‘I’ve seen liberty wake up/ every time I have played/ for a rustle of girls/ at a dance/ for a drunken friend’.) His life finishes ‘in nettled fields… with a broken flute and a raucous laugh and so many memories…’ The fact that students (who all year had shown no inclination to read any poetry) had however devoured Spoon River and all its musical adaptations, said a lot about their aesthetic tastes.

  Even Italy’s fourth estate – its bureaucracy – has its own way of doing death. I’ve often heard stories of people who have mistakenly been ‘killed’ in the bureaucratic system. It’s nothing sinister, simply the usual gremlins in the system. Since existence within the bureaucracy is often more important than being physically alive, it’s actually quite useful (if you’re behind on your income tax), but more serious if you’re expecting to receive a pension. The alternative to bureaucratic elimination is to keep someone artificially, bureaucratically alive. It’s a sort of resuscitation, in which if a relative is still alive in the bureaucratic sense, there can be all sorts of tax benefits for you (lower bills on the utilities depending on ‘residence’; the number of houses you own and so on). For years I paid bills that were addressed to someone who had died years previously. The practice is vaguely morbid, but is very common. Because of the malfunctioning bureaucracy, until recently hundreds of thousands of dead Italians (the ‘dead electors’) were making their posthumous political opinions felt. Since they were still ‘alive’ in the annals, they could still (or their relatives could still) cast their vote.

  The accommodation of I Morti has always been a major architectural event. Tombs and sepulchres and catacombs have always been ostentatious. They even became the country’s top tourist attractions. The beginning of the Via Appia, the road which heads out of the capital towards Brindisi, used to be the chosen place of Romans for a Sunday stroll, there to enjoy and admire new mausolea which lined both sides of the road. A vital part of the Grand Tour was to search out the tombs of famous poets (despite the fact that many, including Virgil’s and Nero’s, were probably fakes). Dante’s tomb at Ravenna is still an important stop-off for modern travellers, and the catacombs in Palermo are probably more visited than any other site in Sicily.

  November 1, the day before I Morti, is another national holiday, the day on which it’s traditional to visit ancestors in their cemeteries. (Towards the end of October bones suddenly start appearing in the Parma patisserie. The day of I Morti is an opportunity not just to mourn, of course; it’s also culinary tradition. The bones, pastry-coated with garish cream, represent the bones of the dead.) As every Italian schoolchild knows from reading the country’s most famous poem, ‘The Sepulchres’, Napoleonic law was responsible for Italy’s breathtaking cemeteries. His codici decreed that burials had to take place outside the city walls. The result across Europe was the phenomenon of vast, out-of-town graveyards. Unlike Britain, where burial was more usually within church grounds, huge suburbs for the dead grew up outside Italian cities. They are the country’s most beautiful, serene sites.

  In Genoa, for example, the cemetery of Staglieno is built on a hill towards the north-east of the city. On November 1 I went along as a tourist. Since thousands of Genovese were visiting the cemetery, the florist outside must have made half his annual salary within a few hours. There were four trucks selling bouquets to the queues of mourners. The cemetery’s centrepiece is an arcaded square which leads you to the pantheon. The inscription in Latin above the entrance reads: ‘To the glory of God and to the memory of the illustrious Genovesi.’ It’s at Staglieno that Giuseppe Mazzini is buried, next to his mother, in a low, leafy temple. The inscriptions are political rather than religious. Today there are about two dozen fresh bouquets laid out. David Lloyd George, in 1922, left the inscription: ‘To the champion of the oppressed people and the prophet of European brotherhood.’ (The irony is that Mazzini, like Dante and many others now lauded as political or poetic heroes, died exiled from his city. He was, at the time of his death, living under the assumed name of John Brown in Pisa.) In the English part of the cemetery there’s the gratitude of the Empire to Italians in the Great War: ‘The British Empire will always remember, together with those of her children who have fallen for her, those of Italy who gave their lives during the Great War of 1914–1918.’

  Genoa is a grandiose example. The following year I went to one of the smaller rural cemeteries outside Parma. Because it was for less illustrious souls, it appeared like a complex of giant filing cabinets. I Morti are slotted into place, and then rotated according to age and rent in deep walls that are often three or four metres high. The funeral itself involves plasterers sealing off the end of the opening to the file, called the loculo, the ‘niche’. It might sound soulless, but it isn’t: the dead can still be visited, you know where to find them. Almost all the headstones (in reality, the edge of the filing cabinet) carry photographs. On the day of I Morti you go and visit your ancestors, and can even look at your own slot, already booked in the family’s allocated space. The point is that the dead are on display. Even in death, there’s a careful presentation, and even the rigid hierarchies of Italian society survive. The more grand the family, the greater the burial space. Not content with a filing cabinet spot, some build their own temples or shrine. It’s the ultimate in posthumous one-upmanship: ‘Look what I built before I died.’ The cost of marble slabs, arranged to form a temple about the size of a garden shed, often mean that people save for decades just to have the appropriately grand resting place. Silvio Berlusconi has even built his own mausoleum in the grounds of his Arcore estate. It’s designed along the lines of an Etruscan necropolis. Inside are 36 burial slots, reserved for members of his family and his business and political partners.

  Before Italy became, for foreigners, a symbol of the vitality of life (the Edwardian stereotype), it was a symbol of the opposite: the land of the dead or the dying. Henry James had called Venice ‘the most beautiful of tombs’. ‘Nowhere else,’ he wrote, ‘has the past been laid to rest with such tenderness, such a sadness of resignation and remembrance…’ The other-worldly quality of the floating ghost-town of Venice meant that James saw it as a kind of Avalon, a place where bodies were carried in gondolas to their resting place:

  … the little closed cabin of this perfect vehicle, the movement, the darkness and the plash, the indistinguishable swerves and twists, all the things you see and all the things you do feel – each dim recognition and obscure arrest is a possible throb of your sense of being floated to your doom… 4

  Italy’s ‘old age’ made it the natural place for mourning writers to visit during and after the First World War. For Modernists it became imagined as a metaphoric mausoleum, a place where they could come to examine what it meant to be old and to die. James Joyce wrote ‘The Dead’ in Trieste. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which ‘the pale and lovely summoner’ smiles and beckons man to his death, was just the most obvious example of the genre.

  Given its civil wars, though, death in Italy is often more divisive than communal, and memorials and mourners are sometimes acutely politicised. On one of the walls in the main square in Bologna there’s a collage of all the partisans from the city who died in the 1943–45 civil war. It’s like looking at an auditorium of the fallen: a wall of hundreds of black and white faces watching you, almost defying you to challenge their political creed. There are often little vases of flowers left there, or else candles are lit. That in itself is enough to tell you where the political loyalties of the city lie. In fact, the odium between right and left, which became militarist in the 1970s, now finds its most acute expression in the bickering over the wording of memorials. A mile away, outside the station in Bologna, the clock is permanently stopped at 10.25. There was a move by the railway authorities recently to get the clock working again, but the plan was shelved because of a local outcry. 10.25 was the tim
e at which the bomb ripped through the waiting room of the station in 1980, killing 85 people. A little later, revisionists wanted to etch the word ‘Fascist’ from the memorial to those who died; the move – either a worthy attempt to heal wounds, or else a rude attempt to whitewash history – was blocked by the city’s (Forza Italia) mayor. It’s like that monument in Pisa: ‘Anarchist killed by police at an anti-Fascist rally’: provocative as much as it is conciliatory.

  Connected to the politicisation of death is its aestheticisation. Death in Italy has frequently had its aesthetic edge, especially in the country’s terrorism. Non-Italian writers had hinted at the mesmerising quality of violence and terror – Yeats wrote of the ‘terrible beauty’; Shelley about the ‘tempestuous loveliness of terror’ – but it was Umberto Eco who really analysed the politics of death, and thereby gave a political dimension to the ways in which Italian death and terrorism had become attractive and almost longed-for. He discerned not only that death had become aestheticised and adored; he identified the necrophilia as profoundly Fascist:

  … it’s very elusive … but there is one component by which Fascism is recognisable in its purest form, wherever it shows itself, knowing with absolute certainty that such a premise will bring The Fascism: it is the cult of death.5

  The taste for killings and martyrs was, for Eco, Fascism in its purest form. The beautification of terrorism in Italy, perceived by generations of writers, was for him more telling than any professed political dimension. Fascism meant adoring and serving death, be it as the slayer or as the slain:

  To love death necrophilically is to say that it’s beautiful to receive it and risk it, and that the most beautiful and saintly love is to distribute it… This stench of death, this putrid need of death, one feels today in Italy [1981]. If that’s what terrorism (in its deep, ancestrally ‘squadrista’ soul) wanted, it’s got it… 6