The Italian dislike of taxation has prompted the government to some extraordinary measures. It was once calculated that if an individual were to honestly pay every tax to the last lira, he would find himself paying more than 100 per cent of his income. The system assumes dishonesty of massive proportions and thus manages to collect something close to the European average of income tax. Some years ago an attempt was made to shame taxpayers by publishing in each town hall the personal tax paid by each taxpayer. Far from shaming people, it became a matter of pride to stay in the bottom half of the list – only the fessi, the fools, were in the top half. The list I saw one year was laughable. The top place was taken by a man who had paid two million lire, about £1,000. This man is a rich builder, who owns three apartment blocks that I know of.
There is another quirk in the system of assessing personal liability: it is done by meeting an inspector, arguing the case that you are in penury and then agreeing a figure. It is not unknown for people to have special suits and shirts that are clearly old, but which show signs of meticulous mending about the cuffs and collars, creating an air of respectable poverty. It makes a good base from which to begin negotiations. Being Italy, tax and VAT inspectors will often do a deal which saves the taxpayer money while enriching the civil servant.
The tax-law which has had the most far-reaching effect on behaviour came into effect in 1989. Since then all shopkeepers have been obliged to have a cash register with a double till-roll that prints receipts. Any transaction, however small, must be rung up on the register. It is an offence not to issue a receipt, and an offence not to take one. It must also be carried from the shop by the purchaser for at least 50 metres, for within that distance he can be stopped and required to produce a receipt for the items in his possession. If not, both the seller and the purchaser are liable to a fine of £250.
This Draconian law is certainly effective in dealing with tax evasion and limiting the black economy, but it has produced some insane moments. Over-eager guardie di finanza have busted school-children buying sweets with no receipt. A woman was arrested for leaving a hairdresser’s shop with no receipt even though the hairdresser was her son and there had been no charge. Unfortunately I feel sure that before long this system will be adopted by other European states, eager to increase revenues and extend their influence.
Italy always appears to travellers as a country of happy-go-lucky people, laughing, shouting and gesticulating, but with little organization or control. On the surface this may be so, but it is far from the truth. There are many agents of the state, all of whom have powers, should they wish to use them, to make the life of a citizen uncomfortable. There are many kinds of uniformed police, each with their own area of influence and power. At the local level there is the guardia, or vigile urbano. Like all policemen, they are armed. There are traffic police, carabinieri, and fiscal police. All of these are much in evidence. Foreign motorists are unlikely to notice – I have never been stopped while driving a foreign-registered car – but in an Italian car you can reasonably expect to be stopped about twice a week, asked to produce your documentation and a thorough check made of the car. If no documents are forthcoming, the car can be impounded. Any fault, such as faulty lights or insufficient tread on the tyres, is subject to an on-the-spot fine. See how far you can drive at night with a tail-light out before you get stopped and fined.
The state is concerned to know the whereabouts of all its citizens. If I were to sell my house in Gallinaro and move to Rome, I would be obliged to officially transfer my residence to Rome, and re-register my car with Roman plates. In this way an out-of-area car is easily spotted, and can be checked at any one of the myriad roadside check-points. You must at all times carry your identity card, to prove who you are to any inquisitive policeman, something I find hard to remember having spent many years in England and Ireland.
Italians, on the other hand, find it hard to understand how a state can have any control over its citizens when there is neither an identity card, nor, until recently, a driving-licence with a photograph. I have suggested that a man who wishes to disguise his identity from the police in Ireland could supply a false name and address, and in Italy could supply a false identity card. The point is that the majority of people are law-abiding and to me it seems unfair that they should be put to some inconvenience simply to make control of the wayward few easier for the police. This is an argument that I have never had accepted in Italy. A similar line of reasoning, against the necessity for a photograph on a driving-licence, meets with a similar response. It occurs to me that a signature ought to be sufficient, since even in Italy a signature is sufficient on the bottom of a cheque, allowing many millions of lire to be paid out.
Perhaps it is simply that Italians are aware of the waywardness of their national character and know that without sufficient checks and balances life could become more unpredictable than it is already. There is a deep vein of insecurity running through Italian life, a racial memory of a history of constant flux. Just as the farmers of the last century struggled to keep their crops from the marauding brigands, today the fear is economic chaos. There were not always thousands of lire to the pound. Massive inflation during and after the last World War wiped out the savings of millions of Italians. Many people who had their money in property lost it all in bombing raids. Earthquakes have also destroyed properties. In 1921 Sora had a massive earthquake, destroying most of the old town. Compensation was eventually paid in 1989, but lira for lira – damage estimated at 2,000 lire in 1921 was paid as 2,000 lire in 1989.
Italy has now had the longest sustained period of prosperity in its history, but the suspicion remains in the minds of all Italians that well-being is just a temporary blip in what is essentially a vale of tears. The chaos of the past has left indelible marks on the psyche; Italians have a powerful urge to sistemare, a word that can be rendered in English as ‘to bring order into chaos’. But the word has wider usage in Italian. Italians are keen to sistemarsi, to get themselves into a position of comfort and power, where the vagaries of fortune cannot find them. Southern Italians used to believe that a job in the civil service would fit the bill, but government cut-backs have made even this cushy number as shaky as any other. If an Italian tells you that he wants to sistemare his house, he doesn’t mean tidy it up. He means put it right, fix the leaks, add a bathroom, put in a septic tank. There is a constant push to improve, to sistemare.
Currently Naples is the basket-case of Italy. Water supplies are irregular, milk vans have armed escorts, many of its politicians are under arrest or investigation. The Camorra, Naples’ home-grown version of the Mafia, still has tentacles throughout the city and its administration.
A friend told me that Italy’s only long-term hope was to follow the Neapolitan example. Neapolitans have never believed in the mirage of stability – they know that all is flux. They have maintained their flexibility and can cope almost instantaneously with anything fortune may throw at them. Perhaps the adaptability of the Neapolitans is only the sharper edge of one of the great strengths of the Italian nation.
7
Racial Memories
The Comino Valley takes its name from the battle of Cominium, described by Livy in Book X of his history of Rome. The Romans had begun their push southward and found themselves in conflict with the Samnites, whose territory included the valley. The Romans initially suffered one of their most humiliating defeats at the hands of the Samnites at the Caudine Forks and were forced to sign a peace treaty. For thirty years it rankled, until, under the pretext that the consuls had no right to sign the peace treaty, the Romans once more went to war with the Samnites, and this time won, establishing hegemony over most of southern Italy. The battle of Cominium was one of the first defeats for the Samnites. Livy puts it at twelve leagues from Atina, but since this is the only geographical information he gives, the site of Cominium itself is not clear. Accepted wisdom puts the site at Vicalvi, the small promontory which dominates the western end of the valley.
There is a sense of continuous human presence, unbroken through the dim recesses of history. At Posta Fibreno, at the western end of the valley, an enormous spring bursts out from under the Apennines, clear and very cold, which forms a lake before flowing westwards as the River Fibreno to join the Liri. This is a stunningly beautiful place, about which Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote in De Legibus:
We walk
Between the high poplars
Along the banks
Shimmering emerald, opaque.
We have arrived at the island.
There is nothing
More beautiful than this:
Here it is
That the Fibreno opens
Like a bird’s beak.
Here is my real home
And my brother’s too.
From here we spring
From ancient stock;
Here all that we call holy,
Here our relations,
Here so many memories
Of our ancestors.
What struck me so strongly was that Cicero thought this place full of ancient memories, and he of ancient stock. How much more so, 2,000 years later. How hard to see the struggle of a human lifetime as much more than a comma in the valley’s long record of history.
I have always had an interest in Cicero. For years I fondly imagined myself to be descended from him. His name was Marcus Tullius and he was born in Arpino, which adjoins Casalattico. Local legend has it that Casalattico takes its name from Casalis Attici, the home of Pomponius Atticus, Cicero’s friend and publisher. The inference is that Cicero must have had contact with the Comino Valley and may even have had family there, since they were wool merchants by trade. Tullio is common enough in Italy as a Christian name, but rare as a surname; to the best of my knowledge it is found almost exclusively in Gallinaro. All this fanned my belief that he was an ancestor, until I discovered that he manumitted about 300 slaves, who by way of thanks for their freedom took Tullius as their surname. This makes the odds on descent from Cicero pretty thin and I have abandoned it as a theory – instead I now claim descent from Servius Tullius, sixth king of Rome. Cicero, incidentally, means chick-pea, and referred to a wart on his nose. Sad that he should be known throughout history by the name of a facial blemish.
Roman names are not used in Italy with the final ‘-us’ ending as in English but rather with the later Latin vulgate ‘o’. So the man known as Livy to generations of schoolboys in the English-speaking world is called Tito Livio in Italy; Cicero is Marco Tullio Cicerone; Ovid is Ovidio; Marius is Caio Mario. Knowing them by their Italian names makes them somehow less remote and more immediate.
Because the valley has been continually inhabited for thousands of years this historical continuum finds echoes in almost all strands of daily life. In my local dialect there are words not found in modern Italian, phonetically transliterated roughly as poscra, mo, yic, which are nearly pure Latin for ‘the day after tomorrow’, ‘now’, and ‘here’. As television permeates Italian life, so local dialects are declining, but there is one way in which the dialects still thrive. Feste are as important to Italians as wine and sun, and at every festa in my valley there is always a performance in dialect of a ribald sketch. The cast varies little: an old peasant farmer, a spirited daughter, a foolish son, a crafty old woman – all descended in unbroken line from the Atellan farces, originally performed in Oscan (the language of an early Italic people), which degenerated in Roman times to crude mime, but survived in the provinces to become the vulgar belly-laughs of today.
The word ‘dialect’ can cause confusion. In the UK and Ireland it conjures up the rolling consonants of the rural counties, where all that really changes is the accent and perhaps an odd word or two peculiar to the region. In Italy a dialect is really a language, often with its own written tradition and more often than not very different from Italian. Once again the reasons for this are historical: from the break-up of the Roman Empire until the last century, Italy was a loose agglomeration of city states, each with its own traditions and culture. Obviously, states that bordered one another, such as Siena and Florence, had virtually identical languages, whereas if a Neapolitan were to speak in Neapolitan to a Milanese, the latter would understand virtually nothing of the conversation. What we know today as Italian is the language of Tuscany, the language of the great writers of the Italian Golden Age: Boccaccio, Dante and Petrarch. This was the language used by educated men from all parts of the Italic peninsula to talk to one another, much as Latin once was.
What this means is that for many Italians, Italian is their second language. Most people speak their own patois most of the time, saving Italian for conversations with strangers. My friend the poet Gerardo Vacana, in common with many erudite men, delights in speaking Gallinarese rather than Italian. He says he finds it richer in similes. This is true, but in my experience the similes are nearly all agricultural. Until recently I laboured under the misapprehension that I could enrich my Italian simply by speaking to Italians. I have belatedly learnt that this is not a good idea. Oddly most Italians do not speak good Italian. It is rare to find someone with enough interest or pride to really study it and speak it as it should be spoken. When it is well spoken, it is a delight to listen to.
The movement towards a common language encompassing all of Italy has been so successful, thanks to radio and television, that in late 1991 the Italian government felt confident enough to reverse the Italicization policy of Mussolini and pass a new law admitting twenty-two new official languages. These range from Albanian, Croatian, Slovene, Greek, German and French to the regional dialects from Italy’s extremities. Greek, by the way, is still spoken in parts of southern Italy that were, prior to the hegemony of Rome, part of greater Greece nearly 2,500 years ago. The immediate effect of this new law will be to allow towns and street names to revert to their original names, should their inhabitants wish them to do so.
The close link to a 2,500-year-old tradition may seem unusual at this distance from the Mediterranean, but in Italy it results in a casual and sometimes cavalier attitude to antiquity. Italian laws are strict: wherever there is evidence of archaeological interest, the Ministry of Fine Arts steps in and blocks any kind of interference with the site. This is fine, except that the whole Italian peninsula is of archaeological interest. So, for modern man to go about his business, these laws are frequently ignored or evaded. I know of a man who bought a site for a holiday villa near Terracina, where the emperor Tiberius liked to while away the summer. When the foundations were sunk, they revealed the site of a Roman villa. Mosaics and amphorae were discovered. These were immediately destroyed, to ensure that the building would continue. The fact is that the Ministry of Fine Arts has enough sites to keep it occupied for the next few centuries at current rates of excavation, so what in some countries would be seen as wanton destruction of priceless artefacts becomes in Italy a sort of cull.
Archaeological treasures are also the cause of Rome’s lack of an extensive underground railway. Since Mussolini’s day every attempt to expand the syst
em has ground to a standstill within a few metres, since, no matter in what direction they dig, some new archaeological wonder is discovered. As far as I know, there have been many starts, but the system remains with only one more line than Mussolini left it with.
The most perfect example I can think of to demonstrate the layering of history on the landscape is in Pompei. The city is divided along its east-west axis by the Cardus Maximus, the main street. About half-way along its length it bounds the unexcavated quarter. To get a better view of the city, I climbed up to the first floor of a building and found behind and 5 metres below me sprawled a city, while in front of me was an agrarian landscape of fields, maize and vines covering the as yet unexposed part of Pompei. It was easy to see how it was lost for so long. The fields looked no different from millions of others and yet below them was a city. Life continues on the surface as it had on the old.
We visit Pompei most years and now know it quite well. The last occasion brought out some bad behaviour in me. While my wife was painting in the Triangular Forum I sat idly on the steps of the Temple of Hercules, bored. Mindless fiddling led me to discover that the ring-pulls which littered the ground were sharp enough to cut into the stone steps. While Susie painted I cut stone. Eventually I had it – ‘Me transmitte sursum caledoni’ – a little Latin graffito to confound anyone able to make out ‘Beam me up, Scottie’. I was delighted with this, and when we got back to Gallinaro I told Silvano how clever I’d been. As the curator of antiquities in Cassino, he was outraged. ‘You’re a vandal That’s a disgraceful thing to do. Maleducato.’ I’m still proud of my riposte. ‘Since I came here from the north, at least I’m in the mainstream tradition of vandals arriving to deface and destroy.’
North of Naples, South of Rome Page 10