North of Naples, South of Rome

by Tullio, Paulo;

  That clothes maketh the man is not an old adage in Italy, it’s a way of life. As far as I know, Italians spend more per capita than anyone else on clothes. Fashion is a tyrant in Italy. If you should take it into your head to buy a blue pullover, you’d better hope that blue is one of this year’s colours; if it isn’t you won’t find a blue pullover anywhere.

  The tyranny of fashion has many guises. In clothes it is obvious and immediate: no one can afford to be seen in last year’s ski wear, or in a cut that is no longer di moda. Italian designers have in recent years underscored this anxiety among their buyers by putting the year of manufacture prominently on the garment. Either you unpick this, leaving an ugly mark, or you buy a new one next year.

  The obverse of this love of beauty is a dislike of ugliness. Non è bello has a definitive ring as a put down. Paradoxically, the copious hideous buildings and odorous heaps of rubbish don’t seem to qualify as ugliness. The dislike of ugliness takes many forms; its most obvious is the need for even the most functional object to be designed. It is not sufficient that a can opener works well, it must do so beautifully. Until the French started putting a little thought into the appearance of their cars, they didn’t sell well in Italy. That they were mechanically advanced with superb suspension, that they were reliable and easy to service cut no ice. The cars were ugly, and no one would buy them. Realizing this, the French left the design work to Italians in Turin, and immediately the cars began to sell.

  Any Italian street is a fashion parade. At first glance the pavements appear to be peopled with extraordinarily good-looking creatures, causing visitors to remark on the physical beauty of the Italian race. Closer inspection shows a more ordinary range of attributes, but each Italian somehow accentuates their good features while disguising the bad. It is also true that their bearing, which screams confidence and self-esteem, helps to create the desired effect.

  There is a sense of style in all aspects of daily life: in clothes, in accessories and in people’s behaviour. Psychologists have suggested that our style of driving is a reflection of how we live our lives. Watch Italians driving through the traffic-choked streets of Rome for a living demonstration of panache. Everyone seems to know the exact length and width of their cars; tiny Fiats accelerate with their larger brothers, whole lines of cars move as one, instantly, as the lights go green. There is no dawdling, no hesitation. Vans whiz into spaces that seem large enough only for small cars. The omnipresent Api, the enclosed three wheelers built on a Vespa, manoeuvre deftly through traffic and over pavements. You can sense an almost tangible pride in the way the Italians throw their cars about, confident in their skill. There is a vicarious frisson as you watch the near misses, which rarely turn into close encounters. If the psychologists are right, then this is a mirror on the Italian way of life.

  This is why car accidents generate so much heat among the protagonists. Somebody clearly screwed up, misread the situation, didn’t fully appreciate their car’s size. In short, somebody made a brutta figura, somebody lost face. No Italian would admit this readily, hence the roadside arguments. The self-perception of being in control, of confidence in their own abilities, is another facet of the drive for beauty. Elegance in behaviour is as important as elegance in dress. Anything that shakes this exposes an unpleasant ugliness, so must be avoided if possible.

  Much of what Italians do during the day is a public statement. The bar you go to for coffee, the kind of cigarettes you smoke, what beer you drink – all are a carefully controlled expression of an Italian’s public persona. Whereas in our valley beer used to be Peroni and only Peroni, nowadays you must be specific. If you ask simply for a beer, you will be served Stella Artois, or Heineken, or Carlsberg or anything but Peroni. Apart from the fact that a glass of imported draught will cost you more than a larger bottle of Peroni, and it is therefore in the publican’s interest to serve it, it is becoming increasingly unfashionable to drink local beer. Drinking imported beer displays the drinker as cosmopolitan, worldly. Only the old and poor drink Peroni now, just as only the poor and the old smoke Italian Nazionali.

  Actually, that needs clarifying. All cigarettes sold in Italy are manufactured by the state tobacco monopoly, Monital, so all cigarettes are Italian in that sense. However, it is the Italian-manufactured Winston, Marlboro and assorted foreign brands that are the fashionable smoke. Unlike in many other countries, smoking is still rife in Italy. I remember meeting some of the Italian cross-country skiing team practising in the Macchiarvana, near Pescaserroli. As we chatted they took their fags out and passed them round. As a smoker myself, I took encouragement from watching athletes do what I believed to be harmful.

  Italians are less chauvinist than the French; they have always been prepared to absorb ideas and fashions from abroad. My guess is that they are so self-confident and pleased with their way of life that taking on ideas from others is no threat to their national or personal identity. On the crowded FM wave-band it is hard to find Italian music; American and English predominate. Because of the fascination with English-speaking music the young, particularly, are becoming fond of using English. ‘Picnic’, ‘weekend’, ‘bungalow’, ‘cottage’, ‘stress’ all regularly pepper conversations. Unfortunately for native English speakers, not all the words are used as they are in English. Because Italian puts the adjective after the noun rather than before it, some phrases get a little mangled. Apart from the standard forty-card deck, Italians also use the fifty-two-card pack that they call the poker deck. This includes two cards marked the ‘Jolly Joker’. The joker is known universally as the ‘Jolly’. ‘Self-service’ suffers the same fate, ‘self’ becoming the noun. Many petrol stations are boldly signed ‘Self Area’. Golfing pullovers are known as ‘golf’s and jogging is inexplicably called ‘footing’.

  Language does not always travel well: the computer-games giant Sega sells defiantly in Italy with a brand name that means ‘wank’ in Italian. Still, Mitsubishi sells jeeps in Spain under the name Pajero which is slang for ‘wanker’, and for years General Motors sold a model to Spanish-speaking South America called the Nova – literally ‘it doesn’t go’. Irish Mist liqueur sells in Germany where mist means ‘shit’, so perhaps no one really cares.

  The concern and the control that Italians exercise over their personal fashion statements extends to most of the family as well. Why are children so regimented? Why are teenagers so controlled? Why is calling an Italian male a cuckold such a pervasive and powerful insult? The answer lies in the need to control. Just as keeping oneself in control of one’s life is important, so too are the extensions to that life. Unlike in England, there is no debate in Italy as to who is at fault if teenagers run wild. It is the parents, no question. There is no concept that society at large is to blame; the buck stops with the family. So it stands to reason that if you are going to get the blame for your offspring’s bad behaviour, you must make some attempt to curb it.

  This is why Caesar’s wife was beyond reproach. To suggest otherwise is to imply that Caesar cannot control his wife – and if he can’t control his wife, what hope is there for the empire? Why else should suggesting someone has an unhappy marriage be an insult? The insult factor in this hits an Italian male on his Achilles heel. It is because he believes that his wife’s behaviour is somehow within his control that the suggestion of infidelity is so insulting. All Italian men believe that if you are a real stud, an Italian stallion, your wife will never look at another man since all her needs will be satisfied. The opposite also follows: if you are not sufficiently virile, with buckets of testosterone coursing through your veins, your wife will find a lover, hence the insult. What still puzzles me is that while this belief is held among men, the same men will boast endlessly of their conquests of other men’s wives. Surely, I ask, if these women are available, if women all over Italy are eagerly awaiting an invitation to dalliance, then so too must your wife? This suggestion rarely meets with anything other than ridicule. ‘My wife? You must be mad. She’d never do that to me.�
�� Even this statement needs looking at. It suggests that a wife’s infidelity is to spite or hurt the husband, not because she followed her desires in a moment of passion.

  When I was a youth in the Gallinaro of the 1960s, modern ideas were still waiting in the wings. Young men and women got engaged as a prelude to marriage. It was just conceivable that an engagement could be broken, up to say six months, but after that a broken engagement left the girl with no further hope of marriage unless she emigrated. The reason for this is that a long engagement was understood to be a certain prelude to marriage. Therefore the two parties would almost certainly sleep together prior to the marriage, leaving the girl no longer a virgin, and thus no longer eligible for marriage. Logic played no part in these equations, that was just the way it was.

  This system put enormous strains on people who discovered early in their engagement that it just wasn’t working. It was so hard to back out that it was often easier to proceed. The kind of marriage that this produced made marital infidelity a foregone conclusion. This mentality is mostly history, but it is recent history, and it makes understanding modern parents a little simpler. There is a tendency for people who have undergone painful initiation rites to want others to go through them as well.

  Still, even in the valley things are changing. There are young women who live their lives as they wish, with jobs and cars and little or no parental involvement. There are young, unmarried women who take their summer holidays with their boyfriends. What makes this worth reporting is not that it is accepted, but that it is still remarkable, still unusual enough to comment on. Of course it is not the young themselves who comment; for them it is entirely right and proper. It is the stalwarts of the old order, whose rearguard action is still being fought. That Italy has become secular enough in the past twenty years to pass referenda allowing divorce and abortion is remarkable, but it does not point to the disappearance of the ancien régime, only a temporary occlusion. For the moment the prevailing Euro-secularism holds sway in Italy, while the Catholic Church is battered by financial and sexual scandals, its mystique and authority eroded daily.

  Twenty years ago the only access to ideas other than an exchange in the bar was from the one state television channel. Even until the 1970s this channel had peculiarities all of its own. For example, all the advertisements for the day were in one half-hour slot – at half past six, I think, called Carusello, and people actually watched it, as though it were a programme. In rural Italy ideas had been subject to little change, old shibboleths and taboos remained years after they had been broken elsewhere. There was a certainty about right and wrong, about behaviour and morality, that has now melted into the ether. In a way, it seems to me that the lack of certainty in all these things is what makes Italians so clubbable, so happy to be in a group. It is this urge for certainty that makes the slavish following of fashion so endemic.

  No Italian fashion guru is going to say, ‘This year everyone should make their own fashion statement; everyone should just go with their own colours and just be who you want to be.’ How can you be confident and secure in your appearance if no one knows what is fashionable? This is the kernel of the insecurity that makes the fashion tyrants in Italy so powerful and rich. There is no history of personal fashion statements such as London experienced in the 1960s. Carnaby Street fashion got to Italy only after it had been made over by the Italian fashion houses. I remember at the time explaining that this missed the point, that the idea was to make your own fashion, not have it handed to you. It was a bit like selling the concept of igloos to the South American Guaranoto. Twenty-five years on, it’s still a concept Italians have difficulty grasping. The old ideas die hard. Italian mums still iron creases into their sons’ 501s.

  Despite the repression of sexual behaviour by society and the Church, until recently there were still areas that had somehow been missed by the censors. Prostitution has never been a hidden, hush-hush trade in Italy, but always upfront and honest. It was and is accepted, if not as a necessity, then at least as an actuality that will always be there. Prostitutes are visible in Italy. They are on the motorway verges – at night with bonfires to keep themselves warm and to help to be seen; they work from home and in hotels. They are as prevalent as soft-core pornography, which is everywhere. The juxtaposition of strict Catholic morality and easily available sex for sale has always struck me as strange. Perhaps it is yet another example of that very Italian ability to live in the world not as we would wish it to be, but rather as it is. The same tolerance is shown to Catholic priests who fail in their vow of celibacy. Nobody finds it strange that this should happen, strange only that it hadn’t happened sooner.

  Italian women have close relationships with their sons. Areas that are taboo in some societies are not in Italy. Women will proudly point to their infant son’s genitalia, to which the expected response is, ‘Gosh, yes, really big, and such balls.’ Even as sons grow older, their mothers continue a happy banter with them about their burgeoning sexuality. Although not used to it, I find that there is something comfortingly natural and uncomplicated in these exchanges. This kind of sexual banter comes as naturally to Italian women as breast feeding.

  Since the days of the single television channel Italy has gone further down the road of deregulation than any other European state. It started with the FM radio band. It was deregulated in 1978, and anyone who wanted a licence to broadcast paid a £30 fee and was free to set up a radio station. Licences covered a low-power transmitter, which allowed a range of some 30 kilometres, so national networking was not a possibility. It did mean, however, that before long the Comino Valley was full of small radio stations hustling for advertising. Within a couple of years the good ones remained and the bad ones had failed from lack of advertising revenue.

  So successful was this experiment in pleasing small interest groups and raising revenue for the state that the government took the plunge and decided to deregulate television as well. Apart from the state’s three channels, each broadcasting area sells licences for fifty-six channels. In the early years every pressure group, every political party, every hopeful entrepreneur bought a licence, a top-floor flat and an aerial. Eight of my friends got together and started TV Sora. All of these new stations ran on second-hand equipment and relied on endless talking heads throughout the day and old videos run on endless loops throughout the night. They called it twenty-four hour broadcasting and it was very cheap. So cheap that questions formed in my mind as to the value for money given by national stations elsewhere in Europe with a maw ever greedy for increasing licence fees. Everyone needed advertising revenue to survive and to get that you needed viewers. Most of these embryonic stations stumbled upon the same sure-fire formula: sex.

  Until these private stations came along, Italian game shows where housewives strip did not exist. This was the fare designed to wean the Italian viewing public from the state television service, the RAI. In those halcyon days of free-for-all broadcasting there was no nine o’clock watershed; sex was on TV from early morning till late at night. Oddly enough, no one seemed in a hurry to censor it. Whatever strictness there may be in Italy with regard to sexual morality, there is nothing Puritan about it, nor any urge to proselytize. My elderly relatives responded to the non-stop sex shows on the private stations by simply refusing to watch anything other than RAI.

  The idea of sex as a hook was remarkably successful, and within three years several large television stations emerged. The original legislation had preserved national networking for the RAI. Private channels that eventually bought up licences for all of Italy could not network, that is, they could not show I Love Lucy in Milan at the same time as they did in Naples. Out of the mayhem of the first few years Silvio Berluscone built his empire.

  Just as with radio, television stations with catchy titles like the Maoist and Trotskyist Progressive Television for the Proletariat and the Opus Dei Channel exhausted the resources of even their most fervent backers within the first couple of years. What remained was wha
t the public wanted, but where did the sex go? Once the viewers had been won, the larger channels felt that going kosher would lend them more kudos, and the sex went out of it. If you really want to find it, you still can, but it is no longer the all-pervasive daily continuum it once was. Colpo Grosso, the quiz show where the contestants have to take all their clothes off, is still going. Going so well that now they use the topless dancers and the set in the Milan studio for German contestants and a German host, which is then exported as Tutti Frutti to a German satellite broadcasting channel. A good example of pan-European co-operation.

  For the most part Italian men and women do not have competitive relationships. There is an easy understanding between the sexes of their different roles. The women decide on all matters pertaining to the home, friends and children, while the men decide what car to buy. Some men even choose their own clothes. In my teens I was struck by how easy and comfortable relationships with Italian girls were. Once I had grasped the fact that sex was not available prior to a long engagement and simply enjoyed the relationship without looking for sexual gratification, I found these relationships to be infinitely more satisfying than many in England or Ireland where sex figured prominently. There is a lot less trench warfare between the sexes and a good deal of openness.