The Dark Heart of Italy (16 page)

I don’t know whether it’s because of the Reformation, which was iconoclastic and ‘written’; or else because Britain has had, on the whole, the better writers and Italy much superior artists … but Italy is, unlike Britain, a visual, rather than a literary, country. Perhaps because there’s such a forest of legal and bureaucratic language, very few people read newspapers, even fewer buy or borrow books. Every year or so there are official figures about book-consumption from ISTAT, the national statistical research unit, and the results are always the same: a massive percentage of Italian adults don’t read one book a year. To survive, the
edicole
– the little pavilions on street corners which sell newspapers – have to double as fetish shops, selling gadgets and videos and soft-porn magazines alongside the newsprint. On public transport in Britain, half the passengers might be reading; in Italy, they will be eyeing each other, or else ‘reading’ the
Settimana
Enigmistica
, a magazine of riddles and crosswords. There is, one quickly notices, no populist press, and there will be an Italian bestseller (Andrea Camilleri is the latest example) only once a decade.

Reading, when it’s done at all, is done under duress. None of
my students, I get the impression, has ever read a book for pleasure. The more time you spend in the universities, the more you realise that they are part of what the Italian media calls the ‘illiteracy problem’. A vast amount of teaching is done by dictation. When I ask students how they are taught in other classes, they describe professors who roll up and simply read their own books, chapter by chapter, to their students. If someone interrupts the dictation with a question about what has been read, the affronted professor will pause, then go back and read the sentence again, without explanation. Revision involves buying and rereading the professor’s book, and learning it off by heart. Thus when those students then come to me for top-up lessons on language or literature, they have an acute fear of books and a sense of disorientation if asked to debate. They want to be told what to think, and they will then remember it and quote it back at you in exams.

Visually, though, the country is more cultured than any other. Each church feels like a museum: go into the
duomo
in Parma and, with a 500 lire coin, you can light up the entire cupola and admire the angels and apostles who usher the Madonna into heaven. This Assumption of the Virgin is the work of the city’s most famous artist, Correggio (Antonio Allegri). Titian commented on the work: ‘Reverse the cupola and fill it with gold, and even that will not be its money’s worth’. (Although Dickens, visiting centuries later when the frescos were crumbling, was more scathing: ‘Such a labyrinth of arms and legs: such heaps of foreshortened limbs, entangled and involved and jumbled together. No operative surgeon, gone mad, could imagine in his wildest delirium …’) Every week, even in the smallest towns around Parma, a new art exhibition will open. A lot of my friends seem to be budding sculptors or photographers, or else are studying the popular degree course in
Beni Culturali
(the appreciation and restoration of ‘cultural goods’). Many happily talk to me for hours, without a trace of pretension, about why one architect or artist is worthy of note.

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

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 celebri
ties, 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.’