The Dark Heart of Italy (3 page)

For many reasons the importance of Italy’s bureaucracy is in its politicisation. The civil service has often been so slow to implement laws and legislation that they are superseded before they’re in place.
Funds offered by government often, in the past, never arrived, and so became
residui
passivi
(funds beyond their application date) which were duly returned to the treasury. Time-wasting, the greatest skill of a politicised civil servant, became in the post-war period an art-form, whereby civil servants could delay reforms by their obstinate slowness. Endless left-wing historians have written of the clerical class as a shadow parliament: hostile to change, servile only to its insider clients. The bureaucracy is also acutely politicised by the fact that clerical jobs are so precious that thousands, millions, of Italians compete in competitions for a
poltrona
, an ‘armchair’. The jobs are particularly precious because they offer contracts for
tempo
indeterminato
, for ‘time immemorial’. Thus politicians are lobbied by ambitious parents who long for their child to enjoy the comfortable, cosy world of a clerical job. It’s an example of another key-word of Italian politics:
clientelismo
, the culture of looking after your friends and family, and thereby keeping outsiders and unknowns out of the loop. I’m told the whole set-up is much more meritocratic than it was a few years ago, especially in the north, but it’s still unlikely that you’ll ever get a job without the contacts; you need to know the right local politician, or have the backing of – a phrase you frequently hear – a
famiglia
importante
.

If you’re outside the clerical class, though, you begin to understand the contempt Italians feel for their own state. You have to be painfully deferential to the clerics, you have to plead or lobby for the simplest things in the most wordy, sycophantic way. Or else, you can employ a
faccendiere
, a ‘fixer’, to smooth your way through the offices. After about a year in Italy, I was queueing at the post office, furious because I was having to pay the state monopoly Telecom Italia vast amounts of money for two phone lines which hadn’t existed for months. I met one of my middle-aged students, ‘Lucky’ Luciano, and started grumbling to him. He laughed and shook his head as if that were nothing. He was, he said, still waiting for a 28 million lire refund from the state because he had paid too much tax back in the 1980s. Most of his friends had dodged the tax because they knew it was about to be revoked; he, having been honest, had paid a hefty price. Then,
someone next to us in the queue began listing her woes, which went back to a rip-off she had suffered at the hands of the state during the 1970s. Within minutes, three parallel queues were all complaining, each person coming out with a horror story of governmental avarice and bureaucratic incompetence.

To attempt to reason, of course, is as futile as Canute defying the tide. ‘We’re not citizens,’ the mother of my ‘betrothed’told me, ‘but subjects.’ The distance between government and its people, and the them-and-us mentality it breeds, is central to any understanding of Italy. Everyone feels so badly treated, everything is so legalistic, that people feel justified in being a little lawless. ‘Impotence in front of a blocked political system, incapable of change … the negation of democratic logic’,
4
was even offered in the 1970s as one of the central reasons for Italian terrorism. Italians, the argument went, felt it a ‘metaphysical curse’ to be Italian, to be subjected to those grinding, inefficient but very powerful ‘offices’.

The political consequences of the Italians’ disdain for the Italian state is that the sense of community and of the common weal is minimal. The distancing from anything
statale
breeds individualism and an unusual attitude towards law-abiding. I have never lived in a country where so many people thought the state so criminal, and where, therefore, breaking that state’s laws was so often, and indulgently, smiled upon. Few other countries have citizens with such an ‘each to his own’ mentality, or so much
menefreghismo
, ‘I don’t carism’ (signalled with the back of the fingers thrown forward from the throat to the chin). It often seems as if everyone is trying to beat the system instead of trying to uphold it.
Fatta
la legge
trovato
l’inganno
goes a common proverb: no sooner is a law made than someone will find a way round it.

Thus
furbo
, cunning, is the adjective most usually used by Italians to describe, with both admiration and dismay, their fellow countrymen:
Italiani
,
furba
gente
(‘cunning people’… the hand signal is the thumb nail scratching the cheek, implying someone who’s ‘cut’ or ‘cunning’). It can also mean sly, someone who gets by or gets ahead by being smart. A
furbo
watches his money, and
probably casts a wistful eye on his neighbours’; he doesn’t worry unduly about the rules. It’s a very attractive trait (unless the cunning is at your own expense). Its opposite,
ingenuità
, implies gullibility. It’s much better, of course, to be
furbo
, mildly dodgy, than
ingenuo
, naive (which originally implied virtue, because an
ingenuo
was one ‘born free’ rather than into slavery).

In Italy there’s a morality that is unlike anything I have ever come across before. It’s best summed up by Jacob Burckhardt in his
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
:

Therein lies the irony. Wrong-doing is invariably excused by the fact that political or church leaders are thought to be up to much worse things, and a little tax-dodging or bribery by us lesser beings really isn’t that important. Which, of course, continues the vicious circle: everyone’s up to something, and you’re stupid if you’re not too. Judgements are, in fact, rarely moral. Linguistically, as in so much else, the country is based upon aesthetics rather than ethics. The judgement words most used are not good or bad, but rather beautiful (
bello
) or ugly (
brutto
).
Bello
is an adjective trotted out with such regularity that it entirely obscures a concept like ‘good’; it can then be trumped by
troppo
bello
, when something is overwhelmingly ‘too beautiful’. Thus immorality is less frowned upon than inelegance; to be beautiful, or to be somewhere beautiful or with someone beautiful, is more of an achievement than righteousness. That obsession with outward appearance is at the root of the word
figura
, which implies the ‘figure’ you’ve achieved … not only physically, but in the sense of creating an attractive or ugly impression.
Fare una figura
, to make a bad impression, is an error not necessarily of morals, but of presentation.

Strangely, the immorality is also intimately related to the Catholic church. There’s a confessionalism in which it doesn’t matter what you do, whether you’re good or bad, as long as you remain ‘in the ranks’, as long as you profess your intention to get better. Italian Catholicism is all-embracing (the origin of the word,
katholikos
, implies exactly that): everyone is included, which means that everyone’s forgiven, pardoned. There’s nothing that a humble nod towards the purple cassocks or judicial ‘togas’ can’t resolve. Politicians may be criminals, everyone may even acknowledge as much, but it doesn’t matter: everything is whitewashed. History, personal or political, is quickly forgotten.

Another type of
figura
, this time financial, is an integral part of that presentation. Whereas in Britain talking about or overtly displaying money is rather vulgar, in Italy it’s the opposite. No one must appear poor. If in Britain politicians yearn to present themselves as ordinary human beings, in Italy they try and show how superhuman and super-wealthy they are. For the European elections in 1999, Silvio Berlusconi hired a cruise ship, at his own expense, to campaign around the peninsula. His enormous personal wealth was an asset, not a handicap: people admire him for the money he’s made, and even for the
furbo
way in which he might have come by that money. Not to be outdone, his rival Massimo D’Alema, the then Prime Minister and former Communist, would be pictured on his yacht, keen to prove that he, too, wasn’t short of a
quattrino
, a penny.
Ricchezza
and
bellezza
, wealth and beauty, are the foundations for any decent
figura
. Personal probity seems to be a side-issue.

The upside of this famous Italian ‘a-legality’ or ‘a-morality’ is that, compared to slavish Britain, no one really feels obliged to do anything they don’t really want to. Only dress and dining codes are rigorously obeyed; any other rules – red lights or speed limits or no-smoking signs – are only suggestions. Slowing for pedestrians on zebra-crossings or wearing seatbelts are optional. There is also a completely different work ethic. Maybe it’s because it’s harder to be hurried and industrious in the heat, or else because the beaches and lakes and ski-resorts are all so close. Italy has
more bank holidays (rather, saints’ days and feast days) than any other country in Europe. These wonderful, entirely unexpected days off are sometimes announced, if national, on TV; otherwise you have to know that Saint Hilary is Parma’s patron saint, and therefore the 13 January you will never, for as long you’re within the city’s missing walls, work on that day. They’re also called
ponti
, ‘bridges’, which arch over the week and give you an opportunity to go to the sea from Thursday until maybe Tuesday. Invariably, one of the unions calls a crafty strike the day before, or immediately after, the ‘bridge’, so that their grateful card-carriers can get a better tan.

There’s such a lack of guilt about taking time off, there’s such a ridiculing of workaholics (another nickname I was given was
Il
Calvinista
), that I often felt my working week had barely begun before another blessed saint offered me a quick break, and the opportunity for a pleasant family lunch in the mountains. I also noticed, during the skiing season, that my favourite barman had left a note outside his bar, hand-written on cardboard. ‘Closed because of illness. I’ve gone to recuperate in the Dolomites. I will be better on Monday 18.’

The more I enjoyed the leisurely beauty, the
bellezza
, of Italy, the more sophisticated it seemed. The purpose, I was told, of beauty in Italy, quite apart from simply being beautiful, is that it’s a form of fancy dress: an opportunity to seduce or sedate observers. Italy was a country, I read, ‘peerless in the art of illusionism’.
Bisogna
far
buon
viso a
cattivo
gioco
goes a proverb: appearances are important, and it’s therefore ‘necessary to disguise a bad game with a good face’. It’s a bit like stiff upper lip, but subtly different: it implies not stoicism, but ‘presentation’. Everything is dressed up, beautified and embellished. One Italian writer once described that peacock-syndrome, in which everything becomes part of a great show and subtle disguise:

There were two occasions on which I began to realise how disguised everything was, or at least was thought to be. One Sunday afternoon I was sitting on the terrace of a house in the Apennines. A friend put on the coffee, which came to the boil like an aircraft, arriving from nowhere with a growl and receding with a hiss and a vapour trail. ‘You see,’ said the friend, smiling, ‘this says everything about the differences between English and Italian.’ He was pointing at the icing sugar on his croissant. ‘You call that icing sugar, right? We call it “veil sugar”. Apart from the fact that our term,’ he was nodding, smiling because he knew he was right, ‘is infinitely more elegant than yours, it’s also much more subtle. “Icing on the cake” implies ostentation, right? Ours is a veil, romantic, beautiful, concealing something within …’

Then, a little later, I was in Parma’s football stadium watching a match. Everyone was sitting on their personalised blue-and-yellow cushions, until the ref made a bad decision and they were on their feet, insinuating that he was being cheated on by his wife:
Arbitro
cornuto
!
Arbitro
cornuto
!
(‘The referee’s a cuckold! The referee’s a cuckold!’) It’s an amusing and apt insult (in Britain the referee is just an onanist): apart from the fact that it sounds Shakespearean when translated into English, it implies that even the black shirt of authority, controlling the game, doesn’t know quite what’s going on (be it in the match itself or in his marital bed).

Receiving street directions in Parma is rather like leafing through a calendar at random: go down 22 July, turn left, and then right onto 20th March. All over the city there are plaques, memorials and statues of partisans from the Resistance, guns in hand, who are sculpted to look suspiciously as if they’ve been shot in the back. On street corners, copies of the Socialist or Communist papers are pinned up on public boards. Often you see graffiti
imploring ‘Barricade Yourselves!’, though I’m never sure whether it’s politicking or just an advert for a nearby restaurant, ‘The Barricades’.