The Dark Heart of Italy (31 page)

The most frequent question any foreigner is asked in Italy is ‘isn’t it beautiful?’ ‘Yes, absolutely’ is the obvious, expected answer. The standard reply I now give (having been asked the question three or four times a week for the last four years) is that of course Italy is the
bel paese
, but that it has aged like someone who has lived life in the fast lane, someone who has abused themselves and has the lines and scars and stories to prove it. Because Italy, as is obvious to anyone who looks out of the window of a train, is big on building. Since the war the country has seen half a century of ceaseless construction – be it at break-neck speed or more usually in snail-pace developments. (All ‘works-in-progress’ have billboards announcing the law and the architect which have allowed building to begin, accompanied by a projected completion date which is usually long-since passed.)

La Speculazione Edilizia
, basically ‘real-estate gambling’, was the novella which Italo Calvino considered his best work. It describes the ‘new social class of the post-war years’, the ‘improvising
entrepreneurs without scruples’ and the way in which they caused the ‘squalid invasion of cement’. The book was written during 1956–57, but could equally be applied to the entire post-war period in which money flowed as fast as the concrete. It’s a trend that was captured in the opening shots of Francesco Rosi’s
Le Mani Sulla
Città
(‘Hands Over the City’): all you can see from the window of a helicopter are tons and tons of white concrete. In one long and uninterrupted take, the camera shows Naples and all its rampant redevelopments. The buildings look the same: tall white cubes with tiny windows, stretching for miles and miles over the hills and towards the port. When the camera looks directly down, you can see the grid of the city, the narrow streets between the new buildings and, as it zooms in, the lean-to shacks between the motorways.

The film, made in 1963, was similar to Rosi’s other films: a plea to battle against the abuses and illegality of society. It was a nightmare vision of the new Italy: the collapse of a
palazzo
isn’t used to slow down development but to speed it up. The ‘Party’ (the Christian Democrats) get rich by assigning building contracts to
mafiosi
, who in return guarantee the politicians their votes. The city council’s one honest politician, a Communist, is powerless to stop the speculation, and is reduced to traipsing from office to office looking for proof of illegality which doesn’t exist. As far as the law goes,
tutto
è in
regola
, everything is ‘by the book’. The lawless has been legalised. The commission of inquiry can reach no conclusion. Politics is reduced to the buying and selling of votes, made possible by the vast amounts of money slushing around the construction business. Besieged by angry women, the mayor unfolds huge notes and passes them around. Looking over his shoulder he smiles and says ‘Consigliere, see how democracy works?’

If building residential properties is lucrative,
appalti
are even more so.
Appalti
– governmental contracts – are the gravy of the Italian economy. Before the Clean Hands prosecutions against bribery, it was normal for politicians to get a hefty kickback from the recipient of any contract. As the system became habitual, huge
factories and refineries were built simply to make the politician and the constructor a profit, regardless of whether there was any need for them. Once a particular project had served its purpose (injecting a bit of cash in the right directions), it could be shelved and forgotten. Many now lie abandoned half-way to completion, as people have realised that there was never the necessity. There are, all across the south, roads that lead literally nowhere. Those abandoned, useless constructions are called the ‘cathedrals in the desert’, and look like something from
Ozymandias:
‘trunkless legs of stone’ in the sand.

Since Clean Hands, people are more aware of the problem of government oiling the wheels of big business, and politicians therefore benefiting. But it still goes on and is, many have suggested, making a comeback. Eyebrows were raised after the election of 2001 when a building entrepreneur from Parma, Pietro Lunardi, was made ‘Minister for Infrastructure and Road-Building’. Lunardi’s role in his engineering and construction company, Rocksoil, would provide yet another potential conflict of interests for the government since he would be responsible for spending a 100 trillion lire war-chest on everything from the high-speed rail link between Milan and Rome to the long-projected bridge which might finally unite Sicily with the mainland. What if Lunardi’s Rocksoil had interests in the bidding? Quizzed on the matter by a journalist, the politician’s defence was the invincible ‘family’ argument – ‘Why should one hundred families have to be turned out of house and home just to please I don’t know who?’

Then, a few months later, the minister made a comment that sent out a very clear message about his intentions: ‘One needs to get along with the Mafia and the Camorra [the Napolitan Mafia]. Everyone should resolve problems of criminality as they see fit … the Mafia has always existed, always will …’ If anyone was still in any doubt, his words were a chilling indication of who the government was prepared to accommodate. It was, wrote one newspaper, as if the martyred anti-mafia judges had never existed, as if all the mourning at their deaths had suddenly been forgotten. One cartoon in the (left-wing)
L’Unità
newspaper spelt it out:
‘The government says we should get along with the Mafia,’ says one character. ‘Judging by the election results in Sicily,’ replies the other, ‘someone’s getting along with them very nicely.’

The fact that the scandal blew over after a few days’ indignation is typical, because fear about construction corruption is so widespread that it isn’t news. The consequences, though, for the country at large are hugely damaging: tax-payers feel, rightly or wrongly, that a cut of all their taxes is paid back into the politicians’ pockets (I’ve never met anyone in Italy who isn’t convinced of this); thus tax-dodging comes to appear a form of honest resistance; the costs of public works are artificially high, because it’s in the interests of both parties to up the prices; finally, nobody outside the loop is likely to get a look-in. The best company making the most financially competitive bid rarely comes out on top.

The cost, unfortunately, isn’t only financial. When I first arrived in Italy, in the spring of 1999, there was a short news flash: a block of flats had collapsed in Foggia in Puglia. 71 people died. I was astonished, not just by the fact of what had happened (the flats, constructed at the cheapest costs conceivable, had just caved in to gravity), but by the fact that a few days later it wasn’t even mentioned. It was, I was told, a not uncommon occurrence. Three and a half thousand people have been killed since the war in landslides alone. Part of the reason is that Italy has a uniquely sensitive ecosystem: 6,400 miles of coastline, two mountain ranges, tectonic fault-lines, volcanoes. Britain appears geographically very gentle by comparison. Many reports from around the country, whatever the season, are about the physical battle for survival. Earthquakes flatten entire suburbs, landslides obliterate villages, fires rip through ancient forests and volcanoes spit out molten lava. The elements, given the sheer number of human lives they claim, seem simply crueller than elsewhere. But the problem is compounded by the human desecration of the landscape, and the deaths often seem an almost biblical revenge for the violations of the land.

The tragedy of Vajont was Italy’s worst civilian disaster of the post-war period. For years, until a ‘protest-play’ by Marco Paolini
was broadcast in 1998, it was simply forgotten. Now the valley in the Dolomites has become a place of lay-pilgrimage, where thousands of people from across the country visit and pay their respects. The atmosphere there is like that at the former trenches from the First World War in France and Belgium. As you walk around the rough scrub you know that here, in the earth, lie thousands of people swallowed up by the soil. In October 1963, Mont Toc, a mountain of porous rock, gave way under the weight of a man-made lake whose capacity had been endlessly increased despite the warnings of every visiting expert. As the mountain collapsed into the lake, fifty million cubic metres of water slopped like a tidal wave over the edge of the dam. The water fell vertically for hundreds of metres before ripping through the villages below. Two thousand people lost their lives.

Another – this time on-going – man-made disaster is the car culture. Car-production is the foundation stone of the Italian economy, and the country now has a higher per capita ownership of cars than any other country in the world (it overtook America in the late 1990s). No other country in the world is as obsessed by its cars and their possible speeds. Driving is a white-knuckle ride: everyone seems embarrassed by being anywhere other than the fast lane (the slow lane is known as the
corsia
della
vergogna
, the ‘lane of shame’), so it thus gets slower. Then impatient drivers overtake on the inside, slaloming between the other cars and flashing their lights to persuade a lorry to pull onto the hard shoulder. Many are simultaneously talking on telephones, or else gesticulating to a driver in the adjacent lane who is going too slowly. Even on narrow streets in the
centri storici
of medieval cities, four-wheel jeeps career like large bobsleighs through the shoppers, the drivers shouting wildly if someone holds them up. The consequence is a mortality rate that is nearer something from a war zone: in the last decade, 72,000 people have died on Italian roads. News reports are invariably dominated by the latest multiple crash on a motorway. At the same time, levels of smog throughout the plain of the Po are suffocating. Often the traffic in Milan has to be literally halved, meaning that only odd or
even numberplates are allowed into the city centre in order that pedestrians might breathe.

The response of the new government to the car problem was to announce plans to notch up the speed limit by another 20 kph, to 150 kph on certain roads. For the first time since emigrating to Italy, I felt completely disgusted by the whole situation and desperate to go home. More people, I repeated aloud to myself, have lost their lives in the last decade on Italian roads than America lost in the entire Vietnam war… seventy-two thousand people. And yet the solution is to increase the speed limit. As with
abusivismo
, the new government appeared on the side of the lawless bandits and the
menefreghisti
(the ‘I couldn’t carers’). Any rules or laws were by now nothing more than an affront to individual freedoms, and were to be ignored or done away with. That lawlessness might sound vaguely attractive unless you’ve seen it first-hand: hundreds of miles of beaches replaced by concrete slabs, cars which career onto the pavement and into prams and which never stop after an accident, residential buildings which give way like sandcastles at sunset.

After a few days watching immobile bulldozers in Agrigento, I decided to make my way back to Palermo. Most of the other journalists had already left weeks before. Waiting for the train in Agrigento’s railway station I went into the little chapel. Under a little image of a Madonna were the words: ‘Monsignor Montucci decrees that whosoever pronounces four glorias in front of this shrine shall receive one hundred days of indulgence.’ It’s that, I suppose, that lies at the heart of the moral conundrum of
abusivismo
in Sicily: transgressors are indulged rather than punished, and everyone’s sins are forgiven as long as they say the right prayer, or else pay the fine to the politicians’ coffers.

I left the railway station’s chapel and decided instead to hitchhike back to Palermo along the coast. I had little optimism, given the rude grunts I had received in many bars and hostels. By then, though, I knew that each time I was exasperated by life in Italy, an act of breathtaking civility was only just around the corner to
restore my faith. Within five minutes a man stopped. The car, like most in Sicily, was so dented that it looked like aluminium foil folded over a leg of lamb. There were already seven in the car. The driver had just stopped to explain why he couldn’t pick me up.
Auguri
, he said. ‘Best wishes’. Another soon stopped to explain he had to turn off. It’s inconceivable that something of the sort would ever happen in the north. Two rich kids predictably stopped slightly ahead of me. One step towards them and they sped off, laughing. Then a baker picked me up. ‘I’ll take you to where there are a lot of girls. You’re still up to that at your age aren’t you? You American then?’

‘British.’

‘Myself, I’ve never been to the continent,’ he said, examining me as he overtook a lorry loaded with lemons. I wasn’t sure if he meant ‘continent’ as in Italy or Europe.

‘Britain’s not really the continent either. It’s a collection of islands like Sicily…’

The baker then delivered a soaring, eloquent monologue explaining exactly what he had intended by the word ‘continent’: ‘For me,’ he said, ‘the continent implies anything that creeps onto this island, that tells me what to do. I don’t care whether that’s Rome or London, if you come here and want to be my boss, you’re the continent.’ He went on for an hour, summarising his notion of autonomy from any authority. Each time his voice sounded stern about the ‘continent’, he would offer me another of his
arancini
, his balls of fried, orange rice. He left me at a beach full of adolescents, including the two, now-sheepish, rich kids who had driven by earlier. ‘My house is over there if you ever need anything,’ the baker said extending his flour-dusted fingers.

That was in Marsala, a town whose name implies in Arabic ‘the port of God’. It’s famous as the home of the sweet dessert wine and as the landing place of Garibaldi and his ‘thousand men’ in Sicily as they exported the unification movement to the south. I sat on the beach watching the huge rollers crash against the coast, splashing the private deck-chairs which everyone has to hire. (Even in Sicily the beaches have all been privatised.) Huge speakers
blared out Europop. Stunningly beautiful girls, their fluorescent bikinis flattering their dark skin, were throwing frisbees to each other, seemingly hoping that they got taken in the wind to the deck-chairs where the single men were sitting.