The Dark Heart of Italy (34 page)

One shop-owner told me how he hated these protesters: ‘I’m from the National Alliance and I’ve got absolutely nothing in common with those idiots,’ he said. ‘I think Article 18 should be repealed. Of course it should. Here it’s impossible to sack anyone. It’s like having marriage without a divorce. A lot of what the government wants to change is for the better: it wants an elected president, chosen by the people not by parliament. It wants to reform the judiciary and RAI. All that is fine. It’s just that,’ he began rocking his hands in the imploring praying position, ‘it’s
just that if there was one man in the entire country you wouldn’t trust to reform all those things, the one man you shouldn’t let near the whole project, it’s Berlusconi!’

On the train back to Parma I read Shelley. Writing about the long history of Italian tyranny, he spoke about the ‘viper’s paralysing venom’ (the snake was the symbol of the Visconti family). ‘Lawless slaveries’ and ‘savage lust,’ he wrote, trample ‘our columned cities into dust.’ It’s much the same language that the country’s left wing is now using: apocalyptic and pessimistic, convinced that democracy is in peril. Is it a hyperbole to say Berlusconi is a dictator? Is ‘
Forzism
’ really a twenty-first century, televisual version of Fascism?

It’s certainly true that the authority of the boss is unquestionable. He is above the law and criticism of him will be punished. Protest marchers will be dispersed by bullet and baton. Magistrates who rock the boat are themselves threatened with prosecution. Six out of seven channels of communication are dominated by the government. What passes for programming is really propaganda or else cheap pornography. The outcome of elections, at least in certain regions, seems certain to be levered in the government’s favour. Any diversity in Italy, any criticism of
Il
Presidente
, is now identified with terrorism. It is seen as an incitement to violence and will be duly quashed by the authority of the state. It reminds me of Primo Levi’s definition of democracy: ‘Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed,’ he wrote; ‘Fascism does not want them, forbids them.’ The trouble is that there’s something slightly absurd about accusing Berlusconi of being a Fascist. It’s ridiculous to say that Italy isn’t a democracy. Then again, it seems equally ridiculous to say that it
is
.

Il Presidente
is such a unique political model, he’s so
sui generis
, that it’s impossible to compare him with anyone else. Perhaps only a fictional creation captures the idea. Shortly after all the TV channels fell into Berlusconi’s hands, there was a satirical email doing the rounds. It succinctly expressed the way in which Berlusconi has become the Orwellian Big Brother:

The only other useful comparison for the bizarre political model is a religious one. It’s a comparison which Berlusconi himself has often made, comparing himself to either Moses or Jesus. That’s exactly what watching him feels like: he can be caring, gentle, smiling. Then suddenly he will become stern, strict and critical of all around him. He seems to think he has a monopoly on moral guidance; he’s followed by millions of the faithful, some because they believe him, others because they might need him. He appears to own the land we walk on, and to watch our every waking move. Shortly after the Euro arrived, I received a currency-converter in the post with a letter from
Il Presidente
saying ‘Dear friend, our dear old Lira is to be substituted…’ It had been sent to everyone in Italy, ‘with the most cordial good wishes’. Everywhere you look, you realise that Berlusconi is involved. It reminds me of those hymns about how ‘The Good Lord Made It All’. You can’t escape, anywhere on the peninsula, his presence and his produce. Everyone is agreed that he’s a prophet, only as yet no one knows if he’s a false one or not.

Late that spring, I was back watching football. It was an international match and the tinny trumpets were rasping out the national anthem, the
Inno di Mameli
. For some reason I found it intensely moving. I sang the melodramatic words with the rest of the stadium. They seemed to express the immense suffering and bravery
in the country: ‘We’re ready for death! We’re ready for death! Italy has called!’

I realise I have become something I never thought possible: patriotic and proud about being an adopted Italian. In more honest moments, I realise that I might never quite be able to leave the country. That longing to leave, and the inability to pull yourself away from the
bel casino
, the ‘fine mess’, has been written about for centuries. Using the usual prostitution metaphor, one of the country’s most important patriots, Massimo D’Azeglio, wrote: ‘I can’t live outside Italy, which is strange because I continually get angry with Italian ineptitude, envies, ignorance and laziness. I’m like one of the people who falls in love with a prostitute.’ That, in fact, is precisely the feeling of living here: it is infuriating and endlessly irritating, but in the end it is almost impossible to pull yourself away. It’s not just that everything is
troppo bello
, ‘too beautiful’, or that food and conversation are so good. It’s that life seems less exciting outside Italy, the emotions seem muted. Stendhal wrote that the feeling one gets from living in Italy is ‘akin to that of being in love’, and it’s easy to understand what he meant. There’s the same kind of enchantment and serenity, occasionally insecurity and sadness. And writing about the country’s sharp pangs of jealousy and paranoia, Stendhal knew that they exist precisely because the country’s ‘joys are far more intense and more lasting’. You can’t have the one without the other.

I feel even more tied to Parma than to Italy. The city is one of the capitals of Italian culture, from cuisine to classical music. It is a place of such aggressive political opinions, coupled with incredible generosity, that I can’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else. Giovanni Guareschi, the writer of the ‘Don Camillo’ stories, proudly wrote about his fellow
Parmigiani
:

That mention of humour reminds me that I spend large amounts of my days laughing. Wit, in the sense of both humour and intelligence, must be the defining characteristic of most
Parmigiani
. Never is there a dull moment because everyone is a natural raconteur. The humour is exceptionally surreal and intelligent, perhaps because everything that goes on is so incredibly complicated and byzantine.

Singing the words to that national anthem – ‘we’re ready for death’ – I noticed that there’s one, admittedly morbid, theme which touches all the aspects of Italy which have interested or infuriated me over the course of four years (the exquisite culture, the excruciating bureaucracy, all the style and the superstitions):
I
Morti. If you spend long enough in the country, you begin to notice that there’s something very unique about death in Italy. I noticed it during my first few days in Italy. It was during a question about birthdays in a bar (the conversation, as it often is, was about horoscopes). Someone asked me when mine was, and I told him the date. In Britain, sharing a birthday with ‘All Souls’ had never raised eyebrows. Here, within seconds, everyone was frowning, backing off or else laughing, slapping me on the back and telling me I was a bit
sfigato
, ‘jinxed’. My birthday, I was told, was the day of
I Morti
, ‘the day of the dead’.

That initial wariness about a date of birth was, I supposed, the normal suspicion about ever mentioning death. To talk about future extinction is not the done thing, and is thought to bring ‘the evil eye’. If you do venture in that direction, it’s wise to ‘make the horns’ with index finger and pinky, pointing to the ground, as a sign of superstitious courtesy. In the south, many even wear an imitation chilli-pepper on bracelets or necklaces, the curling ends of the peppercorn producing those ‘horns’ which ward off evil spirits and therefore, for the time being, death. Given that wariness, someone born on the day of the dead is obviously thought to be a close cousin of the Grim Reaper and bound to bring bad luck.

Like the political mysteries and the Catholic miracles, when it comes to death there’s still a sense of magical intervention: we don’t know who’s pulling the strings, but we know we’re only
puppets. A superstitious bracelet (or the vulgar version: touching the testicles) will ward off the bad luck in the same way mages and astrologers, the staple personalities of Italian television, will tell us which numbers to put down for the lottery. It might seem absurd to a modern rationalist, but there really is a belief in what Fellini called Italy’s ‘ancient cults’. It’s half paganism, half Catholicism. I remember once going into the cathedral at Siena and seeing lines of motorbike helmets hung up on a wall. In front of them were candles, dutifully being lit by the sort of young men you don’t normally see in churches: tough, tattooed, pierced. I asked one what he was doing, and he explained that the orange helmet on the top left of the collection was his. He had had a particularly gruesome crash a few weeks ago, and had come here to hang up his helmet in front of the Madonna with the rest. It was, he explained, a way of giving thanks for the fact that he had cheated death. It hung there like a modern, financial sacrifice to the deity in gratitude for his life.

When death does come, the rituals of mourning and commemoration are incredible: touching and communal in a way unthinkable elsewhere. I’m normally surprised by the collective amnesia, by the speed with which recent history is brushed under the carpet, but when it comes to
I Morti
the memory in Italy is a very long one. Every city or village feels like Shelley’s ‘widowed’ Genoa where the ‘moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs’. From every direction the faces of the dead stare back at you, either in sculptured busts or photographs. Every country, of course, has its memorials, but only in Italy is there such a sense that you’re walking in someone else’s footsteps. Perhaps it’s because of the Catholic notion of purgatory, of companionship with and prayers for the dead; or else because, especially in the south, there’s a kind of ancestor cult. Almost every alleyway seems to have its own plaque or memorial; I’ve often paused to look up at them, only for someone to stop and explain who the local dignitary was and explain the highs and lows of their lives. It’s that communal, public side of death which is different. In Sicily especially, but all over the country, you see hand-written notices up on the street corners of
parishes: ‘The Gambino family thanks everyone who has been close to them in their time of mourning.’

If you open the back pages of Italy’s oldest newspaper, the
Gazzetta di Parma
, dozens of faces stare back at you: these are
I
Morti, the dead. Some have passed away recently; others have had their photograph put there by relatives or friends on the anniversary of their death. In many other newspapers, national or local, the obituaries section runs on for as many pages as do the financial or sporting sections. When someone from the editorial team of a television channel or a newspaper dies, or even one of their relatives, there are often long threnodies for the following days and weeks.

Funerals themselves are spectacular. When there’s a particularly famous passing-away, the funeral will always, without fail, be televised. Flags and fists are raised, huge crowds applaud coffins. It doesn’t matter if the deceased is an actor or an anonymous victim of a sadly spectacular murder, the funeral is more than just a send-off, it’s a pageant. Millions of viewers watch the catwalk of politicians who come to pay their respects. The coffin is open, the cameras rolling, microphones are placed near sobbing mothers. In more remote parts of Italy there’s even someone called the
prefica
, the hired female mourner who guarantees that the wailing will be at a respectable pitch. The spectacle of death is especially marked in football. At every Roma home match, on the southern terrace of the stadium, there’s a banner to supporters who have died that week, or even one to those who died on that day years ago. It’s hard to imagine something so noble happening on the terraces at a British football ground. Many cemeteries are covered with football flags and scarves. ‘W Parma’ is often scrawled on the city walls (the ‘W’ being
viva
); or else ‘M Juve’ (
Morte
to Juventus).

But the dead aren’t just seen, they are also ‘heard’. The point about hearing the dead is that in Italy words are habitually put into the mouths of
I Morti
, as if there really were voices from the grave. It’s part of the uncanny continuum that happens between Italy’s life and death. In one cemetery in Naples, after the first, extraordinary championship won with Diego Maradona in the
1980s, someone wrote graffiti in the local dialect:
Guagliò, che ve
site persi!
(‘Kid, what you’ve missed!’). Legend has it that a few weeks later the reply from the cemetery, scrawled on another wall, arrived: ‘I didn’t miss a thing!’