Read The Dark Heart of Italy Online
Authors: Tobias Jones
Tags: #Travel, #Essays & Travelogues, #History, #Europe, #Italy, #Sports & Recreation, #Football
Back in your flat the light is sliced thin through the shutters. You pull them up and walk out onto the balcony. The neighbours are on theirs, opposite, and shout ‘
salve
’. There are children everywhere. There’s something in the light. It’s the cusp between night and day and swallows are beginning to give way to the bats. It’s this light which is incredible. It bounces off the ‘Parma yellow’, the city’s favourite colour. Everything seems gentle and reposed. The reason those Thomas Jones paintings from the eighteenth century are so moving is because it’s obvious that here was a Welshman who had found, in Italy, a completely new type of light. The colours might be the same, but they’re infused with that placid, serene light which northern Europeans spend their whole lives yearning for.
There’s something about the pace of life which makes living more enjoyable. You take your foot off the pedal which doesn’t
mean (the usual stereotype) that you lie in a field of corn strumming a mandolin and sucking on a flask of wine. It’s just that you’re less driven. It’s as if you allow things the time and space to take their natural turn, not out of idleness but because you truly savour whatever it is you’re doing now and don’t yearn to rush off and do something different. There’s less need to be frantic if you’re simply happy where you are. You can allow coincidences to come and find you rather than haring around trying to fulfil some ambition. Everything is thus more surprising and more spontaneous. Life just appears – I don’t really know how to describe it – less forced, more natural somehow.
Although you’ve been away for months you don’t even need to call anyone to know where they’ll be tonight. You remember when you first came here, you used to be amazed at the way people went out, always in groups, always with the same people week after week. In Britain, most people would be happy if they saw close friends more than once a month. The friendship wouldn’t be any less close for that, but it’s very different. People live so far apart. You pick them off one by one because they’ve all moved away or abroad and you’ll have a reunion, all together, only when someone gets married or dies. In Parma, though, you would meet the same people in an almost ritualistic way: the same places and faces, the same old stories being told for the umpteenth time. You don’t ever need to make a date, a time and a place, to see everyone. It’s as if you all meet at the usual place out of a willing submission to habit. That’s what
compagnia
means: having a pack of friends that you see week in, week out. Most pensioners in Parma still see, daily, the people they sat next to at school. The durability of an Italian friendship is breathtaking and creates something else which I had, at first, belittled. I used to be irritated by what I perceived as the impunity or confessionalism of Italian society whereby nobody is ever punished for wrong-doing. But through friendship I saw that there’s simply more understanding in Italy and that that isn’t a bad thing. There’s an acceptance, even anticipation, of human weakness and rather than shy away from people when they do wrong, people stand by them. There’s a perma
nence to family and friendships which is much rarer in Anglo-Saxon societies and consequently there is, there has to be, more understanding and empathy about our many short-comings. If you never leave home (or, at least, your home town) you’re forced to confront issues, rather than run away from them. What I used to call confessionalism is actually candour. Relationships between friends or between relatives in Italy simply appear more intimate, more profound.
Later that night when we’re all at the usual dark grotto, a bottle of wine on the table, you realise, listening to the endless stories and laughter, that there’s another Italian word which doesn’t really have an adequate translation in English and which is the enjoyable flip-side of that solidity:
estrosità
. It means flair, elan, whimsy, fancy. It’s the ability to be capricious and creative, to adapt to every situation. And the amazing thing about this compagnia is that so many of them (despite having busy, full-time jobs and families) are deeply involved in voluntary work. The quiet guy with a long goatee in the corner dresses up as a clown once a week for children in the oncology department of the city’s hospital; the girl sitting next to him goes to a
casa di riposo
, an old-people’s home, every week to help feed the geriatric patients. They never talk about it but you know they do it, and you know that it’s par for the course in Italy. My contempt for all the corruption has, in recent years, been replaced by a sense of being humbled by the sheer humanity of this community.
Life just feels more sophisticated here. The next day all of us go up to the mountains. We’re in the middle of nowhere, in some country villa which is as rustic as it is stylish. There are chickens clucking around antique wheelbarrows. We sit outside in the shade and can hear, from miles away, the sound of someone playing the guitar, entertaining friends with old folk songs. Filippo is passing round tiny thimbles of the chilled Erba Luigia liqueur which his grandmother has made and we start joining in the songs, old De André numbers. A couple of people have gone for a walk in the woods to pick wild strawberries for tonight’s dinner. That refinement, that delicacy with which friends enjoy the sim
plest, most innocent pleasures together, is incomparable. And for all the complications, Italian life can sometimes seem incredibly simple. Sometimes I don’t even hear the noise of my gnashing molars.
1
See Perry Anderson’s discussion of the adjective in the
London Review of Books
(21 March 2002)
2
Massimo Carlotto,
The Colombian Mule
(London, 2004)
3
Marcello Fois,
The Advocate
(London, 2004)
4
Luigi Pirandello, ‘So It Is (If You Think So)’ in Six
Characters in Search of An Author and Other Plays
(trans. by Marti Musa London, 1995)
1
Parole, Parole, Parole
2 ‘The Mother of All Slaughters’
3 Penalties and Impunity
4 ‘The Sofri Case’
5 The Means of Seduction
6 Clean Hands
7 Miracles and Mysteries
8 An Italian Story
10
I Morti
Revised Postscript
Agrigento
1
consumption of concrete
1
demolition work
1
illegal houses sanitised
1
in election campaign
1
Naples redevelopment
1
therapy of the bulldozers
1
,
2
,
3
Advocate
,
The
(Marcello Fois)
1
,
2
Agca, Mehmet Ali
1
AGIP
1
senator for life
1
Agricola, Riccardo
1
archaeological site
1
Calogero Sodano
1
landslide
1
Valley of the Temples
1
see also abusivismo
Alessandrini, Emilio
1
Alighieri, Dante
see
Dante
Alleanza Nazionale see
National
Alliance
Almirante, Giorgio
1
Ambrosini, Vittorio
1
Amnesty International
1
anni di piombo
xi,
1
,
2
,
3
,
4
,
5
,
6
,
7
,
8
,
9
,
10
,
11
Fascist bombings
1
historiography
1
Sofri Case
1
see also
bombings, Red Brigades,
Ordine Nuovo,
Lotta Continua
Antonioni, Michelangelo
1
L’Avventura
1
La Notte
1
Arnone, Giuseppe
1
Arpinati, Leandro
1
protest against repeal
1
Asian economics
1
Aulla
1
Australia
1
Azione Cattolica
1
Azzurri see
football
Badoglio, Pietro
1
Baggio, Dino
1
Baldelli, Pio
1
Banca Rasini
1
Bank of America
1
banking system
1
Barbacetto, Gianni see Vetri, Elio
Baresi, Franco
1
Basile, Carlo Emanuele
1
Batistuta, Gabriel
1
Beneduce, Alberto
1
Benetton Edizione Holdings
1
Berlusconi, Paolo
1
alleged corruption
1
owner of
Il Giornale
1
Berlusconi, Silvio
alleged proximity to Mafia
1
,
2
,
3
An Italian Story
1
attitude towards taxation
1
Clean Hands
1
investigated by
1
support for
1
conflicting stories of career
1
David Mills and
1
defence against accusations
1
,
2
,
3
,
4
Lentini
1
Foreign Secretary
1
future prospects
1
horoscope
1
hypocrisy, alleged lack of
1
journalists sacked from RAI
1
legislation
1
mausoleum
1
media interests
Blockbuster video rentals
1
Edilnord
1
Mondadori publishing house
1
,
2
,
3
national broadcasting sanctioned
1
Pagine Utili
1
and politicisation
1
purchase of rights to American films
1
see also
Mediaset television;
RAI television
Mediolanum
1
Moggi and
1
in opposition
1
supporters’ reaction to author’s book
1
The Italy I Have in Mind
1
World Cup and
1
Berlusconi’s government (May 2001)
Berlusconi appoints himself foreign Secretary
1
criminal activity during
1
defence of Carnevale
1
democratic election as defence of government incursions
1
Euroscepticism
1
formation of government
1
Islam denounced
1
Mafia relations
1
neutralisation of judicial processes
1
protective escorts cut back
1
,
2
,
3
realpolitik
1
refusal to sign European arrest warrant
1
renaming of streets
1
signs of an authoritarian regime
1
speed limit raised
1
Statute of Limitations reduced
1
,
2
veto on distribution of European agencies
1
withdrawal from military transport project
1
Bertolotti, Francesco
1
Bertolucci, Bernardo
1
The Spider’s Stratagem
1
The Conformist
1
Bertossa, Bernard
1
Biagi, Enzo
1
Biagi, Marco
1
Blob
1
Blunkett, David
1
Bocca di Magra
1
Bocca, Giorgio
1
Boccaccio, Giovanni
1
Bologna, University of
1
Florence and Milan (1993)
1
Freccia del Sud
1
Milan and Rome (2000)
1
Piazza della Loggia, Brescia
1
Reggio Calabria
1
Rome (2002)
1
Rome and Turin (2001)
1
Venice and Vigonza (2001)
1
Bompressi, Ovidio
1
Borghese coup d’état
1
aborted
1
P2 linked to
1
Borghese, Prince Junio Valerio
1
,
2
,
3
death
1
founder of
Fronte Nazionale
1
organiser of coup d’état
1
President of MSI
1
proclamation
1
tried as war criminal
1
Borrelli, Francesco Saverio
1
,
2
convictions against
mafiosi
1
Bossi-Fini Act
1
Bourbons
1
Bretton-Woods agreement
1
Briatore, Flavio
1
Brigate GAP
1
Britain
1
Buffon, Gigi
1
Bush, George
1
business
banking system
1
Berlusconi’s legislation
1
false-accounting decriminalised
1
para-statal companies
1
small-medium enterprises
1
support for Berlusconi
1
see also
economy