The Italians (11 page)

By far the biggest challenge to the validity of examinations created by digital technology comes from hacking. In the old days, the questions were sent to schools around Italy by post and kept by the head teacher until the day of the exam. In theory, they could be stolen, although they seldom were. Even if that happened, though, the information contained in the letter from the ministry in Rome was only of use to an individual student, or at most to his or her schoolmates. Once they began to be stored and transmitted electronically, however, they could be accessed by a determined teenage hacker and distributed nationally.

The most important exam in the life of Italian pupils is the dreaded
maturità,
taken at the end of their school careers, which decides whether they can apply for university. For several years in a row, accurate reports of the subjects to be covered were put up on the Internet before the three-day written exam. By 2012, the education ministry in Rome was deploying countermeasures that the minister himself compared to those of the CIA. The questions were drawn up in an underground bunker at the education ministry in Rome protected by closed-circuit television and officers of the Carabinieri. Only eight people were given access. From there, the questions were sent to secondary schools around Italy in a so-called digital envelope that could be opened only by means of a twenty-five-character alphanumeric password divided into two sections. The first was sent out several days before the
maturità,
and the second half an hour before the start of each exam. Any school that found itself disconnected from the Internet could get the password from the first television channel of Italy’s state broadcaster, Rai, which transmitted it as a subtitle to its programs from eight thirty onward. Failing that, the principal of a school where even the electricity had been cut off could call for a paper version. This was kept in a safe in the office of the prefect, the provincial representative of the interior ministry, who would order it to be rushed to the school in a high-powered Carabinieri patrol car.

According to a book on the subject,
Ragazzi, si copia
—the fact that an author could find enough material on the subject to fill a book itself speaks volumes—a survey conducted among ten- to thirteen-year-olds found that only 26 percent claimed never to have cheated. The same book added a characteristic justification: “Cheating means reprocessing. I would add that, to cheat, you need to know.” What was striking about that comment, though, was that it came not from a student, but from the headmaster of a school in Milan. Small wonder that when an examination was held a few years ago in Turin for aspiring school principals, 9 out of the 460 candidates were disqualified after it was discovered that they had brought in dictionaries stuffed with
bigliettini
.

In parts of Italy, there are people who, for a relatively modest consideration, will go into court to perjure themselves on your behalf. If, for example, you have caused an accident by straying onto the wrong side of the road, such a person can be counted on to swear blind that you were on the right side. In 2010, investigators discovered a veritable perjury exchange in Naples. It centered on the Court of the Justice of the Peace and involved more than a hundred witnesses-for-hire whose word could be bought for between twenty-five and one hundred euros. In a separate investigation in Rome, police listened in on two private detectives who were bringing an expert fibber to the capital for a thousand euros with all expenses paid.

Not that perjury is always committed for money. To a striking extent, trials in Italy—in particular high-profile ones—can become a morass of conflicting evidence. The wife who originally told police she was in the kitchen when she heard the screams now says she wasn’t in the house at all, while a friend has come forward to say she saw her in the supermarket. Meanwhile, Uncle Rosario, who had testified that he was away in the regional capital that day, has been found never to have left his hometown, and his wife, who heard the telltale footsteps on the gravel path, has changed her story and now says there was only one person running away from the scene of the crime, and not two.

“They take us for idiots,” said a judge in Aosta after just such a case had passed through his court. “It’s incredible how easily they lie in front of a judge . . . without the least attention paid to the plausibility of their stories.” He estimated the number of witnesses brought before him who told the truth was between 20 percent and 30 percent. “Lying amuses and pleases,” he said. “It does not bring social contempt.”

The problem of getting at the truth is also perhaps one reason for the prevalence of wiretapping in Italy. According to a study published by the Max Planck Institute in 2003, the number of warrants issued annually in Italy—76 per 100,000 inhabitants—was higher than in any of the other countries surveyed. The corresponding figure was 15 per 100,000 in Germany, 5 in France, 6 in England and Wales and only 0.5 in the United States.
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Among the few foreign firms to have successfully penetrated the Italian market is the UK-based mobile telephone operator Vodafone, which acquired a controlling stake in an Italian firm, Omnitel, in 2000. It has since taken a one-third share of the market. There have been various reasons for its success. Its earliest advertising campaign, built around a distinctive-looking model and actor, the part-Maori, Australian-born Megan Gale, made a huge impact. Since then, Vodafone has deployed a string of catchy slogans, shrewdly aimed at Italian sensibilities, to keep itself in the public eye. But I suspect that some modest part of its success is due to its having offered a unique service. It is known as Alter Ego and enables customers to have two numbers on the same SIM card. As the company explains, “You can pass from one to the other simply and quickly by using the menu and choosing to be contactable only on the active number or both.” Perfect for cheating husbands or wives, and mighty useful for anyone, in fact, who wants to make him- or herself temporarily unavailable. Vodafone confirmed that Alter Ego was available only in Italy. It was, said a spokesman, a “local market initiative.”

It is tempting to speculate that the Italians’ abiding fascination with illusion also helps explain the unusually prominent role in their culture of masks. Noble families in ancient Rome kept death masks of their ancestors. Masks were an integral part of the Commedia dell’Arte, which emerged in Venice during the sixteenth century. And it was in Venice too that the masked ball developed at about the same time.

The masks used in a masked ball are used to withhold identity, by placing an assumed face in front of the true one. This is close to what Jung had in mind when he adopted as his term for the apparent self the Latin word for “mask,”
persona.
But masks can be used for more than one purpose. In the Commedia dell’Arte, they served not to distract from reality, but to heighten it by presenting the audience with a caricatured representation of the character of the wearer. In ancient Rome, they were intended to mirror reality: death masks were donned by professional mourners at the funerals of family members.

Illusion and falsehood can certainly be used to deceive. But they can also be used to communicate. Many of the events in Shakespeare’s
Othello
never actually happened. Michelangelo’s
David
is not a real man, any more than Botticelli’s
Venus
is a real woman. But no one would think of calling Shakespeare a liar or accuse Michelangelo and Botticelli of deception. Their creations transcend the issue of authenticity because they serve to communicate ideas and represent ideals. And nowhere is this power of fabrication to send messages grasped more instinctively or used more widely than in Italy.

This is partly because Italians, like other Southern Europeans, are naturally theatrical. There are exceptions, of course. I have known plenty of Italians who are less animated than the majority of Swedes. But you only have to spend time in Italy, and particularly in bars and restaurants, to see that people interact with one another using facial expressions and hand movements that are, in general, more animated and expressive—more dramatic, in a word—than is the case in the more temperate north.

This often complicates relations between Italians and foreigners in their country. One of the other foreign correspondents in Rome when I first worked there had spent much of his professional life in the Far East and was convinced that the relationship of Italians to Northern Europeans and North Americans was a bit like that of Europeans and Americans to Asians.

“People in much of Southeast and East Asia show their emotions in ways that are barely discernible to us, so we tend either to think that they lack feelings or dismiss the issue altogether by labeling them as ‘inscrutable,’” he once said. “I think a lot of Italians regard us in the same way. Our expressions of surprise or disappointment or annoyance or whatever are so much less evident than theirs that we just go ‘under their radar.’”

It is certainly more difficult to show Italians that you are angry. So you gradually develop an ability to lose your temper at will. As you turn up the volume and your physical gestures become increasingly expansive, you can sometimes see on the faces of the people you are dealing with an expression of dawning realization mingled with almost pleasurable surprise: all of a sudden, and in a way that has nothing to do with philology or semantics, you are speaking their language.

If Pirandello is the archetypal Italian writer, then opera—packed with searing emotion expressed without reserve—is the quintessential Italian art form. Its origins, in the late sixteenth century, are exclusively Italian. It grew out of the discussions and experiments of the Camerata, a group of Florentine writers, musicians and intellectuals whose main aim was to revive the blend of words and music that was known to have existed in classical Greek drama.
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An Italian, Jacopo Peri, composed the earliest recorded opera,
Dafne,
which was first performed in 1598. And it was in an Italian city, Venice, that the first public opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano, was opened in 1637.

In the nineteenth century, moreover, opera became entangled with the concept of Italian nationhood (as it did, with rather more questionable effects, in Germany with Wagner). This was largely because of Giuseppe Verdi.
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Nabucco,
one of Verdi’s early operas, deals with the Jews’ Babylonian captivity. It includes the stirring “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves,” often known by its opening words as “Va Pensiero,” in which the exiles sing of their longing for their homeland “so beautiful and lost.” In recent years, scholars have questioned whether Verdi intended
Nabucco
to carry a political message. But there is no doubt that the composer was an ardent supporter of the nationalist cause or that “Va Pensiero”
came to be seen in retrospect as a metaphor for the subjugation of the Italians by their foreign masters. The subject matter of some of his later operas, such as
La battaglia di Legnano,
was overtly nationalist, and in 1861 Verdi became a member of Italy’s first parliament.

It can often seem as if there is still a close link between Italian politics and opera, or at least operatics. You might expect, for example, that of all the parties in Italy the Northern League (which, by the way, has taken “Va Pensiero” as its own) should be the most down-to-earth. Its founder, Umberto Bossi, claimed to speak for the hardy, less demonstrative folk of the Po Valley—the descendants not of florid Latins, but supposedly of the Gauls, Goths and Lombards who settled in the north of Italy over the centuries. These are the people who like to think of themselves as living in
l’Italia che lavora
—“the Italy that works.” Bossi termed northern Italy “Padania” and at different times called for it to have autonomy or independence.

Back in the mid-1990s, he decided he needed to realign his movement by making it more separatist in orientation. Anywhere but Italy, a party leader in the same situation would summon an extraordinary congress, make a rousing speech in favor of independence and then set up working groups and policy committees to recast the party’s program. Bossi opted instead for what one newspaper columnist at the time called “the most colossal political farce ever seen in Europe.”

The playacting began one Sunday when the League leader went with his most senior officials to the spring that gives birth to the Po, almost seven thousand feet up in the Alps. There, he ceremoniously filled a glass vial with the “sacred water of the Po.” Then he and his supporters descended the Po in a flotilla of boats, carrying the vial to Venice, where Bossi read out a declaration of independence that began with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson.

“We, the peoples of Padania, solemnly proclaim that Padania is a federal, independent and sovereign republic,” he intoned. An Italian flag was then lowered and the Northern League’s green and white standard raised in its place. A so-called “transitional constitution” distributed at the same time made it clear secession would not take place immediately. It empowered a “provisional government” that had already been formed by Bossi to open talks with the central government on an agreed separation, but set a deadline of September 1997. After that, failing agreement, the Northern League’s unilateral declaration of independence would take “full effect.”

Wars have broken out over less.

But not in Italy. A former president of the Constitutional Court called in vain for Bossi to be arrested. Police clashed briefly with far-left-wing and far-right-wing demonstrators protesting at his initiative. But the overwhelming majority of Italians understood his descent of the Po for what it was: an elaborate symbolic gesture. They were right to do so. September 1997 came and went, and Padania—if it can be said to exist—stayed firmly within Italy. In fact, no one much noticed that the deadline had expired. But everyone had been made aware that the Northern League’s orientation had changed—at least, until the next tactical switch.