The Italians (14 page)

Berlusconi was born into a lower-middle-class family in Milan and for many Italians of a similar background, particularly those who were self-employed, one of Berlusconi’s greatest attractions was that he seemed to be tolerant of tax dodging. He described himself as a liberal. But the freedom he was taken to be offering was the one after which many an Italian hankers: to do
“quello che gli pare”
—whatever he or she likes. Nowhere is this truer than in the field of taxation.

A prime minister cannot, of course, openly tell people that he is happy to turn a blind eye to tax dodging. Nor did Berlusconi ever do so. But he set out his thinking on the subject in 2004 when, as prime minister, he attended a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the founding of the Guardia di Finanza whose officers carry out many of the functions of tax inspectors. “There is a rule of natural law that says that if the State asks you for a third of what you have earned with your hard work, it seems a fair request and you give it over in exchange for services,” he told his audience. “If [the State] asks you for more, or a lot more, then you are being overwhelmed by the State and so you set about inventing systems of avoidance or even evasion that you feel are in accordance with your private sense of morality and which do not make you feel guilty.”
⁵
Four years later, he declared that if “taxes are between 50% and 60% it is too much and it is thus justified to practice avoidance or evasion.”
⁶
Ironically, though, his governments did not reduce taxes. In 2008, he fulfilled an election pledge to abolish a much disliked house tax. But the overall tax burden grew.

All that said, Berlusconi entered politics with two exceptional advantages. In the first place, he was among the richest men on earth, the head of a business empire stretching far beyond the media into retailing, insurance, asset management and, of course, sport in the form of AC Milan. According to
Forbes,
his wealth peaked at almost $13 billion in 2000.
⁷

That sort of cash can come in handy in politics. It helped him to return to power in the general election in 2001, when, at a cost of 37 billion lire ($26.5 million), he distributed copies of a hagiography of himself to every household in the land. His political opponents have repeatedly claimed that his almost unlimited resources helped him to survive crucial no-confidence votes that risked toppling his governments. In the run-up to one such, no fewer than ten members of the Chamber of Deputies shifted their allegiances in Berlusconi’s favor. In 2013, a senator who had abandoned the center-left seven years earlier alleged that Berlusconi paid him €3 million to do so. Berlusconi, who denied the claim, was put on trial, charged with bribery the following year.

His other, immense advantage, of course, has been his hold over the media. He entered politics as the owner of a publishing house, Mondadori; he also owned a weekly newsmagazine,
Panorama,
and through his brother he controlled a daily newspaper,
Il Giornale
. But it was Berlusconi’s hold on television that counted more than anything.

Italians are unusually dependent on TV for their news and information. Even before the Internet began to make inroads into circulations, less than one Italian in ten bought a daily newspaper. And as recently as 2014, and despite the spread of the Internet, an unusually extensive poll of voters found that more than half took their news predominantly or solely from TV.
⁸

While in opposition, Berlusconi was able to count on the support of the three channels belonging to his Mediaset network. But when he was in government, he could also exert influence on the three belonging to the state-owned Rai. The effect of this videocracy, as it has been termed, is impossible to demonstrate in any quantitative way. But it can be illustrated.

In 2010, for example, a poll was carried out to determine Italians’ perceptions of the economy. One of the multiple-choice questions asked when in recent years unemployment had been at its highest. In fact, it had been rising ever since Berlusconi’s government had come into office two years earlier. Yet the largest number of respondents gave as their answer 2007—the year
before
he returned to power. There was a similar misconception about the overall health of the economy. On average, those who took part in the survey vastly underestimated how much it had shrunk. It was not until the following year that Italians began to realize how bad the situation was.

Ever since 1994, Berlusconi and his media flunkies have succeeded in changing not only perceptions, but the meaning of words. The head of Mediaset began his political adventure with a massive handicap. Casting around for support, the only people he could find, apart from the Northern League, were the neo-Fascists, the pariahs of postwar Italian politics. When he first expressed support for them, most people were deeply shocked.

So, instead of acknowledging that he had put himself at the head of an alliance packed with far-right-wingers, Berlusconi began to refer to his followers and allies as “moderates.” His coalition was of the “center-right.” At first, people took it for the nonsense it was. But Berlusconi and his television channels hammered at the terms relentlessly—
“moderati . . . centro destra”
—and gradually, over the years, they have become universally accepted.

Gianroberto Casaleggio, the Internet guru who cofounded Italy’s antiestablishment Five-Star Movement, once quipped that living in Berlusconi’s Italy was rather like inhabiting the simulated reality of the 1999 sci-fi movie
The Matrix.
⁹
Certainly, perceptions inside the country were markedly different from those outside. And it helps, I think, to explain one of the paradoxes of recent years: why a man widely regarded in the rest of Europe as a buffoon was able to garner such a high level of support from a society where people are almost obsessively concerned with the impression that they make on others.

A lot of non-Italians have heard of
bella figura.
Far fewer understand what it really means. In the case of English speakers, this may be because neither of the words corresponds exactly with an English equivalent. In Britain and the United States, beauty is thought of as something almost entirely separate from virtue. But in Italy the two concepts overlap.
Bello
(
bella
in the feminine) translates as “beautiful,” “pretty” or “handsome.” But it also means “nice,” “fine”—and “good.”
^*
A good deed is
una bell’azione.

As for
figura,
it covers a range of meaning that extends from “picture” to the impression made on others. Perhaps “image” is the nearest English equivalent, except that
figura
has more to do with the way you appear to others than the effect you wish to project.

Fare una bella figura
is to make a positive impression, though not necessarily in a visual way. The shop assistant who wrapped that present will probably have told you, for example, that by turning up with a large box of fruit jellies or a bottle of vintage malt whiskey,
^*
you will
fare una bella figura
(though it goes without saying that you will make an even better impression on your hosts if your gift has been exquisitely wrapped; in fact, you would
fare una brutta figura
were you to turn up at the door with your gift, however pricy, wrapped in nothing but a paper bag).

In several respects,
figura
is close to Far Eastern concepts of “face.” And since Italians generally agree on the need to avoid losing face, they are prepared, in the same way as Chinese or Japanese, to go to great lengths to ensure that others do not do so. A chief executive who has utterly mishandled the running of a firm will not usually be openly berated at the annual general meeting and denounced in excoriating fashion in the financial media. It will be quietly agreed between all concerned that he is not up to the job, at which point he will be got rid of in the most discreet manner possible and in a way that allows him to keep his dignity and reputation.

Dread of
facendo
una brutta figura
—a losing face—is omnipresent in Italian society. It explains why there are so few laundromats, and why the few that do exist are used mostly by poor immigrants and foreign students. It is why Italians put on tanning lotion
before
they get to the beach or pool. It is why town and city councils arrange for their best-looking cops to direct the traffic in the main square. And why Italians above a certain social standing are reluctant to travel on public transport.

Bella figura
is also why Italians of both sexes will endure remarkable discomfort in the interest of keeping up appearances. Throughout the rest of the Mediterranean, from Spain to Israel, male workers cope with the summer heat by changing into short-sleeved shirts sometime around June. But in Italy that would be to run the risk of being thought, like Almirante, “vaguely obscene.” So, even as the temperatures climb into the high nineties in late July, the sort of Italians who wear a suit or jacket and trousers to work remain stubbornly—and willingly—imprisoned in shirts that allow them to shoot their cuffs. Look down and you will probably see that they are also wearing heavy leather shoes (because they keep their shape) and long socks (because one of the worst sartorial gaffes you can commit in Italy is to reveal an expanse of flesh between sock top and trouser hem). The women, meanwhile, will very likely be wearing clinging tops and figure-hugging skirts or trousers. Like the men, they cannot be comfortable. But they feel they are
facendo una bella figura,
and that matters more than mere comfort.

The same need for the approval of others would seem to lie behind the boom in demand for plastic surgery. The international statistics in this area are unusually patchy, but figures taken from a report compiled for the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (ISAPS) and based on statistics for 2010 indicate that Italians are exceptionally ready to submit themselves to cosmetic procedures of all kinds. In a cross section of twenty-five countries, Italy was second, behind Greece, for the number of plastic surgeons per hundred thousand inhabitants and third, behind South Korea and Greece, for the number of procedures—surgical and nonsurgical—relative to the population. The number of cosmetic procedures carried out in Italy in 2010 was proportionately more than 30 percent higher than in the United States. France, Spain and Germany all lagged behind Italy while the figure for Britain was barely a quarter of that for Italy.

What makes these figures all the more striking is that they refer to a country widely regarded as having an unusually high proportion of good-looking men and women. I am struck, for example, by the number of Italian women who have had lip enhancement procedures. The evidence is all too painfully visible, many having apparently been done on the cheap and botched. This is doubly tragic because you suspect they were unnecessary in the first place: most Italian women have good, full mouths that need no attention at all.

It brings to mind the anorexic teenagers who look into the mirror as slim girls and see fat ones staring back. And if the results of a survey for the U.S.-based nutrition firm Herbalife are to believed, that is precisely the frame of mind of about one in seven Italians. In 2005, the pollsters the company commissioned found that while 40 percent of Italians thought they were overweight, only 26 percent actually were.

For the most part, the preoccupation with
bella figura
is harmless enough. It can be argued that it makes the human landscape more decorative and life in Italy generally more attractive and enjoyable. There are elements in the
bella figura
mentality of a concern to fit in with the other members of society. In some respects, it counterbalances what Italians call
menefreghismo:
unbridled egotism, not caring a damn about other people.
^*

But the
bella figura
mentality also points to a deep-seated insecurity, oddly at variance with
menefreghismo,
that echoes Italians’ historic vulnerability and fragile sense of national identity. What is more, the corollary of all this reverence for whatever is
bello
is a tendency to despise, shun and hide whatever is
brutto
—or rather, anything judged to be so.

It sometimes takes months, or it may take years, but sooner or later you notice something odd: that handicapped people in Italy are almost as rare as redheads on the streets and in the bars and restaurants. There are disabled mendicants in the bigger cities, for sure. But they are almost always foreigners. And the same is true of the tourists you see being pushed around in wheelchairs.

So where are the Italians with evident physical deformities? Where are the blind and the paraplegic? And where, among all these beautiful people, are the Italians who suffer from Down syndrome or cerebral palsy? The sad truth is that large numbers are at home and out of sight—kept there, in many cases, by their relatives’ feelings of shame, discomfort and embarrassment, and, in other cases, by the lack of facilities for the handicapped in a society that seems never really to have made provision for them.

The invisibility of Italy’s disabled, like much else in society, may also owe something to the huge influence on society of the Roman Catholic Church. Ideas that developed in medieval times, though long since discredited, continue to exercise a subtle influence. One was that deformity was a punishment from God.

Handicapped Italians are not the only invisible ones. My personal experience, and that of friends, is that Italians are exceptionally reluctant to be seen when they are seriously or terminally ill. It is also noticeable how few women you see in Italy in the last months of pregnancy. This is paradoxical since pregnancy in Italy is wrapped in a fair amount of encouraging rhetoric. Women who are expecting a child are referred to as being
in dolce attesa
(in sweet expectation): a phrase that is not just used by solicitous elderly relatives, but in, for example, airport announcements telling them they can go to the head of the queue. In practice, as well as in theory, mothers-to-be are treated with reverence. But then they are carrying within them that most precious of all gifts: life.